One of the biggest, and best, gray areas of business is Product Marketing. It’s an (undervalued) role that combines business strategy with marketing with products, and produces materials for a wide range of audiences. Product marketers serve as the ultimate translator of features, benefits, and product strategy to sales-speak, marketing-speak, business-speak, and operations-speak. The person, or team if you’re lucky, in your company’s product marketing role has to be able to work cross-functionally and clearly communicate internally and externally.
In her article “Translation Please?” Why Product Marketing plays a critical role as a translation layer, author Rebecca Geraghty simply identifies these duties of a product marketer:
- Breaking down technical concepts for sales, customers, and partners to better understand
- Framing a new feature in terms of why and how it matters (not just what it does)
- Positioning a message in context of a specific vertical, use case, or customer persona
- Or channeling market insights back to impact product roadmap
And follows by (correctly) stating:
“…product marketing has an incredible opportunity to adapt, interpret, tailor, and articulate what stakeholders need to know about the product — clearly and with impact.”
(The article is great! I would encourage you to read the entire thing.)
How is Product Marketing a Gray Area?
Product marketing is at the intersection of every single department in your company. Product marketers need to have beneficial and mutual relationships with product, technology, sales, marketing, finance, operations, and maybe most importantly, customers. Product marketers don’t just receive input from these different teams, they also need to be able to provide feedback and input back to those teams for this to all work. It’s probably the biggest gray area in business.
It Can’t Be That Complicated
I’ve read more than my share of articles, blogs, and books to know that everyone wants to simplify this role. This is a common and easy response to something, anything, in the gray areas of business. Some say its where the CEO and CMO come together and need a strategist. Others say this role is only where Product and Marketing overlap. Product marketing isn’t a two circle venn diagram. It’s the crazy five-way intersection without a traffic light. It’s the four-way stop sign next to a yield sign next to a merge sign leading to a freeway entrance. This role is inherently complicated, cross-functional, and requires someone with a broad skill set in strategy, marketing, product and operations, AND your product marketer needs to have an innate passion for growing adoption rates and market share for your products.
Product marketing isn’t a two circle venn diagram. It’s the crazy five-way intersection without a traffic light. It’s the four-way stop sign next to a yield sign next to a merge sign leading to a freeway entrance.
Why Can’t My Product Manager Do This?
Your product manager should be the expert in managing the deliverables, roadmap, and strategy of their product. They should be able to explain these goals to the business and their dev teams to get the product created. These people management, development management, and roadmap management skills are not even close to the skills needed to effectively market a product. I’m not saying product managers can’t be product marketers (or vice versa). All I’m saying is that if you want to get a product built, hire a product manager. If you want a product to sell, hire a product marketer.
If you want to get a product built, hire a product manager. If you want a product to sell, hire a product marketer.
The Greatest Gray Area of Business
In my opinion, product marketing is the greatest gray area of business. Without proper positioning, understanding of the market, clearly outlined (and audience specific) benefits and features, all you have is a product that YOU think is great. It’s black and white. With product marketing straddling every single area of your business, creating messaging, positioning, and providing feedback to the business, the product that YOU think is great becomes a product that OTHERS think is great. It is the greatest gray area of business because results of product marketing provide revenue growth, operations cost cutting, and other cost savings to the business.
I know now that I have always been a product marketer. Before I had the title, and the boss who correctly identified that that’s what I was, I thought I was a weirdo who always challenged the business in product meetings, asking questions like “Can I see the product?”, “What’s the customer benefit for this?”, and “How will our help desk support this?”. Turns out, this is exactly what a product marketer is supposed to do! Question everything, come up with clear positioning, and focus on getting the product adopted. As a certified, and experienced, Product Marketer, I’m ready to help you work through the greatest gray area of business.
Segovia Consulting 