AMA: GitHub Senior Director of Product Management, Julian Dunn on Product Management Vs Product Marketing

I always start with roles & responsibilities. What is it that PM will be chiefly responsible for versus PMM? Starting with Pragmatic Institute's framework and agreeing to who will lead each activity is a good way to kick this off. Overall, I do tend to think of PMM as PM's single route to market. It's on PM to do the research ("customer development") and work with engineering & design to build the right thing, including the right scope to be sufficiently valuable. Now assuming the product has product/solution fit, achieving go-to-market success is largely on PMM. That includes the ability of sales to sell it, the clarity of supporting materials like data sheets & the website, and clear positioning and messaging that underpins all of it. At a smaller company, effective collaboration between PM & PMM is going to be based more on personalities rather than responsibilities, since everyone wears so many different hats in a startup. Nevertheless, having an informal conversation about who is going to do what, and checking in periodically on how it's going, will help avoid friction in the long run.

This is a great question. I've transitioned from PM to PMM and back again, so I can give you my perspective on both. The biggest challenges for anyone moving into PM, whether that be from PMM or other roles, are the following: * deeply understanding the domain; * leading by influence; and * being comfortable with high levels of ambiguity. (And, of course, the ability to make good judgment calls on top of all that.) For PMMs specifically, particularly those without a technical background, the first area is going to be the one that's most challenging. You can't be successful at leading by influence if you don't deeply understand the product & customers and can convey the nuances of these elements to your engineering and design counterparts. Let's be honest: In marketing, you can sometimes get away with hand-waving (PMMs have often done it to cover for product shortcomings!) In PM, this simply won't fly. You can't BS your customers or your R&D teams. For PMs looking to move into PMM: I actually wish this was a more "acceptable" career path, or that PMs could do a stint in PMM and then come back again, because knowing how to position a product and working with the rest of the company to take it to market is an incredibly critical skill that I believe makes product managers better at their jobs. Unfortunately, the current industry perception of PMM is that it's a lesser role than PM. The recent e-book from the Product Marketing Alliance, Product Marketing Misunderstood, essentially states this flat out. It's very difficult to get back into PM once you've made the move to "marketing" which is often perceived as a fluffy department by R&D teams. That being said, Product Marketing Misunderstood holds as its central thesis the notion that the CMO of the future will come from PMM rather than demand generation, which, if it holds water, bodes well for the PM-cum-PMM who wants to rise in their career. Just bear in mind that, as you become more senior as a PMM, you will increasingly need to interface with marketing functions (such as demand generation, events, field marketing, partner marketing) that may not interest you at all. If you're a PM considering making the move into PMM, you should familiarize yourself with all the aspects of marketing (I even have a blog post about this), assess the maturity of those functions at your company if you're planning to make a lateral move, and then decide.

As early as possible! I pull in product marketing as soon I have a good understanding of the problem statement and its benefits to customers. Typically the artifact we'll share at this point is a draft of a PR/FAQ. If you're not familiar with this term, it's a practice taken from Amazon, where they start feature or product development by authoring a strawman press release (PR) that a customer could conceivably read and understand the value proposition of the product. Having PMM's eyes on this early ensures that PMs aren't too inward-facing or talking about too much technical mumbo-jumbo that obscures the nature of the problem. Plus, it gives PMM a good sense of the assets they'll need to update or create in order to support the feature when it gets released. The FAQ portion of the document is something we'll add to as development progresses. But it's important to get PMM's feedback on the PR portion as soon as practical.

This is a popular question and one that I've struggled with a lot in my years doing both PM and PMM. Most answers I've seen tend to weasel out of a strong point of view ("it depends!") but I am going to go out on a limb and firmly state that I believe product marketing should report into marketing. Here are a couple of reasons why. 1. It sets up a nice, healthy tension between two functions at the executive level. Too often, product executives complain that marketing (that would be the traditional office of the CMO without product marketing) is doing a poor job at pitching the product. But without product marketing sitting under marketing, that CMO has insufficient leverage to challenge the product roadmap or the value propositions of products or features. Traditional marketers often don't understand the product in enough depth to call out product management on BS. Putting PMM in marketing ensures that they do. 2. It creates closer alignment with other marketing functions like demand generation, brand and corporate marketing. Customers expect your brand and products to speak with one voice. If product marketing is off on an island, saying and doing things that don't connect to the overall company narrative, it'll be a disjointed experience. Putting product marketing under the marketing umbrella creates harmony between the corporate positioning/messaging and product positioning/messaging, as well as forcing a demand generation organization to align its activities to the messages and calls-to-action that product marketing wants to drive. No more wasting money on digital display ads that don't drive a product outcome! 3. Better access to budget. Product marketing sitting under product ("R&D" on the income statement) will get starved for resources as compared to the lions share of expenditures in R&D, which is engineering and product management salaries. Marketing dollars are generally easier to come by as they're a) on a separate line item on the income statement ("S&M" or sales/marketing) and b) there is typically both a program budget and a salary budget in marketing, which means that if PMM wants to push demand generation/events/field marketing to run impactful campaigns they think will move the needle, those dollars are more readily available. I've started to notice a trend of organizations changing reporting lines to put PMM under marketing and I think it's a good thing.

I think "share" is the right term to use here. I've heard marketing teams claim that only they represent the voice of the customer, which is obviously not true. There are many groups in a company that interact with customers and listen to their voices. It's a PM's eternal challenge to figure out which voices are the ones they should weigh more heavily and which ones less! I would say that PMs tend to engage deeply with a small proportion of the customer base and get a certain perspective that is then balanced by the views that PMM gains by interacting with the broader market using different instruments. For example, PMMs will gain particular viewpoints when they interact with analysts, or conduct win/loss analysis, that are often distinct from what PMs will hear from working with users. Good PMMs also tend to have a clearer view of the voice of the economic buyer in B2B software, as PMs tend to work with users more. Lastly, I want to address the topic of customer feedback. Most successful companies tend to have some kind of customer feedback system where feature requests and other general feedback go. This kind of information is a goldmine representing the voice of the customer, provided there is someone -- usually a product operations function -- curating the data and summarizing common patterns for both PM and PMM. Without this, the feedback system is just noise and we lose the incredible valuable information buried in it.

I used to be very much on the side of "PMM should own pricing" but I will now caveat this with a couple considerations. First off, though, I think at a smaller company, say a startup where you're the only PMM, PMM should still own pricing. That's because there's both a strategic ("how should we set our suggested retail prices and package the product?") and tactical ("how much should we allow our reps to discount the product and on what basis?") element to pricing. At smaller companies, I've seen more problems with the latter. Failure to set acceptable discount levels and enforce them with the sales team creates the wrong kind of working relationship with them and leads to a lot of "special" deals that you'll end up having to unwind later when your product is successful. ("What do you mean $EARLY_CUSTOMER from 5 years ago is only paying $5/seat/year? They have 80,000 seats now and we can't raise our prices that dramatically!") At a larger company, my answer is "it depends who is capable of taking a rigorous approach to pricing and packaging" including conducting both quantitative and qualitative research on how products should be priced and packaged (P&P). If this sounds a lot like product management, it is. That doesn't necessarily mean I think P&P should sit under PM, however. P&P is such a specialized skillset that works in a domain so distinct from traditional PM that I've started to see companies start to create VP/Senior Director of Pricing roles. These roles often roll up to a Chief Product Officer (CPO), but not always; particularly with the rise of growth marketing and the renewed hype around product-led growth (PLG), sometimes it's more effective for these folks to sit in marketing. My default choice would be to put P&P in product marketing, because experimenting with packaging and pricing is a job better left to the go-to-market side of the house.

It depends on what your background is. If you have a background in traditional marketing, it's going to be easier to get into product marketing by learning both the domain and the product in-depth. The advantage of coming from marketing is that you already know what a demand generation organization needs from product marketing in order to effectively articulate the product and fill the funnel. It's easier to get into product management if you come from a technical background such as engineering or design, but also including roles like technical support, customer success architect, or professional services consultant. You'll need to pick up the basics of how to develop and articulate strategy as well as shifting to more long-term thinking.

In general, PM KPIs tend to be further down-funnel and PMM KPIs are further up-funnel. PM's KPIs are about utilization / adoption of products or features, including repeat usage ("stickiness" or "MAUs/DAUs"). PMM's KPIs are about clarity & effectiveness of messaging and positioning, which you can measure with metrics like message pull-through on launches, inclusion in analyst reports, progression through stages in the customer's consideration journey particularly the later ones, etc.

As a PMM, I was always conducting my own wide-ranging research about competitors and market dynamics (competitive and market intelligence) and providing this to PM. This included reading a lot of analyst reports, both about our category and adjacent categories, meeting with industry analysts to conduct inquiries on pressing questions of interest, keeping up on industry news, and understanding what trends are likely to impact the product and category. Finally, distilling this down to both proactive recommendations (where I would send unprompted suggestions to the product team) and reactive input (where I would comment on their product proposals and bring in this information) is how I would add value. As a director of PM now, I have come to expect the same of my peers in PMM, as they well know. :-) The PMM's job in this regard is generally to widen the aperture of PM. PM can often get trapped inside a very myopic worldview, where they are only building products for the customers or markets that exist today. In the worst case, PM can become a feature factory, literally taking customer orders for enhancements and just building those. PMM's job is to push PM to expand their horizon. In sum: Adequate PMMs help market horizon one products. Great PMMs help product management build horizon two and horizon three products.