The Thin line between Product Marketing and Product Management
Product marketing and product management are two processes that are necessary for a product’s success in terms of customer acquisition and their long-term satisfaction. Both processes are often extensions of each other with various common elements.
One of the difficulties of careers in product management and product marketing is that even experienced professionals may struggle to determine the exact boundaries of their responsibilities and the potential overlap between them.
In this article, I analyzed product management vs product marketing outlining the differences and similarities between both.
Let’s start by looking at their definitions
What is product marketing?
Product marketing, also known as product marketing management (PMM), helps ensure you build a desirable product and that your target audience is aware of it. This is done through product research, positioning, launching, and interacting with your target audience.
What is product management?
Product management is the process of building and maintaining a product based on feedback from existing users and guidance from product marketers. It involves ideation, problem-solving, roadmapping, prioritization, delivery, and analysis.
Who is a Product Manager a
Vs who is a Product Marketing Manager?
- A product manager has ultimate responsibility for the product. A product manager’s responsibilities will often include owning the product’s strategy, developing and maintaining the product roadmap, and conveying the roadmap to the development team to ensure they build the product according to plan.
- A product marketing manager’s primary responsibility is to communicate the product’s value to the market. A product marketing manager’s responsibilities could include training the sales force on how to sell the product, creating marketing materials that communicate product features, and developing the marketing tools and campaigns to attract new prospects and customers.
Key Responsibilities of a PM vs PMM
Product Manager: (Strategic Insight)
- Product Vision/Strategy/Roadmap
- Product discovery & development
- Product lifecycle management
Product Marketing Manager: (Message Creation)
- Building a Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy and execution
- Sales empowerment (B2B) and lead generation
- Communicating the product to the market
- Marketing campaigns
Product marketing vs. product management: What’s the difference?
Product managers focus their efforts on designing and improving physical or digital products. Product marketers look at that product and think about how to convey what it does to the people making up their target audience. So it's safe to say product management is about engineering, while product marketing is about consumer psychology.
Simply put a Product Manager is more concerned with the overall direction of the product through defining its strategy, vision and roadmap. While a Product Marketing Manager on the other hand would be more focused on taking the product to market -communicating its value proposition in a way that it attracts and retains customers.
"While all product teams aspire to create an elegant user experience and functionality that enables customers to intuitively “get it” after they try it, product marketers are focused on conveying the product’s value to the customer to engage, convert and retain them. Product marketers play a key role in driving awareness and trial as well as packaging the product to appeal to customers. They accomplish this by packaging a product’s features and functionality into messaging and positioning, pricing, and collateral.” — What Is Product Marketing? by Ada Chen Rekhi
Common responsibilities between PMM vs PM
The debate of product management vs marketing is difficult to settle because the roles of both are closely related and point towards a common goal — building a profitable product. Without product marketing, product management will be in the dark about their competitors' position in the market and their audience’s needs. Similarly, without management, product marketing cannot test its hypotheses.
While understanding the difference between a product marketing vs product management, it is crucial to learn about their shared responsibilities which are:
- Pricing
- Market research
- Product positioning
Both product managers and marketers work together to conduct market research, set appropriate pricing, and determine brand messaging. Who does the majority of what depends on the product, its domain, and the organizational structure.
In summary
Product managers and product marketers should be seen as complementary roles, as a team— people that can help each other out by making sure the product is evolving in a direction that makes it profitable (product marketing) and builds the product accordingly (product management) .
Culled from:
- https://link.medium.com/uJNUMKxq7Ab
- https://link.medium.com/nFQAeHCq7Ab
- https://www.productplan.com/learn/product-manager-vs-product-marketing-manager
- https://zeda.io/blog/product-marketing-vs-product-management
