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

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 ...Read More

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 are ...Read More

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. 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 ...Read More

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 produc ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 proacti ...Read More

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 ea ...Read More

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 ...Read More