AMA: Box Vice President Product Marketing, Jon Rooney on Product Marketing vs Product Management

In order to be a partner to PM, rather than a support function, PMM has to clearly establish a few fundamental things: Clear swim lanes with PM in terms of ownership and deliverables. In general, PM owns what to build and why (backlog and roadmap) and then all the engineering cat herding to get the bits (not the marketing) out the door. In general, PMM owns the messaging, positioning and GTM cat herding ("we need to reach these people with this message to get them to do these things") informed b ...Read More

The critical points of collaboration between product marketing and product management are, using the example of a product launch - which is probably the most common interaction, are as follows: Doing product strategy development and ideation - PMM should at least be in the room for the basic hypotheses around "let's go solve these problems for these customers which we can do better than these competitors for these reasons" - this is critical context and The next point of collaboration is when th ...Read More

Whether PM provides this or, as we've done in my teams, PMM works with PM to codify/confirm - the following iss the primary handoff from PM to PMM: Problem statement What is the pain point that customers have today that we are solving?   Describe it?   How does this impact their business? Customer awareness of the problem Do customers know that they have this pain point?   How do they know?   Who in the business knows about it (persona - level, title, function)?   Who experiences this pain point ...Read More

I'm a firm believer that, as a GTM function, product marketing should sit in marketing, whereas Product Management sits with Product/Product Development. While PMM needs a strong partnership with PM and, in particular, get valuable inputs around core product positioning from PM, PMM's #1 stakeholder should always be sales. The core contributions from PMM, including providing guidance around "we need to reach this audience with this message to get them to do these things" should be in the service ...Read More

The most effective way I've found to credibly push back on product for anything, including launching something that might not be fully baked (which happens all the time everywhere) is to anchor your perspective in deep customer insights and sales feedback that you gathered and synthesized first-hand. If there was a Beta - was there customer-centric exit criteria that was met? Did any Beta customers vote with their wallet in any way after using the product (expansion, renewal, etc)? Are there hap ...Read More