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 marketing, I felt a lot closer and in sync with my channel and creative partners. On the other hand, when I became part of the product team, I got more involved in product strategy and roadmap discussions. I think the choice comes down to where your company expects product marketing to lean more into - product work or marketing communications work.

To be clear, Square’s model is not product marketing reporting to product management. We have more of a General Manager model and view product management, product marketing, design, engineering, and data science as the 5 disciplines that make up a full-stack product team. I personally really enjoy this setup. It fosters that mindset of owning your product and its outcome.

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 enablement, pricing and packaging, competitor and market research. If PMMs are reporting into product, these other functions can become deprioritized.

Further, while the PM / PMM relationship is most important, a close second is the relationship with the rest of the marketing team and sales. Sitting in the Product team pushes PMMs further away from other crucial partners and makes it harder to build trust and credibility with those teams.

But, this isn't always the case at smaller companies. In some smaller companies having PMM within the Product team can help streamline launches, roadmap planning, as well as competitor/market research. Typically smaller companies have marketing teams focused on growth and performance marketing only, two functions which are far removed from PMM. As such it can often be tough to align the goals and targets of a Marketing team in a smaller company with that off a PMM. I want to be clear, I'm not saying this is a one-size fits all and there are plenty of smaller companies where it absolutely makes sense for PMM to report into Marketing. 

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.