All opinions of course, but based on a few years of working in GTM for businesses selling enterprise cloud infrastructure and developer solutions. YMMV if you’re shooting for B2C or even B2B2C, or anything else without a direct sales motion, as that’s not really my area of expertise. Also, “product ops and content dev” is an unusual combination - I’ve never seen that under one umbrella before.

Part 0: ask yourself if product marketing is actually what you want to do. It is (as you can see) a widely misunderstood role. There may be some other facet of marketing that’s more appealing - demand-gen is a challenging area on its own, as is partner GTM, or branding. If you’re looking for strategy, you may really be searching for a corp dev, product strategy, market research, or chief of staff role. No way to really know except to talk to folks in those roles and check out some job descriptions in your target industry (seriously, the only thing that really galls me when I get asked for career advice is when I inquire “consumer marketing or enterprise / B2B?” and the person shrugs…these are wildly different marketing roles and I wouldn’t dream of weighing in on a consumer marketing job search).

Assuming you’re still interested in B2B product marketing:
Part 1 is get as close to the customer as you can. The goal is to know the market (this includes competitors) and the customer as well as possible. Every single product marketer I know is sitting in on sales or customer success calls, doing research interviews with existing customers, investigating prospects we lost, and talking to people for whom the product is never even under consideration. If in a time crunch, sales people - particularly sales engineers and your top sellers - will do, but eventually you want to follow that up with more robust research designed with product management and demand-gen, as sales will only capture bottom of funnel info secondhand for you. In your role, it sounds like you can ask for 30 mins to talk to a sales leader or top seller under the guise of serving the customer better as part of product ops or content, and go from there.

Part 2 is build some content that demonstrates specialized knowledge. The goal here is to take that knowledge from Part 1 and demonstrate that you can actually turn it into something that can support other teams, at scale. The scale part is important - sales or content marketing can deliver content, too, but normally they’re looking to product marketing for anchor content to customize for a particular customer, or a webinar, or an article. No, creating this stuff is not ‘strategy’, but if you didn’t come from sales, you’re already fighting a credibility gap, and no one likes working with a product marketer who can’t make a deck, write a decently technical white paper or blog post, assemble a messaging document, or design and build a sales enablement curriculum. It’s best if you can demo your own product - and the less technical it is, the more you’ll be expected to do it. For example, analytics or productivity solutions would likely be within a non-technical product marketer’s capabilities, while something like a managed database or DevOps tools requiring integrations with a wide set of solutions means being able to work with a PM, technical marketing, or sales engineer. Check out a release blog or an overview video from a product you’re interested in doing marketing for to get an idea of what to expect.

The good news is if you have what I think is required of strategy consultants, you’re probably already a strong writer, good at boiling down market analyses down to the essentials depending on audience, and experienced with building and speaking to a good storytelling deck. Hiring managers will ask for work samples.