How do you introduce Product Marketing functionality in an organization that lacks the relationship with Product Management?

As a product marketer, your relationship with Product is one of, if not the most, critical ones to build. If you find yourself in an organization where there isn't an existing relationship, I've found it helpful to build the initial connection both formally and informally.

Because product marketing as a craft covers a lot of different functions—from market sizing to customer interviews to growth campaigns—it's often defined differently across companies. As a result, your product team may not have the same starting point for how to think about the PMM function, how they'll work with you, and what outputs and outcomes they can expect from you. It sounds super basic, but having a clear (and concise) doc or deck that walks through how you've structured the PMM discipline, key functions and capabilities, top priorities, etc is helpful in more formally introducing and establishing the craft.

On the other end, strong relationships require trust. Trust is built in many ways, but some of the best ways to do it are through a combination of close alignment (which often happens informally in hallway conversations or as you work through problems together) and strong, collaborative execution. This can mean spinning up a quick project to bring in audience/market insights that can help unblock roadmap or GTM decisions. Or it could be planning and hosting a scrappy devcon to bring the product team closer with the audience to drive deeper engagement and capture user feedback.

There's a couple of tactical ways in which you can start building trust with PMs. It all starts with knowing the product. I would get to know the product intimately by using the product and talking to customers to understand how they are using it. Armed with this knowledge, I would offer these insights to PMs and give them ideas of what are the features that customers love, point out where there might be product confusion/friction, and offer up ideas based on asks/requests for new features or functionalities (use customer quotes and be specific about your source). Another tactical way is to be proactive about doing the competitive research and then bringing those insights to your PMs on what new products / features your competitors have launched.

By adding value in these ways, you can start to build relationship and rapport with PMs so that they'll start relying on you as a thought partner to brainstorm, ideate and plan what to build based on your unique POV of customer wants/needs and market dynamics.