PRODUCT MARKETING: The Best Job You’ll Ever Have

I’m not a recruiter, or some paid influencer for some product marketing university — shit I don’t even have a marketing degree. I just took a path in life that led me to this insanely rewarding corner of the marketing world called product marketing, and I narcissistically think it’s the best job anyone could ever have. Below I’ll tackle the first of 4 common questions I have heard from people looking to learn more about the field. If that’s you, peep dis, fam:

Question Numero Uno: Product Marketing? What the hell is that?

I guarantee Brit doesn’t know either, it’s ok.

So glad you asked. And because this is a relatively new, developing, evolving field, it’s not fully defined yet. So let me give you my definition: Product Marketing sits at the epicenter of the Product, Sales, and Marketing teams. It is our job to communicate and collaborate with damn near every team in the org to make sure everyone inside the company, as well as everyone in the market is talking about our products, solutions, and company in the same exact way.

I’ll start by illustrating just a few of the most common issues that occur in the absence of product marketing:

• Sales is selling a product that doesn’t exist
• Product is building a solution customers don’t want
• Marketing is promoting a product to the wrong audience with the wrong message
• Customers don’t really get what you do

Any of these sound familiar?

And what’s worse, is these annoyances aren’t just all too common, but all too expensive. When sales sells something inaccurately, it takes countless hours to custom build a solution to satisfy a customer contract. When product builds something nobody wants, we waste precious time, and let something that may have taken months or years to develop collect dust on a shelf. When marketing targets the wrong audience, we miss deals that could be the difference between just keeping the lights on and going public. And when customers don’t get what you do? Well then why the hell do you exist in the first place?

And the common thread here with all of these issues isn’t that everyone’s an asshole (although it may feel that way at times), it’s that each department communicates differently. Sales speaks in dollars and deals, product speaks in features and functions, and marketing speaks in clicks and conversions. And yes, I spent a little extra time making sure all of those were alliterations. You’re welcome.

But remember when Chris Traeger got Ron Swanson that round desk that allowed him to swivel around in the center of the office so he could be accessible to everyone at any time? Yeah. That’s us. (For the record, Ron Swanson would make a shit product marketer).

A Product Marketer’s job is to sit at the middle of all of these teams that are setting different goals, measuring different successes, and speaking different languages, and act as the company translator. It is our job to make sure:

• Sales fully understands the products we are selling
• Product has competitive R&D and customer voice at the center of their strategy
• Marketing knows exactly who need your products and why
• Customers feel heard, understood, and connected to your solution

So how do we do it?

As my fearless boss Yoni Solomon puts it, with a little bit of pizazz and panache. And also a strong ability to communicate and write clearly, a neurotic passion for project management, and the tendency to more or less get along with everyone. It means having to juggle dozens of projects and launches, while keeping your finger on the pulse of the market. And it means knowing how to draw the connection from the hyper technical details to the highest-level disruptive strategy, and all the steps in between.

If this field and skill set appeal to you and you’d like to keep learning, scope out part 2 of this blog series where I outline how I made the move from slingin’ car insurance to launching products and partnerships for the largest B2B marketplace in the world.