Should product marketing report to product management or marketing?

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 m ...Read More

There’s no universally “correct” answer to whether Product Marketing should report into Product Management or Marketing. The optimal structure often depends on the expectations, scope, and maturity of the Product Marketing function within the organization. In my experience, I’ve seen Product Marketing report into both functions—and the reporting line often reflects how the role is defined. In some organizations, Product Marketing operates more tactically—focused on content creation or sales supp ...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

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 featu ...Read More