The VP Positioning Strategy That Landed Me Two OffersStep 1: Decide what kind of VP you want to becomeI did not begin with my LinkedIn profile. I began by defining the role. I knew I wanted to become a VP of Marketing inside a startup. That gave me a much more useful question: What would make a startup CEO trust me to lead their marketing organization? Which capabilities would matter most? What gaps would make them hesitate? Who would need to know me before one of those roles became available? That answers would have been different if I wanted to lead product marketing inside a global enterprise or run a mature demand generation organization. “I want to become a VP” is not specific enough to guide your decisions. You need to understand the environment you want to lead in, the business problems you want to own, and the expectations senior leaders will have of someone at that level. The clearer the destination, the easier it becomes to work backward. Step 2: Find the sharp edge of your experienceMy experience was broad, but broad experience alone was not going to make my value explicit. I decided product marketing would become the sharp edge of my positioning. It was close to revenue, and one of two main marketing disciplines that generate the most VPs. I was not abandoning the rest of my background or pretending I had spent my entire career in one specialty. Product marketing became the part of my experience that led the story. It gave people a clear way to understand why I was valuable. This is where a lot of senior leaders struggle. You have spent years developing a wide range of capabilities, so when someone asks what you bring to the table, you try to include all of them. You describe yourself as a strategic, cross-functional leader who drives transformation, builds high-performing teams and delivers results. All true. Also true of thousands of other leaders. You do not need to erase the breadth of your experience. You need to decide which part should lead. What is the clearest reason a senior executive would pull you into an important conversation? Which business problem are you unusually well equipped to solve? What part of your experience is most relevant to the VP role you want? For me, it was competitive go to market motions. I knew how to find the right customers at scale. That meant that every marketing tactic that came after that was 10x more effective. And that was something CEOs wanted. That is the sharp edge of your positioning. Step 3: Learn how your market thinks and talksOnce I chose product marketing, I went deep. For almost a year, I regularly listened to six or seven podcasts focused on product marketing. I learned who the respected experts were, which ideas were shaping the field, what companies were struggling with, and how the strongest leaders explained their impact. I also joined the Product Marketing Alliance because I wanted to be around people who were already operating in that world. I paid attention to the terminology they used, the problems they prioritized, and the trends executives considered valuable enough to invest in. I was not simply learning more about product marketing. I was studying the executive conversation and what VPs in particular were focused on. You can have excellent experience and still struggle to position it if you do not understand how senior leaders value that experience. Your work may be strategic, but if you describe it through tasks and deliverables, people may still see you as tactical. Strong positioning requires you to understand what matters to the leaders making decisions: What problems are becoming more urgent? What results are executives accountable for? Where is the business investing? What separates solid functional leadership from executive-level judgment? The deeper I went, the easier it became to connect my experience to the issues senior leaders already had on their minds. Step 4: Reverse-engineer the people already doing the jobAt the same time, I began reaching out to senior marketing leaders on LinkedIn, especially VPs who had come from product marketing backgrounds. I wanted to understand how they had positioned themselves. Which experiences did they emphasize? How did they describe their work? What helped them move from functional leadership into an executive role? What patterns could I see across their careers? I documented everything I learned and gradually built a playbook for the day I became a VP. This was networking, but it was also market research. You can apply the same strategy to your field. Find leaders at the VP level who have a similar background and reach out. Ask for an opportunity to learn about their journey as you are designing your next move. Pay attention to how they communicate, which problems they own, who relies on their judgment, and what evidence made senior leaders believe they were ready. Do not copy their career. Look for the decision criteria hiding inside it. Start applying it in your day to day. Step 5: Build proof before you need the titleJoining the Product Marketing Alliance eventually created an opportunity I could not have planned. A few weeks before one of their events, they reached out and asked whether I could deliver a keynote. Someone may have canceled. I did not have a ready-made presentation, and I was scared shitless. I said yes. I knew the opportunity could help establish credibility in the exact space I wanted to own. (Side note: you don’t have to wait to get invited. You can reach out and pitch yourself) The keynote was recorded, and I shared the video on LinkedIn. That one piece of visible proof started creating opportunities. CEOs and senior executives reached out to ask whether I offered consulting. As I did more product marketing work as a consultant, my positioning became more credible. At the time, I was already working on a project with Google, but it wasn’t giving me enough of the go to market exposure I needed. So I put together a plan to expend my scope and pitched it. They said yes, and I strengthened the exact reputation I was building, while doing meaningful work. The keynote created public proof. The consulting work created operating proof. Together, they changed the story I could tell, and that changed how people saw me. This is the part you cannot solve with a better LinkedIn headline. You need evidence. Inside your company, that might mean taking ownership of a strategic initiative, expanding the scope of a project, advising another function, presenting to senior leaders, or solving a problem that normally sits one level above you. Externally, it could mean speaking, publishing, consulting, advising, or contributing to an industry community. Your positioning becomes believable when people can see you doing the work, not just talking about it. And no, this isn’t a quick fix. It’s a process that builds reputation, but when it finally falls into place you get to reap the rewards for the rest of your career. Step 6: Build relationships that multiply your visibilityBy the time I was ready to pursue a VP title, my positioning was already working. My network had seen my expertise develop. I had speaking experience, consulting projects and stronger examples that supported the story I wanted senior leaders to believe. Then I became more deliberate about who needed to know me. It’s easy to think that if you just update your LinkedIn opportunities will magically come, but we’re not here to play the ego game. Waiting is not a strategy. If you want visibility - you need to create it. Because I wanted to lead marketing inside a startup, I reached out to partners in venture capital firms. One VC relationship could potentially open doors to multiple companies. An investor recommendation would also carry more weight with a startup CEO than a cold application. By that point, I was not asking anyone to imagine whether I could operate at the VP level. I had evidence that I already was. And (and this is an important one) after dozens of networking conversations with senior leaders, I also had the confidence to tell my story. That made it easier for senior leaders to recommend me, and those conversations eventually led to two VP offers. The same principle applies internally. You need relationships with people who influence opportunities. That might be your skip-level leader, a respected cross-functional executive, a business-unit leader, or someone who regularly participates in talent conversations. Positioning becomes much more powerful when the right people can see it and repeat it when you are not in the room. Your job is to make it easier for them to see and advocate for you. VP positioning starts before the opportunity appearsThe process of positioning myself for those two VP offers I landed? It took about a year because I started from zero right after moving to a new city and with no network to support me. You might need 90 days if you have a good baseline, but the bottom line is that it’s not something you do over weekend. You do not build VP positioning during the final weeks before a promotion decision. You build it through the strategy you follow and the choices you make long before that conversation happens. Your resume and LinkedIn profile should reflect that strategy. But they are not the strategy. I’m sorry I can’t give you a quick fix, but what I can offer is this: your brand and your positioning is one of the things no one can take away from you. Once you build them, they will continue to serve you and future proof your career. | 
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