Ask three people in a growing software company what the product does and you will get three answers. The founder tells the story of why the company exists. The sales team tells the story that closed last quarter’s biggest deal. The product team walks you through the latest release.
Each version is true. Each one lives in its own deck, and the customer hears all three, sometimes in the same week.
Nobody decided this. It happened anyway, and it is the most common form of product marketing I meet.
Every company does product marketing, usually by accident
Product marketing exists in every company that sells a product, whether or not anyone holds the title. Someone chooses which customers to chase. Someone sets the price, often once and never again. Someone decides what a release means for the market. Someone writes the pitch sales will actually use. Someone checks whether customers adopted what was launched. The work gets done, in fragments, by people whose real job is something else.
When everybody does a little product marketing, nobody necessarily owns the whole system. The fragments drift apart, and the business pays for the drift. Deals stall because the buyer cannot tell what makes you different from doing nothing. Features ship and nobody adopts them, because the people who were supposed to explain them heard about the release the day before. Discounts stand in for a value story nobody wrote.
In my experience, the first visible symptom is almost always the same: three pitch decks for one product, and a sales team that has quietly stopped trusting all of them.
The problem is not that too many people care about product marketing. The problem is that nobody has the mandate to connect the pieces.
A definition you can defend
Product marketing is the function that turns a product into a business. It connects what you build to the market you sell into, and the promise you make to the value customers understand and to the revenue you collect.
I like to call it the business conscience of the product. Not because product marketers are the only people who care about business, but because the function should keep asking the questions that are easy to postpone:
- Who will pay for this?
- Why would they choose us over the status quo?
- What are we asking them to believe?
- What would make adoption difficult?
- How will we know it worked?
The idea is older than software. On 13 May 1931, a young Procter & Gamble employee named Neil McElroy wrote a three-page memo asking for people who would each be accountable for one brand, from top to bottom: study its past advertising and promotional history, go and see the territory first-hand, find the weakness, build the plan to fix it, follow it through to the very finish and keep the records the memo, read at ninety by Ken Norton (opens in a new tab). Product marketing in software inherits that idea, with one complication McElroy never had: the product changes every sprint, so the work never stops.
If the definition still feels fuzzy, you are in good company. When the Product Marketing Alliance asked product marketers whether other teams and stakeholders understood what product marketing does, only 4% said that was totally true State of Product Marketing 2021 (opens in a new tab). The people doing the job struggle to make it legible. That is a reason to define it sharply, and to define it by what it changes in the business rather than by the documents it produces.
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In this article2 of 7 read
- Read:Every company does product marketing, usually by accident
- Read:A definition you can defend
- Locked:What product marketing is not
- Locked:Where the function should sit
- Locked:Four parts, twelve disciplinesTool
- Locked:AI makes the fragments cheaper, not the system clearer
- Locked:How to tell a strong function from a weak one in one meeting
