From your experience, what are some best practices for product management and product marketing to work together effectively?

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. 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 pe ...Read More

I think of product management as the hub of a wheel that’s surrounded by cross-functional spokes, and product marketing is one of the most important spokes. Both PMs and PMMs are chasing the same finish line, but they come at it from slightly different angles. PMs own the whole journey, pulling the project together, shipping on time, and proving we hit the success metrics we signed up for. PMMs drill deeper into the “why would anyone care?” side of the story. They zero in on metrics like NPS or ...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

A strong, collaborative partnership between Product Management and Product Marketing—built on continuous communication—is critical to ensuring the success of any product or feature launch. This alignment directly impacts product readiness, go-to-market execution, and long-term product adoption. Too often, product marketers are brought in only at the eleventh hour, expected to deliver a “Mardi Gras”–style launch without sufficient context or preparation. This reactive approach typically leads to ...Read More