What is product marketing (and where to focus yours)?
Has anyone noticed that the tech industry can’t agree on what product marketing does? Just look at the job descriptions out there for product marketers – their responsibilities are all over the board. By contrast, if you look at product manager roles at tech companies, you’ll see a lot more standardization, and a lot of them will define that role like this:
There are good reasons why product marketing gets inconsistently defined – and why this might be a good thing.
While product marketing as a disciple is growing fast, there aren’t yet nearly as many product marketers as product managers in the world – lots of organizations still don’t have a product marketing function or have built it into other roles in their company. Product Marketing roles tend to get added much later by companies, after they’ve had product managers ship product for months and years, and usually after the velocity of product delivery gets fast enough – or the organizational complexity gets high enough – that a specialized role is needed to bridge product development and delivery.
Where’s the Squeaky Wheel?
Because product marketing roles are created later in a company’s development (say, between 50 and 150 employees), organizational strengths and weaknesses will have already emerged: Maybe product management is not in touch with the needs of customers or the market, or marketing lacks the technical acumen (or time) to message and promote the product, or product launches are a mess and customers and salespeople don’t understand what’s in the new releases. And this is key – it doesn’t matter which one it is: the biggest weakness in the organization at that time – the squeakiest wheel – will inevitably define the product marketing role in the organization. And senior management will then endorse the need for “product marketing” headcount. Almost every time.
“the biggest weakness in the organization – the squeakiest wheel – will inevitably define the initial product marketing role in the organization. ”
As a result when you ask Marketing VPs and C-level folks about the product marketing roles they plan to add to their company, you always have to ask what problem they’re trying to solve. The answer falls in one of two categories. We’ll call these front-end product marketing and back-end product marketing (thanks to my colleague Tim Low, currently SVP of Maketing at Payscale, for the terms).
Here are two recommended ways of grouping potential product marketing responsibilities into a robust role. You can call either one "Product Marketing."
Front-end product marketing
Companies with front-end product marketing use the function primarily to take finished product to market (see diagram): the function is focused on creating and executing a marketing plan, including some amount of tactical marketing execution, and on getting internal and external stakeholders ready for the product release.
Back-end product marketing
Companies with back-end product marketing use the role to refine the product development process: deciding what should be built for end-users, documenting this in a way that results in market needs getting met, and executing some go-to-market activities usually limited to messaging and perhaps internal readiness.
Can one person do both?
Yes, poorly. As my aforementioned colleague Tim once told to me, it is rare to find candidates who are good at both. And, even if they are, it is difficult to execute simultaneously well on both.
Which approach is right?
Either one. This depends on the needs of your organization, right? As a company matures with their product marketing function it may need to be realigned or further specialized – something we help companies to do as well as setting product marketing up to succeed from the start – but the function must prove itself initially by fixing the company’s squeakiest wheel.