In a world where AI has reached a level of maturity that enables agentic workflows to be trusted and actively used to drive efficiency and effectiveness in business processes, it is incumbent on us to assess what an AI-first business can deliver. Product Marketing as a discipline is ready for a revolution. Burdened by an overwhelming volume of tasks, constant underinvestment, and predictable resourcing constraints, the opportunity presented by AI can be ignored at our own peril. We either reinvent ourselves, or we will be reinvented.
This post explores what the future state of a Product Marketing team looks like through the lens of moving beyond simply being a consumer of AI to a discipline that is AI-First by design and definition.
Assumptions
There is no durable method by which we simply jump from our current state to a utopic world of agentic AI workflows driven by hyper-efficient humans with the requisite knowledge and skills. That will be a generational journey with a few step-changes along the way. We can, though, define the end state at the completion of that journey, with 3 key assumptions.
- Empowerment. We have access to the AI tools we need.
- Efficacy. We have agentic AI workflows in place for daily tasks.
- Enablement. We have the AI proficiency level required in our people.
On the assumption that we have these requisites in place, we can model the team structure and capacity requirements.
Accountabilities
Before we define a team structure, let’s first capture the functions of product marketing and the accountabilities the business expects of the team. These can and do vary by company and team, I have captured what I’ve seen as the most common elements for this thought exercise.
- Delivery of emotive value and outcome-focused product content to drive customer desire and trust.
- Customer and technology-based proof points and evidence to inspire confidence and provide decision validation.
- Market intelligence and insights that fuel innovation, influence investment decisions, and aid in honing messaging to improve win rates.
- Coordinating a community of champions across external validators and peer-driven practitioner sentiment.
- Enablement of marketing campaigns and sales plays to drive effective, efficient pipeline generation and opportunity progression toward revenue closure.
- Providing data and anecdotal evidence to inform product investments and business planning aspects such and pricing, SKU’s and packaging.
Team Structure
The new world of an AI-First product marketing function offers an opportunity to reimagine both the structure and scope of roles. With access to the needed tools, established agentic workflows, and the knowledge to thrive in this environment, we can construct a structure that not only is incredibly efficient and effective, but can also continue to adjust and adapt in a landscape that will continue to evolve at a pace.
Based on the need to deliver on the above accountabilities, I propose that there are 5 groupings of capability and focus within the team (in a fully formed group, think of this as an end state more than a blueprint to target out of the gate).
The atomic groups are:
- Intelligence: This group is responsible for understanding the market needs and the competitive landscape.
- Influence: This group is responsible for running the program that builds trust and influence with critical-scale audiences among analysts, influencers, and practitioners.
- Messaging: This group is responsible for crafting value-based messaging for the products and solutions available in the product portfolio across the content journey from first discovery through to confirming proof points.
- Advocacy: This group is responsible for the program that builds external advocacy across customer, partner, and community champions.
- Ecosystem: This group serves as the scale function, aggregating and transforming content for broad use across marketing campaigns, sales plays, and partner marketing, prioritizing inputs to product investments, and influencing business planning decisions.
Depending on the company’s maturity, market size, product portfolio, and business priorities, these groups will vary in capacity needs and could be individual teams with leaders, or conjoined for efficiency and span of control.
Agentic Workflows
I’ve been mulling this for a while, and ended up with this as a Top 10 Starter list. There will be more, way more, and different … you quite likely have a completely different list and ideas, which only reinforces the opportunity! These are just a set of examples for how an AI-First PMM team could leverage agentic workflows, reducing the “execution tax” of PMM while still ensuring that the Human is ultimately in control.
Intelligence Group
Workflow: Continuously monitor competitor comms, news, and social sentiment.
Action: When a significant update is detected, it ingests the new data, updates internal battlecards, drafts a “What this means for us” internal memo, and pushes an alert to the relevant Sales communication channels.
Workflow: Ingest raw data from support tickets, win/loss reports, and sales call transcripts.
Action: Identify common and recurring customer pain points, cross-reference them against current product investments, and generate a prioritized list of “Market Asks” to influence product investments, messaging, campaigns and sales focus.
Influence Group
Workflow: Track recent publications, posts from analysts, MQ, Wave and other published materials from relevant firms.
Action: Map product capabilities and messaging to analyst themes and draft tailored messaging for review.
Messaging Group
Workflow: Ingest new PRFAQ’s, PRD’s, Specs etc along with existing content.
Action: “Interview” key persona’s from the ICP framework of the company, and simulate pitches to identify gaps, claims that lack proof points, and language that confuses.
Workflow: Ingest a long-form rich content asset as a baseline.
Action: Generate a content package that showcases the content across mediums, publishing locations and audiences. Include sample blog posts, social content, email nurture sequences, and scripts for product showcase based on product truth content.
Advocacy Group
Workflow: Monitor “Customer Success” channels and feedback for potential heroes and champions”
Action: Identify potential advocates, drafts an initial outreach email, populated with the value prop of becoming an advocate and creates a set of value and proof points based on the customers product usage and commentary seen in channels.
Workflow: Scan forums and free form content repositories for trending topics in your domain.
Action: Identify opportunities to engage, draft potential responses that align with the tone of the specific location and that align with your brands tone.
Ecosystem Group
Workflow: Triggers when a new roadmap item is approved or moves to a critical milestone.
Action: Generate a draft launch plan based on the feature’s impact, creates the necessary tasks in the team’s project management tool, and drafts the initial “Internal Readiness” announcement for Sales Enablement.
Workflow: Ingest the core messaging and content along with target verticals and industries.
Action: Transforms general product content into targeted collateral for each vertical and industry, including specific pain points, customer stories, and value outcomes delivered.
Workflow: Ingest market intelligence, ICP’s and product baseline content.
Action: Model pricing and packaging scenarios to optimize base sales and expansion and attach opportuities.
The Human Audit
And to close out, let’s remember that while these agents are doing an incredible amount of the heavy lifting, the human PMM remains the final “Source of Truth” who signs off on the emotional resonance of the output, adding real-world context and perspectives.
This was a long one, and not everything here will work in all scenarios. But hopefully there’s some food for thought!
Adam