What do most product marketers get wrong?

While an important part of product marketing is aligning with product goals and plans, most product marketers don’t spend enough time developing marketing-led strategies. I see a lot of PMMs that rely on product for direction, but the best marketing teams develop narratives that are out in front of the product, implement marketing levers that bring that messaging to life, and ultimately guide product direction. 

For example, our marketing team noticed that customers were increasingly viewing and using our increasingly multi-product portfolio as a platform, instead of distinct product lines which were how they appeared in-product. As a result, our team developed a new portfolio brand that could help bring together our products under one unified umbrella — this helped reduce customer acquisition costs, streamline marketing programs, grow adoption through cross-sell, and lay the breadcrumbs for a future platform product. Had we waited for product to build that platform first, we would have incurred compounding marketing debt and missed the opportunity to give product valuable insights about packaging and use cases.