Product Marketing Manager Itches the Engineering Scratch

Name: Tyler Myers (he/him)

PhD: Materials & Nanoscience, University of Colorado - Boulder, 2021

What was your main area of research?

I studied a technology called Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD). This is a thin film deposition technique that builds material on a substrate one monolayer at a time. It is extremely precise and was originally used for creating electroluminescent displays, and was a key technology for the semiconductor industry's miniaturization of the transistor, i.e. why electronics are so small, fast and powerful now.

My PhD included projects focusing on fundamental surface chemistry mechanisms of the technique, as well as a couple of industry-funded applied projects for creating time-release films on pharmaceuticals and surface smoothing of optical components.

What is your current job?

I am a Product Marketing Manager for Forge Nano which is headquartered in Thornton, Colorado, but I work remotely from Porvoo, Finland.

I am responsible for creating Go-To-Market plans for ALD equipment, which involves market research, audience building, messaging, content creation and campaign management.

I also lead our marketing operations initiatives which include data analytics and reporting, process creation and documentation, and management of our marketing technology, like Salesforce. I often attend tradeshows as a representative for the company and, on occasion, will give conference presentations.

What is your favorite thing about your job?

I LOVE Operations. Marketing gets a reputation for being an arts and crafts department, but there are a ton of aspects of marketing operations that really itch an engineering scratch.

One of my main tasks is to manage our CRM and marketing automation platform. The entire goal is to build processes and workflows that allow data from our digital channels to flow seamlessly between platforms, capture the necessary data for reporting purposes, and then use that data to automate marketing activities, like email outreach or ad placement. Building these platforms out and finding new ways to optimize them, or new tools to integrate, is an engineer's dream. Then once it's working, you're sitting on a huge pile of data that you get to organize into reports, help inform your next actions, and tell a story with.

I mean, what's so different about this than doing a PhD?!

What is the most important skill you developed or experience you had during your PhD that now helps you in your current position?

Creating and giving presentations.

Between conference talks, presentations at group meetings and frequent updates to our industry funders, the audience was constantly changing. Learning to understand which pieces of information to showcase and how to weave them into a compelling narrative that would resonate with each audience was invaluable and highly translatable to a career in marketing.

How did you build the skills necessary for your current role?

I was lucky to have a PI that allowed me to do some work outside of the lab. During the second half of my PhD, I worked as a licensing fellow for our technology transfer office. This role was meant to build an outbound marketing program to help promote technologies invented at the university and generate more industry conversations for our licensing associates. There were aspects of content creation, lead generation, messaging and data analytics as part of this position.

Outside of this, I spent a lot of time using Hubspot's online learning academy to get smart on marketing. They have an extensive library of resources on all marketing topics, including fundamental marketing theory, outbound marketing, digital marketing, account-based marketing, CRM management, and so on. Their certification courses are fantastic!

I also spent time curating a list of people on LinkedIn to follow. It took some time to cut through the noise and find some great voices, but I found getting a good LinkedIn feed was quite valuable for staying at the forefront of what was happening in the marketing world since the majority of my network was from my technical field.

How did you find this position? What were the career steps you took to get to where you are now?

Via my network. Forge Nano was hiring for a Director of Marketing, and I reached out to their VP of R&D, who I knew from my graduate school network.

Licensing Fellow ➡️ PhD Graduate ➡️ Technical Marketing Manager ➡️ Product Marketing Manager

If someone is interested in a similar role, what would you recommend they start doing now to prepare?

Use AI! If I've seen one thing change in my short time in marketing, it's the prevalence of AI usage. There are plenty of debates on what it should and should not be used for, but, especially in marketing, people are being measured more and more on what kind of AI agents they can make, and what kind of productivity impacts those will have. Shopify even announced recently that they're challenging their teams to incorporate AI into their processes before asking for more headcount.

If you're interested in marketing, I'd also suggest getting smart on marketing terminology and how marketing results can be effectively communicated to business goals. Marketing teams are notorious for struggling to show their impact (to be fair, it is a notoriously difficult problem), but if you're able to level with management about revenue impacts, you're much more likely to be taken seriously. Thankfully, us PhDs are typically happy crunching numbers, so I find this to be a fun challenge!

Why did you decide to not pursue a career in academia?

I was never interested in pursuing a career in academia, but it was difficult coming to the realization that I didn't even want to do research anymore. I felt research was too isolating, too narrowing, and I felt too many steps removed from being able to make a real impact.

It wasn't until exploring some alternatives during the second half of grad school that I really became privy to my own desire to pursue something not only outside of academia, but also outside of research.

What advice do you have for someone getting their PhD and looking to pursue a career outside of academia?

I always recommend that people first reflect on what they LIKE about their PhD.

We inherently gain a lot of transferable skills in the process of getting a PhD, but because the process is so focused, we're kind of tricked into believing it's only applicable to academic research. For example, maybe you really enjoy writing papers or proposals - then finding a grant writing or project specialist position could be a good career path. Maybe your favorite part was data analysis - well, data is king for pretty much every company, and they would love to have a PhD-trained data scientist on their team.

I would also recommend networking as much as possible. I don't have hard statistics on this, but it is so much easier to land a position when you know someone at the company. Hiring is an arduous process for both sides, and hiring managers will happily take the path of least resistance if they are still getting a good candidate out of the process.

And then when you get the job, don't stop networking. You never know when you might need to lean on it.