Product Management Vs. Product Marketing

The most successful organizations have a split between product management and product marketing. They have people who support sales and others who set product direction. Both talk to customers every day, but the conversations are very different. In the end they work together, of course. The work of each feeds into the other. But in the end, the mission of one is to bring the message from the market in, and the mission of the other is to get the message out.

It's different wherever you go. Sometimes product managers are part of the Marketing department, sometimes they are part of Development. Sometimes their primary job is developing products and sometimes it is helping sell them. Sometimes they are called product managers and sometimes product marketing managers.

There's little consistency in naming or responsibility, but there is one role that must be present if the company wants to succeed long term.

Organizations need marketing people who know the product and can support sales activities with expertise, demos, collateral, website copy, white papers and so on. But the conversations they have with customers are colored by their mission to help sell. That mission makes it hard to sit down and just have a discussion about a customer's business - and then move on.

To develop the insights about market problems needed for new product development, a product manager must step away from what the company has to sell today and engage with customers about their business and its problems. They must do this over and over again until patterns emerge. Then they must find ways (surveys, analyst reports, etc.) to quantify those patterns to size and target the right market opportunities. That's the other half of the messaging cycle, and the critical one to developing new solutions that respond to the market's needs.