What does a product marketer do, in theory and in practice?

Three places where the absence shows

Mathieu opens his part of the talk by asking the room what a company without product marketing looks like, then sorts the answers into three families: the design of the product, the go-to-market, and the alignment between teams.

On design, product managers rarely have time for market research. They have discovery and delivery to run. Discovery then centres on users: there is a pain, there is a solution, and sometimes nobody behind it ready to pay. On the go-to-market, the price is often set between leadership and sales, without a real link to what competitors do or might do next. On alignment, marketing, sales and customer success understand the product and its features in different ways, and nobody has the time to dig into what each feature means for a buyer.

Users and buyers are not the same people

A distinction runs through the talk: in B2B, the buyer is sometimes a user, but the user is rarely the buyer. The product manager knows the user deeply; the product marketer’s starting point is the buyer, the market and the competition. The two roles form a pair, and in some organisations a market insight team carries part of the research.

The scope of the role

Mathieu then presents the product marketing framework he built at Thiga, read as a cycle. It starts with understanding: the market, the competition and the buyer. It continues with shaping the product alongside the product manager: pushing the right features, influencing the roadmap and building a strong positioning, which he defines as how a company is recognised as the most relevant player to deliver a unique value to a customer.

Pricing comes next. It is not always in the product marketer’s scope: revenue leaders or sales may own it. His advice is to contribute either way, not with fixed convictions but with everything known about the market and the competition. Then messaging: turning what is known about buyers, product and positioning into a message strong enough to convince them, which product managers rarely have the time to write. Launch, enablement and business metrics such as lifetime value, acquisition cost and recurring revenue complete the scope.

In practice: a new offer at MailinBlack

Cassie Leroux, then head of products at MailinBlack, an email security company, takes the second half with a real case. She describes how the team turned part of an existing product into a standalone offer: positioning it in the range, choosing what to charge for and how prices decrease with volume, training the teams who sell it and deliver it, and adapting the product so the new offer could be bought on its own. Some steps were skipped or kept light, which is the point of the session: the theory is a checklist to adapt, not a sequence to follow in full.

The questions from the floor

The Q&A covers the questions every product team asks about the role. How a smaller, more expensive player can still win against a much larger competitor by finding where the leader is weak. Whether a product manager can also carry product marketing, and what gets neglected when they do. How to measure a product marketer’s work. Whether internal products need product marketing at all. Where the function should report, a question the speakers answer with the same caution: it depends on the company and the people. And when to hire the first product marketer, usually as a company approaches forty to fifty people.

How this maps to the twelve disciplines

The talk’s starting point, a team solving a pain for which no buyer will pay, is the gap between Map the Terrain and Know Who’s Paying: someone signs, someone recommends, someone blocks. Shaping the product with a strong positioning and an informed price is Own Your Unfair Advantage and Design Your Revenue.

Four years later, the written version of the same questions is in what product marketing actually is and when to hire your first product marketing manager.