Product ❤ Marketing

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to work with marketing better. Having bored other product managers with the subject too, it’s clear I’m not the only one who feels like we make hard work of this relationship sometimes (OK, most of the time).

So why is it harder than it sounds? Surely PMs (along with their product teams) build the products and marketers get people using them, right? Hmm not quite. In fact, not even close if you want your product to be a great success.

Engaging with marketing before starting to build your product or feature (as well as during the build itself of course) helps ensure you get the target market right and that what you deliver is exactly what those people are after. There are a raft of issues this early engagement avoids too, including:

• Lack of clarity about what each side is doing
• Unnecessary friction
• Last minute changes
• Time wasting and delays
• Others?

So at what point exactly should you start talking with your marketing team? You could argue that it’s when you’re writing your product’s vision, or when researching the opportunity, but without doubt it should at least be when you’ve got an early draft business case (or lean canvas) since this is when you’ll define who the product’s for and what success looks like (two of the most important things for both product and marketing).

Speaking of success, it helps when clear goals are set by the business and consciously filtered down throughout the whole organisation. This makes alignment much easier for everyone, including product and marketing. Companies like Google and LinkedIn use the OKR system for this, as do we at Trade Me. In my experience, systems like this can be great if they’re outcome driven (rather than output driven) but unfortunately this is often not the case. I’ll leave that topic for another day!

And what about product roadmaps? Should Marketing have a hand in those too? Assuming you’re still using roadmaps, the short answer is yes. At least once a year, before locking them down, you should get marketing across your plans. You will be surprised just how useful this exercise is if you’re willing to change things around based on their input.

I’ve also found it’s necessary to be clear who is responsible for what, especially leading up to a product launch. Those fancy landing pages, emails and push notifications promoting your new product or feature have a lot of moving parts (e.g. content, legal approval and scheduling) so knowing if it’s product or marketing’s responsibility avoids confusion and time-wasting for everyone involved.

Most of us aren’t lucky enough to have a marketer dedicated to each of our product teams so we have to work harder to bring them in at the right times, but believe me it’s worth the effort. Of course it’s not just PMs who are responsible for ensuring this happens, marketers themselves should be proactively hitting up their PMs to get involved too.

In future posts I’ll share my thoughts and experiences as a PM working with other roles and teams including designers, analysts and those all important sales people.