Product Management vs. Product Marketing
What I learned from a career in both roles
Most of my immediate family members have had long careers in what are typically described as professional roles — lawyers, doctors, and teachers — careers that require advanced degrees and even have their own majors in many cases. Given my career in software and technology, it’s probably not surprising that I’ve frequently been on the receiving end of the question:
“What exactly do you do?”
The answer to that question has always been either product management or product marketing. Which of course leads to the question:
“What exactly do you do?”
There are no shortage of articles, blog posts, infographics, and SlideShare’s that describe the differences between the two roles (I happen to like this simple explanation from Dave Gerhardt at Drift). Yet there remains lots of confusion and even more overlap and interdependence between the two roles. I came into both roles in companies where it didn’t previously exist, which meant both I and the company had to do a lot of learning on the fly about how the role would fit into the broader organization. Here’s why each company needed the role at the time and what I learned as the first person to fill that role.
How would you like to be a product manager?
Product management owns the problem. Engineering and Design own the solution
My first job in software was as in implementation manager at a small healthcare IT company called HealthShare Technology (eventually acquired by WebMD). I was in Client Services responsible for implementing, training, and supporting new users. After about a year in this role, I was approached by the COO of the company asking if I would be interested in filling a new role that didn’t yet exist in the company — product manager. “What’s that?” I recall asking. After more discussions and research on the role, I found myself asking “Why me?” I hadn’t majored in product management in college (no such thing). I majored in psychology of all things (PERFECT in hindsight!).
Why did we need it?
It’s common for the CEO/Founder of a technology company to serve as the defacto product manager — for a period of time. But ultimately the CEO needs to do CEO things, and someone else needs to focus on product management things. That was essentially the situation at HealthShare when the COO approached me with the idea of taking on the role. Following are three early learnings as a first-time product manager?
#1 Be the internal voice of the customer
It turns out I had a penchant for asking “why” — a LOT! I was a bit of a broken record when it came to hearing users’ questions and asking internally “Why do we do it this way?” or “Should we be doing it that way?” These were questions coming from our users every day, and I was on the front lines hearing them in person, over the phone, and via email.
I was also a bit of a nudge when it came to technical support. When our system went down or experienced connectivity or performance issues (this was in the very early days of ASP model delivery), I wasn’t satisfied with “just” getting it back up and reporting this to users. I wanted to know more about how it happened and whether it could be prevented or minimized through some change in the product, process, or technology. And we made quite a few changes in all three areas over time based on customer feedback and experience.
#2 Understand and organize around the problem, not the solution
Our solutions allowed users to analyze internal/proprietary and publicly-available hospital clinical and financial data. We were a decision support system for strategic planning, quality assurance, and managed care contracting departments. Over time, however, our users began asking more about the data than the software. Could they have/purchase access to more current data? Could the data be combined with other sources and multiple years for trending analyses? Could the data be combined with survey data?
Why did our users care so much about the data? What about our solutions’ features and functions!?
The ah-ha moment came when I started to focus on understanding our users’ pains more than our products’ features and functions. And that made sense that I would have some innate empathy for our users as I had previously worked in healthcare operations (our primary user persona) — I had lived their world, felt their frustrations, and harbored many of their skepticisms for software vendors like, well, me!
“If I only had one hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes defining the problem, and the remaining 5 minutes solving it.” — Albert Einstein
We eventually organized our product team around the data more than the software. I tasked one person with data research, acquisition, and management. This person would “own” the data and serve as the internal expert on all of our current and potential sources. Others on the team were charged with processing the data as quickly as possible to ensure it got into our software and delivered to our users earlier than any of our competitors. Finally, we focused efforts around educating the broader organization, including Sales and Customer Success, about the data. The more expert we could become in the data — what it was and what it was not — the better we could serve our customers. There was (and remains) a lot of misinformation about how to use healthcare data for quality improvement, so this was a role in the market that we tried to fill better than our competitors.
#3 Being the first is tough
Being the first product manager in an organization is hard, especially when it’s also YOUR first gig as a PM. Not only are you spending time leveling up your own understanding of the role and what’s expected of you, but you are educating others within the organization about it as well. You are simultaneously developing your persuasion and leadership skills while trying to advocate for influence within the organization with respect to product decisions. If your organization is not used to taking a user-centric and data-driven approach to making product decisions, that will add to your list of challenges as a new product manager. But press on you must as the customer must always remain at the center of your role as the product owner.
When product managers become product marketers
Product marketing owns positioning, messaging, and the overall go-to-market strategy.
Roughly nine years into my career as a product manager I encountered another opportunity to become the first to fill a role at a company — this time responsible for product marketing. At the time I was product manager for a suite of products at PatientKeeper. Then Congress passed the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009, which, among other things, provided direct incentives (through the HITECH Act) to hospitals and physician practices for installing and adopting Electronic Health Records. My suite of products, however, would not be covered by The Act. This meant strategically (and correctly), PatientKeeper would not likely be throwing any resources behind my products.
Not one to just ride out a slow decline in activity and responsibility, I approached the VP of Marketing (my boss) with an idea. “We need product marketing, and I think I can fill that role.” The VP of Marketing laughed, I squirmed, and then he told me he was laughing because he made the same suggestion to the CEO the week prior. Perfect! Now what?
Why did we need it?
Over time communication between sales and product management at PatientKeeper had begun to break down. Product managers were too heads-down and focused on release management, roadmapping, and bug triaging to give sales the education, materials, and support they needed in the field. Furthermore, the EHR space had become increasingly more competitive while our expanding product line became more complex to sell. In order to win, we would need strong, differentiated messaging and even more support for sales to close deals. This just wasn’t realistic to expect if it was to be on the backs of product managers — which leads me to the top three things I learned filling this new role in product marketing.
#1 Product management can’t “do” product marketing
It’s not uncommon to combine the responsibilities of product marketing with product management. And while there can be overlap between the two roles, neither will be optimally effective in this scenario. Usually when this happens, it’s the product management responsibilities that win out over the product marketing responsibilities. In this case what you get is a product/solution that may actually solve your users’ problems (that you understand well, of course), but that everyone describes and sells differently and is poorly positioned in the market (or even in the wrong market).
#2 Target market identification, differentiated messaging, and more
In the early days of the company, PatientKeeper offered a fairly niche product that focused narrowly on mobile charge capture. Over time the sales process grew increasingly complicated as the product suite expanded to include additional clinical workflows. Previously sales reps could be reasonably expected to serve as quasi-experts, answer all prospect questions, AND demo the product. They could no longer fill these roles in a more complex, more crowded marketplace. With the passage of the massive HITECH Act and every vendor chasing it, we needed:
- A deep understanding of the The Act and how it would impact the market in order to develop appropriate positioning and messaging.
- To re-evaluate and re-establish our target market.
- Buyer personas that identified and described our ideal customer within a NEW target market— customers with a higher close and satisfaction rate. The buyers of our legacy charge capture product were NOT the same as the buyers we would now be targeting.
- Sales enablement materials that helped sales reps close more deals within the target market.
- A go-to-market strategy that outlined in detail how the product should be promoted and sold in a more competitive market.
- To improve the relationship and communication between sales and product.
This would not happen without product marketing. Easy, right?
#3 Repeat the message — over and over again
Malcolm Gladwell popularized the 10,000 hour rule, and others have researched how many repetitions are required to learn new words and skills. As with a company mission and vision, a product’s positioning and messaging can’t be repeated too many times. Companies and product lines expand and contract, people come and go, and market conditions change. Your positioning and messaging require frequent evaluation, validation, and reinforcing throughout the organization to ensure everyone is on the same page. Maybe even to the point of achieving “automaticity.”
I’m fortunate to have been able to spend over eighteen years in both roles as each one has contributed to a better understanding of the other. Have you been in roles in both product management and product marketing? What did you take away from both experiences?
