Partnering with Product Marketers
Successful products rely on successful marketing. After all, you can’t achieve product/market fit unless the market understands why your product is valuable to them, and that’s the exact responsibility that product marketers have.
The role of the product marketer is to clarify the value proposition of the product, to fine-tune it for various target segments, and to broadcast that messaging across high-leverage channels.
That said, both product managers and product marketers are responsible for product launches. Both need to coordinate across multiple groups within a company to ensure that the product release is successful. So, where does one role end and the other begin?
One way to think about the difference: product managers are responsible for leading the creation of a product, and product marketing managers are responsible for leading the go-to-market strategy for that product. Below is a quick summary of the responsibilities for each role.
Product Manager
Sets the product vision and the product roadmap
Identifies which customer pain points to target, through both user interviews and metrics
Articulates business value of the product
Documents required functionality of the product, and may write out user stories or test cases
Ships the product alongside software engineers, designers, QA, analysts, and others in the product development team
Manages stakeholders and aligns them to the product strategy
Advocates for the end user and shapes the customer experience within the product
The product manager is focused on identifying what customer problems to tackle, and is typically embedded as part of an EPD (engineering / product / design) organization.
Product Marketer
Identifies a coherent marketing strategy for the product
Conducts competitor analysis & market research
Shapes communication & product positioning
Identifies features to spotlight and empowers customer-facing teams (sales, customer success, account management, support) with clear value propositions
Explains benefits of product features via customer-facing messaging (e.g. white papers, case studies, email campaigns)
Leads product demos, presentations, webinars, and events
Sets up marketing campaigns for demand generation
Selects the appropriate pricing strategy for the product
Provides guidance throughout the lifecycle of the product, ranging from minimum viable products to fully mature products
The product marketer is focused on empowering go-to-market teams such as sales, support, customer success, and account management. They’ll typically be cross-matrixed across multiple product teams, and they’ll tag-team with other marketing partners such as demand generation (e.g. email, website) and event marketers (e.g. conferences, summits).
PM and PMM Roles In Practice
In an ideal world, the product management team is clearly separated from the product marketing team, so that both teams can focus and specialize. This most frequently happens in larger organizations.
However, in many smaller companies, a single person will be responsible for both roles, often acting as a product manager who must also take on a marketing role once the product is ready for release to customers.
Why might a single person tackle both roles, especially in smaller organizations? That's because both roles share the following skill sets:
Customer obsession
Mastery of both qualitative feedback and quantitative metrics
Strong communication skills
Drive to execute at a quick pace to unlock maximum impact
Deep influence to align stakeholders to the strategy
In resource-constrained environments, the same person can flex to tackle both areas of responsibility.
Collaboration Best Practices with Product Marketers
Product marketers are valuable partners, and it’s important that we treat them that way. The following principles have helped me to drive better collaboration with my marketing counterparts.
Empower Your Marketing Partners
When you’re first starting to identify which users to target, you should already start to loop in marketing. They can help you understand which other competitors are already targeting those users, and how effective those current competitors are.
Plus, because they’ll be close to the ground with customers, they can surface up insights around pain points that you might not get from your day-to-day work as a product manager.
And, as you flesh out the design of the product, work with product marketing to ensure that they know how to position the features of the product to align with both your value proposition as well as the company’s broader brand image. Marketers prefer using collateral that includes the actual design of the product itself, so be sure to keep them informed as you work through implementation!
Product marketers should be strategic partners for the product management function. They should feel empowered to push back with their own ideas on which customer segments to target, on whether the roadmap makes cohesive sense, and whether any proposed functionality is truly the highest-value initiative to tackle right now vs. the competition.
Product marketers will be able to call out any competitive action that’s being taken, and identify gaps and weaknesses in your current product that needs to be resolved soon. A marketer should be able to chime in with her own feature ideas and be taken seriously, given her deep context in the industry.
Clarify Marketing Priorities
Product marketers will usually be cross-matrixed with other product managers, so be clear about your priorities and your timelines. Work with your marketing partners to clarify their total set of priorities and timelines, and help them stack rank their work accordingly.
Your job is to maximize the value of your company – and that means if another PM has a higher-leverage product, you need to lower the priority of your initiatives! Marketing only has so much bandwidth, and that bandwidth needs to be judiciously allocated across your company’s various initiatives.
And of course, be sure to call out customer constraints (e.g. deadlines and adoption challenges) early and often, so that marketers know how to best position the product. As an example, I worked on Blend’s Home Equity product offerings, which only applies to banks and credit unions.
If marketing tried to market these products to “mortgage banks” (which only do mortgages and not home equity products), our customers would be furious with us!
By calling out that particular kinds of customers wouldn’t find value in my products, I enabled our marketing team to redirect valuable resources towards doubling down on our target segment of banks and credit unions, rather than wasting energy in chasing the wrong kind of customer.
Establish and Protect Working Processes
Marketers need to have time to plan their go-to-market strategies and campaigns. That means that you can’t just throw deadlines over the fence to them – they need to be kept in the loop as strategic partners throughout the creation of your product.
In general, you should give product marketers about 1-2 months of advance notice in terms of release dates. That is, if you plan to launch your product in July, your marketers should already be preparing for its launch starting in May.
That way, they can identify the highest-impact channels and methods to use to best position your product’s value for customers. As the release dates get closer, provide weekly updates on how your product implementation is progressing so that your marketers can update their timelines as well.
You should get a sense of how long planning takes for each kind of marketing activity, so that you can get ahead of those timelines. Events typically require planning about 3 months in advance, whereas newsletters can typically be tackled on much shorter notice, e.g. 2-3 weeks in advance.
Help Marketers Help You
As you work with your customers to launch your products, you’ll regularly hear about competing solutions. Your customers will talk about why they’re currently using competing solutions, and they will provide commentary on both what those solutions do well and where they could improve. Be sure to raise this information to marketing so that they can continuously update the positioning of your product and maximize the chances that you capture customers vs. competitors.
And, as you launch products, create templates around how you measure the success of your product for your customers. For example, you may want to state upfront with customers that the goal of your product is to decrease some inefficiency by 10%. If that’s the case, make sure that you first measure the baseline inefficiency they have, then measure the new inefficiency metric after they adopt your product.
From there, get your customer’s buy-in to be featured on your website in the form of a testimonial quote or a case study. Then, work with marketing to create compelling materials from that customer so that you can prove to the market that your product holds unique value for them.
Stay Humble and Curious
Always be curious as a product manager! Take the time to understand how your product marketer counterparts tackle their work. Understand what their priorities are on a month-to-month basis, what initiatives they’re tackling, and which tasks they’re juggling.
Learn about the pains that they face, and empathize with the challenges that keep them up at night. You might find that with minor tweaks to your product processes, you can make their lives significantly easier.
And, be sure to understand the kinds of tools that they use for their work. Being familiar with your stakeholders’ tool kits will ensure that you fine-tune your work habits to meet their needs.
Summary
An amazing product isn’t amazing until it’s adopted by the market, and markets don’t adopt products that they’ve never heard of. That’s why it’s crucial for product managers to partner with product marketers, because product marketers create demand for your products within the target market.
Take the time and mental effort to treat your marketers as partners, and you’ll find significant value in your collaboration. You’ll find that your product will be positioned far more effectively against competitors, and that you’ll be getting solid intel on what competitors are doing.
