What are the biggest frustrations you have as a product marketing manager?

One of the pillars of Product Marketing at Snow Software – where I work – is that we should “Be the glue between Marketing, Product, and Sales Enablement”.  While this sounds great, it is hard.  A rock star PMM serves the needs of these three customers equally. However, for most of us it’s really hard to have an A+ relationship with these three groups at the same time.  For most of us, if we have an A+ with Marketing, then we’re usually managing a B+ with both Product and Enablement. In my view, ...Read More

Any frustrations I have are either a reflection of my ego getting in the way, or a failure on my part to communicate expectations or demonstrate value.  Some examples: Sometimes it's frustrating when sales comes up with their own messaging, and slideware. However, if they're doing that it's because what they have isn't working, or they haven't been properly enabled, or they're not convinced of the results existing content can produce. This can actually GOOD to some extent, because you're getting ...Read More

For me right now - it's that the craft of Product Marketing isn't fully realized by both people in Product Marketing and companies. There is a pretty stark difference between someone who markets products and someone who is a product marketer. I find that people who market products are heavily focused on the top of the funnel only, which comes with a lot of content/headline writing, while product marketers are looking at the entire buying process from end to end. And while I write and produce a l ...Read More

Hiring! My big challenge right now, to quote our head of sales, is that there's not enough of me to go around. That's not meant to be self-congratulatory--when the need for your function exceeds your resources, it's a challenge and frustration! You have to be relentless in your prioritization and accept that you will not do things that people need sometimes. All the other challenges are the type that a person is lucky to have in their job. A lot of PMMs find that other leaders in the business wa ...Read More

I absolutely agree with the response above. I believe the "Craft of product marketing" is many companies is relegated to "content" but in order to product content, people don't realise that you have to first understand the industry, customer, problem, solution, why different, why now, how etc. Craft a solid messaging and positioning brief that senior leadership has also understood well enough, the message resonates and the pillars are aligned. Any good content writer / agency should be able to t ...Read More

I’m going to split my answer here because the additional question details suggest you may be feeling frustrated that PMM has become more strategic, but for me, the strategic work in product marketing is a large part of why I love the function so much :). I’m hoping I can still be helpful to you in my response if I just separate those pieces. In my experience, I’ve actually always seen the role of PMM to be quite strategic and I think that’s really driven by the function sitting at such a critica ...Read More