Product Management vs Product Marketing

I work at Intercom where Product Managers where closely with Product Marketing Manager ('PMM'). The four main areas that our PMMs cover are: * Customer and marketing insight - Like PMs, our PMMs want to be as close to the customer and the market as possible. PMMs represent the voice of the customer internally. * Product strategy - Whilst the PM is ultimately accountable for the creation and execution of the product strategy, PMMs play an important role in informing the product strategy and roadmap. * Product positionong and messaging - PMMs develop product positioning and ...

Product Management primarily partners with engineering. They are responsible for what we build, and why we built it. Product Marketing is responsibile for how we position these products to the customers. While product management is also responsible for the positioning, they are looking at it as part of the vision and decision making.

PMs should always lead voice of the customer (VoC) programs While PMMs need to have their ear close to the ground when it comes to customer feedback, it's ultimately the PM who will use the feedback to make product decisions. Additionally, PMs should never be in a situation where product feedback is "second-hand" or being prioritized by someone who doesn't own the roadmap.

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 differ...

* It’s a good idea to try internal transfer if you want to transition from PMM to PM, or vice versa. Learning the craft of a new discipline is not easy. You are more likely to set yourself up for success if you minimize other variables like new company, new product, new team. * Anchor on your strength. There are many transferable skills between the two disciplines, e.g., customer discovery, data analytics, communication and influencing skills. Leverage your strength in the new role and you will find it easier to get early wins and build confidence in yourself. * But def...

I love this question since I recently made the PMM to PM transition! 1. Focus on transferrable skills. Three of the most important PM skills include: communication, leading through influence, and problem solving. PMMs looking to transfer into a PM role should ensure they are strong in all three. 2. Leverage institutional knowledge. It's much easier to transition from PMM to PM in your current company than applying to a new position in a different company. In your existing PMM role you are likely to know all the relevant stakeholders, have product knowledge, and un...

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 lea...

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 i...

It’s a joint decision between product management and product marketing at Square. In general our PMMs tend to have more ownership here. They will lead competitive analysis and commission qual/ quant research to inform pricing decisions. That said, from what I observed, when you zoom into the specific PM/ PMM pair, it really comes down to whoever has the expertise and the respect from the team to make the right call.

Pricing and packaging is typically a PMM function. 1. P&P is typically a business decision. In general, PMMs own business and go-to-market decisions, while PMs own the user experience and the product roadmap. And P&P falls into the former.  2. Product should have a perspective on which features to build. Pricing and packaging refreshes typically happen because the composition of your existing product has changed materially (i.e. a lot of new features have been launched, new acquisitions, etc). As such PMs will always have a role to play in determining how certain ...

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 wit...

Ha, organizational design questions are always the fun ones. :) These types of questions don’t have a right or wrong answer. Each design will have its pros and cons and it’s all about what you are trying to optimize. When I started in product marketing at Square, we reported into marketing. About 8 months later, we got spun off marketing and reported into product GMs. While I didn’t think that changed how I did my job - reflecting on the experience - I did feel some differences. While I was in marketing, I felt a lot closer and in sync with my channel and creative partners. On the other h...

Usually Marketing, but in some smaller companies Product. PMs and PMMs will almost always have very close relationships (and if you don't then that's a problem). So, it usually doesn't matter which organization PMM reports into. However, at larger companies there can be some misalignment of priorities if PMMs report into the product management team. PMM teams that report into product become too narrowly focused on launches. PMMs typically cover a wide range of responsibilities, beyond just features. For examples, PMMs at Zendesk work on customer stories, industry solutions, sales enableme...

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 ...

Good question. I view product management and product marketing as close partners since we co-own the strategy and business outcome. Cannot say I have best practices, rather some guiding principles of how I would like to see us work together. 1. Involve each other early. I hate the model where the product team does a hard handoff to product marketing only when the product/ feature is ready to launch. PM, PMM, as well as other disciplines like Design, Engineering, and Data Science all bring unique perspectives to problem solving. You are much better off involving each other ...

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 o...

From the very beginning and throughout the development process. This is very much related to the previous question. I will try to bring to life how the process works on the Square teams. * For any new feature development, we hold a kickoff/ problem alignment with PM, PMM, Design, Eng and Data Science. The goal is to align on the customer problem, generate hypotheses, identify open questions that need further investigation. From there, PM, PMM, and Design may divide and conquer customer research tasks. * Once the team is aligned on this is the right problem to solve and the r...

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 ...

Both roles are quite tough to get into without experience, but PM is marginally easier. 1. Companies will typically have more PMs than PMMs. The PMM to PM ratio is roughly 1:4. Even if the company prioritizes PMM roles, it's rare that the ratio will get higher than 1:2. 2. There are fewer PMM roles in the industry. Just doing a quick search on LinkedIn shows that there are about ~100k open PMM roles, while there are about ~280k open PM roles.  3. PMs typically get hired first. Most companies will start with PMs. This is unsurprising since the goal at early stage comp...

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 pro...