1.3 The Generalist Advantage

There’s nothing wrong with being a specialist. Specialists go deep, develop mastery, and are often the ones who actually solve the hardest problems. I’ll be honest, as a generalist, there are days I’m envious of people who are so very good at something they make things that I struggle with look just … easy.

But I will also make the argument that product marketing, almost by design, is a generalist discipline. And for your first PMM hire especially, the generalist is almost always the right call. Not always, but often.

What Makes PMM a Generalist Role?

Think about what the Venn Diagram we covered earlier requires. A PMM has to be technical enough to understand what’s being built, but not so deep they lose the customer storytelling perspective. They have to be able to sell and understand how selling works, without being a salesperson and carrying a quota. And they have to be a marketer without being purely focused on campaigns, demand generation and pipeline.

That’s not one thing. That’s a collection of perspectives that the PMM holds simultaneously, translating between them in real-time. The role is inherently generalist by nature, and requires constant context switching. The best PMM’s I know understand that this is what they are doing, and can “change their hat” to adjust to the topic at hand.

What Generalists Bring

A good generalist brings three things:

  1. A view across multiple functions that a specialist cannot replicate. The PMM in the room sees things that the Product team misses, catches things that Sales overlooks, and surfaces patterns that Marketing doesn’t have the context to recognise.
  2. Insights that spot cross-functional drift before it becomes a problem. When Product is building one thing, Sales is promising another, and Marketing is explaining something different entirely … the generalist PMM is usually the first person to notice those gaps.
  3. The ability to see the “sum of the parts” as an outcome. Specialists optimise their piece of the puzzle relentlessly. Generalists optimise the whole for greater impact at the macro. In an early-stage company where the whole matters more than any individual piece, that’s the difference between a launch that lands and one that falls flat, or a message that resonates across the ICP baselines.

The Hiring Implication

For a first PMM hire at an early-stage company, lean toward the generalist. You don’t need depth in one area … yet. You need breadth across all of them. Someone who can write a positioning framework in the morning, run a sales enablement session in the afternoon, and brief a designer on a customer story by end of day.

The specialists come later, as the team grows and specific functions need dedicated depth. The generalist is your foundation.

One honest caveat: generalists can feel like a risk to founders who are used to hiring specialists. The output of a generalist’s work is harder to measure directly than “shipped X features” or “closed Y deals.” Part of setting your first PMM up to succeed is agreeing up front on what success looks like for them, and acknowledging that impact can be soft in nature compared to other somewhat hard metrics.

Read more: Hooray for Generalists →