What Is Product Marketing?

Whether you’ve found yourself in a job called product marketing (who really dreams of being a product marketer… really…), or you work with a PMM, you might ask yourself, “What is this role all about?”

I don’t know of a single other function in a company that is as vaguely defined, or that varies as much in definition from company to company.

I want to try to solve this problem. Several before me have made solid attempts. Hopefully my take helps advance our craft.

I’m focused on B2B Product Marketing. At some point, I would love to collaborate with a B2C Product Marketing expert to make this even more holistic.

This is B2B Product Marketing at its fullest scope:

I cast the net wide here. Let me explain.

The reason why there is so much variety in product marketing roles is rooted in the fact that product marketing interfaces with possibly more parts of an organization than any other function. In those interfaces is the potential for one of the above boxes to be covered by another function instead of product marketing. There are a few common patterns:

• Functional Strengths — Adjacent functions develop a strength and take ownership. For example, some teams hire very business-oriented product managers. In those organizations, product management might be responsible for pricing.
• Functional Scale — Rather than having product marketing wear many hats, some teams scale by having specialists focus on certain sub-functions. They may scale up more sales support resources within the sales team, or have dedicated sales enablement, content marketing or customer marketing teams.
• Technical Marketing — Tech marketing, sometimes also called Technical Product Marketing developed from the need to have people with more focused technical skills handle things like demos, technical thought leadership and detailed compete guidance. This team may or may not fall under the umbrella of Product Marketing. I consider it under one umbrella, and call out the more technical-leaning product marketing responsibilities that might require a dedicated TPMM or TPMM team. If not under one umbrella, it needs to work in lock-step with the PMM team.
• Ineffective Product Marketing Teams — As the inverse of the previous three patterns, this one is failure from within. Product Marketing fails to take ownership of the full scope of responsibility, or fails to deliver the quality of work required, leaving other teams in the company with no choice but to align resources to fill the gaps.

Many Hats Required, Much Balance Needed

Some of the patterns that narrow the scope of product marketing can be ok, and the PMM team can still deliver an ROI on their cost to exist. But if too many of these patterns emerge in too many directions, then product marketing will sink like a ship taking on water, down to the bottom of the ocean.

PMM teams can sink for a while, and business keeps humming for at least a short time, because PMM is not in a critical path. PMM doesn’t ship product, and doesn’t directly bring in revenue. However, there is certainly at least a correlation between long-term successful B2B technology companies and a valuable and impactful PMM team.

The common thread through my “Strategy, Content, Support” framework is that product marketing is building, enabling and tuning the go-to-market (GTM) capability of the company. If PMM sinks, what’s there will keep running, but upgrades and repairs disappear. And those upgrades and repairs are what often plays a key role in supporting or propelling a GTM team into new revenue opportunities.

The challenge is that PMM teams wear a lot of hats. Great PMM teams have a lot of people that count on them, and most of the people who count on them don’t know half of the rest of what PMM does every day.

How does the lonely (but popular… it’s a life of conflict) PMM handle this? The answer is balance. Being a great product marketer is primarily about balance. Knowing when something is a big enough business problem to devote cycles to figuring it out vs. when you really need to crank out another whitepaper to drive demand gen. Or, knowing when to say yes or no to a request for a new slide from a sales rep.

Lots of Devils

There’s a lot more details and devils to get into. Hopefully I will find the time to write about each of the boxes in the chart above. Each one has it’s own value, as well as traps. For now, if you are a PMM out there and wondering, “is my job really just about writing white papers?” I hope this post has given you a bit of clarity and hope. It’s incredibly rewarding when done at full scope and done well.