One of the things I’ve yet to discuss in my posts is the role of product marketing and how you, the product manager, should work effectively with this department.

After all, as we’ll see shortly, there can be quite an overlap between the roles, and if not managed properly, it could lead to unnecessary tension between departments and even ego clashes.

But first things first – 

What is ‘product marketing’?

People who are working in the product marketing department are called product marketing managers, or PMMs in short.

As their job title implies, their responsibilities lie on the intersection between ‘product’ and ‘marketing’.

Given a product, PMMs are responsible for developing a marketing strategy to get it into the hands of as many customers or users as possible. More specifically, this involves dealing with:

• Product positioning
• Go to market strategy
• Messaging around the product
• Product launches
• Producing marketing materials – including videos, blogs, one-pagers, infographics and more
• Establishing an online presence, including social media, thought leadership, case studies, testimonials, webinars, and more
• Personas analysis
• Gathering market feedback on the product
• Gathering market trends and competitive landscape

I might have missed a thing or two, but you get the idea.

Overlapping with product management

As a product manager reading this list, you will surely notice that there are items on this list that belong also to the product management department, and that indeed can be a source of confusion & tension if not managed properly.

Here is the thing:

Most of the companies I’ve worked with, which have less than 100 employees, usually don’t have a dedicated function for product marketing.

There will be a marketing department, in most of the cases, but their work won’t necessarily cover all, or even most, of the responsibilities above. Early marketing departments are usually focused on branding, positioning, web presence and messaging. They will be less likely to deal with go to market strategy, rolling out features or gathering any market feedback on your product. 

In fact, they may not talk to you at all. I’ve seen several companies at this stage where there’s a total disconnect between the marketing and product teams.

Additionally, in many cases, early-stage companies are still focused on their path to product-market fit. And if you recall, one of the first stages towards achieving a product market fit is cracking the ‘acquisition’ phase (you can read about it more here).

It means that it’s on you, the product manager, to assist the management with the positioning and the messaging of your young product. It also means you’ll be putting a great emphasis on the personas analysis, your go to market strategy and getting market feedback.

Now, if your product and the company are successful and become bigger, they may hire a PMM to assist the company with getting the product to the masses.

If you used to do many of these responsibilities by yourself (whether it was in this company or in previous companies you worked for) – then you may feel as if you were stripped of some of your responsibilities.

This will probably surface on your first meeting with the PMM (whether it’s you or the PMM who are new to the company). If this meeting is mismanaged, it can leave you with some open questions, such as:

1. I thought I was responsible for the personas. It’s crucial for my PMF journey. Is the product marketing department going to tell me who my product should serve from now on?
2. I thought I am the one to click on the ‘release’ button for new features. Do I need to go through them now, and have a proper release and rollout plan each time I want to release a feature?
3. I thought I was the one tracking the competition and understanding the latest market trends. Am I expected to be dependent on what these guys are telling me that is happening out there?
4. I thought I am the one to talk with customers and get feedback on the product. Am I being blocked from doing these and these guys will just feed me back with all the information I supposedly need?

And there could be other questions raised, depending on how the conversation went.

If many of these questions arise, it’s clear why you might suddenly feel stressed, worried, helpless, frustrated, or even angry.

But don’t worry. There is no reason to get to this point as there is also another option:

Your relationship with the product marketing department, if properly managed – can reinforce both of you, and your company will just become more efficient.

Let’s see how we can make sure this relationship is built properly.

Establishing a fruitful relationship with PMMs

As always, the key is in the communication between you and your peers.

You need to understand that this is a long term relationship and therefore, it’s worth investing in.

Based on that, here are my tips:

Your overall approach

There are several key points that you need to keep in mind when it comes to any engagement that you intend to have with the product marketing team, and especially the first ones:

• You are both part of the same team. There is no ‘you’ and ‘them’. The better you work together, the more your company will benefit.
• The PMM speciality is on the ‘marketing’ aspects of things. Therefore, even if you have dealt with the marketing aspects of your product in the past – it’s time to let go. After all, if you were a marketing wizard, you’d probably be a PMM rather than PM, right? Therefore, leave the marketing to the ones who specialize in it.
• Assume that the PMM you’re going to work with is trustworthy and collaborative. Assume that he or she is interested in building a real relationship with you and won’t be driven by ego. Essentially, it means that you shouldn’t embrace a defensive approach and be suspicious towards each engagement. That is, of course, unless you were proven wrong, by explicit actions of the other side.

Addressing overlapping responsibilities

The trickiest part in this relationship are the overlapping responsibilities. 

The key for addressing it is to understand that by watching very closely, even though a specific responsibility seems to be mutual, the small details show that either the overlapping is not really real, or there is a clear and natural way to divide each responsibility.

Here are some examples:

Persona analysis

On the face of it – both the PM and the PMM care dearly about the personas the product serves. However, when examining carefully what each of you should focus on, we can see that the overlapping is much more limited. Here is why:

PMs care mainly about the underserved pains of the persona and the impact of solving these pains, while PMMs care mainly about what are the motivations and values of these personas so they can better tune the messaging to these people.

Hence, the PMs are responsible for what needs to be built in order to solve the pains, while the PMM are responsible for initiating the selling process itself by positioning the product in an attractive manner.

The real overlap which remains is who determines the personas to target. And the way to address it is to understand that the personas don’t change much during the lifetime of a company or a product (if the company is big). Therefore, as I see it, I’d simply let the first person who reaches this task to own this, until, and if, they are proven wrong.

For example – if you were assigned to an existing product team, and as part of the team there is an existing personas analysis that was created by a PMM who is on the team for more than a year now, I wouldn’t focus my energy on doing a whole new personas analysis. I’d assume that the PMM did a decent job and embrace it by default.

However, that doesn’t mean that you should follow it blindly. After all, nailing down the personas correctly, is crucial for building successful products and the small details matter. Therefore, it’s crucial that you get familiar with the current personas analysis, while maintaining a grain of skepticism and keeping yourself open to the possibility that there may be some adjustments that will be required later down the road. Just make sure, if that happens (and by ‘happens’ I mean that as you become more knowledgeable with the product, you become convinced that the personas analysis requires some corrections), to back up your arguments with data!

Launching features

It could be that in your previous workplaces, or even in the current role, before a PMM joined, you were the one who clicked on the button to release to production.

It was straightforward and simple and everyone was fine with it.

Enter a PMM – things change. The PMM tells you all features must have release notes and a full description that the PMM can understand and communicate to the world. Additionally, the timing of when the feature will be rolled out to the customers is no longer your call…

I know how I felt when I first transitioned from being a PM who owned everything to a PM who needs to coordinate his efforts with a PMM. It felt like a complete bureaucracy and a totally inefficient burden on my workflows.

At the end of the day, it indeed means that features will take more time from their ideation phase and until they are at the hands of the customers. That’s a minus, of course.

However, there is another side to the story – the fact that a PMM has joined the team usually means that your customer base is now significant, and your organization is probably transitioning from being ‘pirates’ to being a ‘navy’. There is probably more than one product team and it’s time their efforts will be coordinated. It means a ‘release calendar’ is becoming a necessity because customers are starting to lose track of features.

Once you understand the bigger picture, it becomes much easier to let go, right? I know that for me it was an enlightening moment, because it was the first time I worked in a company with such a scale, and I was unfamiliar with these challenges. The PMM I worked with, back then, opened my eyes.

Gathering market feedback on the product

So, what about gathering market feedback? Does having a PMM mean you can’t interview customers anymore?

Certainly not.

Like the personas analysis – the real overlapping here is relatively small.

When it comes to interviewing customers – your job is to dig for pains and underserved needs. Also – you can gather first impressions on new features and screens.

The PMM is more focused on aggregated feedback about released features and customer sentiment regarding the company’s product.

While most of your feedback gathering with customers will be via 1:1 meetings, PMMs will prefer surveys and indirect feedback mainly via the sales team.

Hence, while there is some overlap – the two roles are using different methods and with different objections in mind when gathering feedback from customers and/or users.

Competitive landscape and market trends

Fine… so what about the competitive landscape and gathering market trends? Who should own that?

In this case there is a true overlap, in the sense that you are both focused on gathering the same data.

Still, I don’t see any true conflict here for the following couple of reasons:

1. PMs are usually more tactical when they are doing a competitive landscape and they are not doing it too often. Usually it’s part of a discovery process when coming up with new initiatives and products. For PMMs, on the other hand, this is more of an ongoing process. They need to be the first to know when a new competitor appears in the market because they need to equip the sales team with the proper ammunition to address it. 
2. As for market trends – both the PMM and the PM needs to stay on top of it, in order to make sure the product will keep meeting the users or customers expectations. However, in this case – the more the merrier. Any discoveries made by one department should be shared with the other one and this will ensure nothing will be missed out.

As you understand by now – there is nothing preventing you from doing your own competitive analysis and following the market trends. When it comes to ‘formal ownership’ though (for example, when the executives are expecting someone to give them an overview on the latest market trends), I’d leave this ownership with the product marketing team, as they spend more time doing this.

Go to market strategy

The last one on my list is GTM, and it’s a bit harder to crack.

GTM strategy can be tricky and it’s highly dependent on the product, because as I see it, the product itself dictates a lot of the characteristics of the overall GTM approach. 

Products which are great candidates for becoming a PLG (product-led growth) product (if you are not sure what it is – read here) – may not need a PMM at the beginning of their journey, while products which aims towards enterprises and require a long-sale cycle will probably need a PMM love right from the start.

I say it’s tricky because sometimes the product itself is not very clear in its early days.

Therefore, my recommendation for the company’s management is that unless it’s very clear that this product is going to be sold via the sales team, avoid involving a PMM until the product reaches the initial product market fit stage.

At this stage, the ownership of the GTM will shift towards product marketing, because there are much less unknowns about the personas and the core product capabilities.

Other things to keep in mind

Now that we’ve addressed the more challenging aspect of this relationship – the rest is quite trivial.

Like with other peers – you need to set a weekly, or a bi-weekly sync meeting with your point of contact at the product marketing department. 

During this meeting you will sync on the upcoming features, roll-out plans and any relevant insights you both learned.

Aside from that, and depending on the company, there may be a monthly meeting where product marketing will gather all relevant stakeholders from customer success, sales and support and educate them about the upcoming features and roadmap. Usually, you may be asked to be present so you can answer any product-related question.

I found such meetings quite useful, as long as they are prepared for in advance. Lucky for you – most of the preparation is on the PMM side, but they may ask you to fill up some slides beforehand.

My only advice here is that you shouldn’t try to own this meeting, and just be a good team player.

Last – you need to recall that any time you’d like to collect quantitative feedback via questionnaires or surveys – you’ll need to coordinate your effort via the product marketing department. They are the ones managing the “broadcast” communication with the customers, so your questionnaire will need to be coordinated with their schedule in order to avoid too many emails being sent to the customer in a short period of time.

Summary

If you weren’t used to working with PMMs, your first engagements may leave you a bit confused. After all – there seems to be some overlap with the product manager’s responsibilities.

However, when looking closely and understanding the goals of each of the roles – things are becoming much clearer, and it’s no longer intimidating, nor confusing.

Yes, some of the responsibilities you used to own before will be handed over to the product marketing department. However, it’s only because your customer base is becoming bigger and the business is becoming healthier. So overall, this is good news.

The so-called ‘lost responsibilities’ will be offset by an increased focus on your current duties due to the growing workload, ensuring that your role remains highly impactful.

The key takeaway is that your relationship with the product marketing department is vital to your product’s success. To achieve this, it’s essential to foster a strong, long-term partnership with your PMM, rather than getting caught up in power dynamics.

Good luck!