Should product marketing report into Product management or Marketing?

Product Management and Product Marketing are two sides of the same coin. Organizationally there are benefits to both approaches. As a product manager, I have had product marketers on my team, and as a product marketer, I have reported into the Head of Marketing as well.  This decision is dependent on what is a bigger problem - product marketer not having a deep understand of the product due to product complexity, lack of documentation or exposure OR is it around go-to-market where product market ...Read More

While there are benefits to both, judging from my experience, I believe PMM reporting into Marketing is more effective. Reporting into makreting creates stronger ties between PMM and the revenue organziation (marketing, sales, operations, etc.) and can therefore lead to more buy-in from those stakeholders during launch. Reporting into marketing positions you as a core partner in the revenue org. You have greater flexibility to "lead" the revenue org through launches and strategy shifts, while th ...Read More

The more technical your product and complex your use cases, i.e. selling to enterprise customers, then PMM can report into Product. This is what we do at Zuora and other companies I’ve worked at. The less technical the product and the less complex your use cases, i.e. selling to SMB/MM customers, then PMM can report into Marketing. This is what we did at my prior companies too.When PMMs need to understand complex use cases and technical products they have more air to cover and it’s better to hav ...Read More

I firmly believe that Product Marketing should report into the Marketing org for one central reason: PMM is a communications-driven role requiring the ability to effectively craft and convey messages across all mediums. While we need to have a strong understanding of our customers, what problems they're trying to solve and how our products (and our competitors' products) attempt to solve those problems down to considerable technical depth, our job isn't to prioritize backlog, create user stories ...Read More

I have been in marketing and product org -- both places and see pros and cons for both. It all depends on the strength of the PM team and their skills.  > If PM team is strong enough to own end-to-end product responsibilities including how to build for new verticals etc, -- then PMM under marketing would well. This gives lots of advantages as highlight above by others - budget, go-to-market, campaign alignment. The normal human behavior of "being in the same tribe" :-). also because most mark ...Read More

This depends on the company and what it needs the role of product marketing to be. This boils down to: what gap is the company trying to fill? I'll use my role as an example, and for context, Full Circle Insights is a six year old startup with a sort of technical product aimed at enterprises/businesses. I sit in Marketing (and I would be reluctant to join a PMM team that sits under Product due to my desire to drive growth and demand gen activities). My company's main objective is to drive growth ...Read More

I've reported into both in my career and the best I can come up with is "it depends". As an overall philosophy, I would generally prefer to report into marketing, because it creates the right level of healthy conflict between the CMO and CPO (Chief Product Officer or SVP Product) that you need in order to develop a good product strategy and go-to-market in tandem. Reporting into product often means you end up just as a support function to product managers and cannot influence strategy. PMs throw ...Read More

I personally think Product Marketing should report into Marketing with the head of the whole product marketing function reporting directly to the CMO. This is exactly how we’re organized at Zendesk and I’ve found this reporting structure seems to work well for our team. I believe it’s because even though our work sits in the middle of Marketing, Product and Sales, our greatest number of direct stakeholders and partner teams are in Marketing. At least in my experience, I find there are so many ot ...Read More

I’ve not personally sat on a product team (so I’m admittedly biased.) But I would vote for it to live in marketing. Here’s why - the essential functions of these teams are different: Product Team - exists to build great products  Marketing Team - exists to communicate the value of the product to market and drive adoption   Narvar is a smaller (sub 200 employees) B2B SaaS company. This division of responsibility has been organic and feels pretty obvious.   With larger companies, it can get more n ...Read More

Based on some research we did (admittendly small sample size), we found that 2/3 report to CMO / VP Marketing and only ~10% to Product. Source: A New Definition of Product Marketing At this stage unfortunately there isn't enough executive ownership of the Product Marketing function, but in future I hope it reports to either VP of Product Marketing or VP Product. This is because Product is now becoming about growth and needs to have a cross-functional team which includes marketing.  Our folks at ...Read More