1.1 What is Product Marketing?

Product Marketing is one of those disciplines that’s easier to describe than define. Everyone in the business benefits from it. Almost nobody agrees on exactly what it is.

Here’s my take, and of course it’s a biased one, I am after all a PMM, this is both self-serving and from that viewpoint. You can agree or disagree, and I’d be disappointed if you concur with everything written here!

PMM sits at the intersection of three functions: Product, Sales, and Marketing. It’s the connective tissue that holds them together, translating what’s being built into language that buyers understand, and translating who customers are and what buyers need back into language that shapes what gets built. Remove PMM from that Venn Diagram and the three circles stop talking to each other. Maybe not immediately. But they will.

The Three Core Accountabilities

Most of what a PMM does falls into one of three areas:

Influence the product roadmap. Key word: influence. PMM doesn’t own the roadmap, that’s Product’s domain. But PMM brings a unique set of inputs: market signals, competitive intelligence, win/loss patterns, customer feedback distilled into themes. The PMM who does this well becomes one of the most trusted voices in product investment decisions.

Create the market narrative. This one is wholly owned by PMM. The long-form story, why this product exists, who it’s for, what value it delivers, how it’s different from everything else available, that’s PMM. Everything downstream, from pitch decks to blog posts to sales battlecards, flows from this narrative.

Orchestrate key workstreams. A PMM is not a PMO. But PMM is the natural orchestrator of two critical cross-functional processes: roadmap communication and product launches. The difference between a clean launch and a chaotic one is almost always whether there was a PMM in the room when key decisions were made.

When Do You Need PMM?

There’s a real and valid state of “not ready yet.” In the earliest stages of a company, before you have something you want to sell or that others want to adopt, product marketing has little value. You don’t need a narrative before you have a product worth narrating. (side note: I have a working thesis that PMM can also be of high value in storytelling in the pre-funding stage, but that’s a topic for another day).

But once you have product market fit signal, the sooner you engage a PMM the better. It takes time to listen to the business, understand the dynamics, and establish the frameworks. A PMM dropped into a company mid-flight with no context is a PMM who’ll spend their first three months catching up.

And one more thing worth saying plainly: don’t establish PMM and then not let them do their job. The Venn Diagram only works if all three circles: Product, Sales, and Marketing, are willing to afford a PMM the access and influence the role requires. A PMM with no seat at the table is just a very expensive action taker.

For a deeper look at the PMM fundamentals, read the original post: PMM Fundamentals →