PRODUCT MANAGEMENT AND MARKETING
Aligning ‘product management’ and ‘product marketing’ efforts
Product management and marketing are different functions that need to partner and align if they are to achieve product-market-fit and develop successful go-to-market strategies
Definition of roles and responsibilities
Product managers, in short, create value by building compelling products. They manage the product life-cycle by developing customers and defining appropriate product strategies and roadmaps.
Product marketers, communicate value by developing the right go-to-market strategies and plans. For this, product marketers will need to focus on content, messaging, targeting, positioning, pricing, distribution, and launch strategies.
Both product managers and marketers need to work effectively, ‘together’, in order to deliver the desired customer experience. For this to happen, product managers and marketers spend shared time on product launches, market and customer research, competitive analysis, and sales enablement.
There is also a difference between product marketing and traditional marketing. While product marketing is a strategic role that aims to communicate value through market segmentation, user persona definition, content positioning and delivery, and sales playbook development, traditional marketing focuses on tactics and operations that deliver the message through field marketing, branding, sales and business development, and other demand generation efforts.
Put simply, product marketing creates ammunition and defines targets for marketers to execute upon.
The importance of internal alignment
No matter how great a product is, if product management and marketing teams are misaligned, then go-to-market plans will fail as they will miss targets and confuse customers. Moreover, when teams fail due to internal misalignment, internal conflicts tend to arise, resulting in lost morale, employee departures, and growing levels of disorganization in the company. As products grow and become complex, for example, Facebook or Amazon, that have a great number of features, use cases, and simultaneously moving parts, then the importance of alignment becomes even more apparent. In order for this alignment to come to fruition, teams need to:
- Prioritize efforts
- Focus on customer friction
Prioritizing efforts
When you’re trying to be everything to everyone, you end up being nothing to no one — there is no average product for the mass market. Product teams need to pick use cases that are important to the desired end users and to research these important use cases from an outside-in perspective, i.e. from the customers’ point of view.
Your product is similar to your child — your child will mean the world to you, and there is an unbreakable emotional bond there. But other people will show little response if you present your amazing children to them, their perspective is quite different. Engineers tend to fall in love with their product features, but they are not the buyers of the service at the end of the day. For the prioritization of efforts to happen, product managers and marketers need to communicate and collaborate effectively. Prioritization of efforts will in turn:
- Optimize resources utilization
- Maximize market penetration
- Drive product roadmap development
- Enhance go-to-market strategies and plans
- Defines sales strategies
- Create repeatable sales playbooks
The benefits of prioritized efforts will in turn create a truly high-impact and integrated — product, marketing, go-to-market, and sales — strategies.
Focus on customer friction
Customer friction is any aspect of an interaction that has a negative impact on the overall customer experience. Disruptive technologies and business models are revered because they remove friction from a customer problem, in turn creating value that people are willing to share with others and pay for.
Customer friction can only be identified across the customer journey or customer life cycle. Product marketers need to communicate with and involve product managers and product owners on the friction customers experience during the active evaluation, purchase, and retention touch-points of their offering in order to minimize friction and maximize the beneficial aspects of a positive customer experience.
Customers can be aware or unaware of frictions. Its the product team’s responsibility to identify them.
Traction, as the definition of success, will only happen if product managers and marketers partner up and think holistically about every single step in the customer journey — therefore, get out of the office, talk to customers, and optimize your offering.
Successfully partnering to prioritize efforts
In order to prioritize efforts, product managers and marketers need to partner up in the following areas:
- Finding new market opportunities, customers, use cases, etc.
- Defining product requirements
- Finding and establishing product-market-fit
- Studying and developing a unique customer journey
- Conducting successful market and customer research
Successfully partnering to remove frictions
Product managers and marketers need to partner up in the following aspects of assessing the customer journey in order to remove friction:
- Customer pain discovery
- Packaging
- Pricing
- Product demonstrations/promotions
- Distribution
- Deployment, adoption, and launch models
Ensure expectations are constantly aligned
Alignment between product managers and marketers influences product roadmaps and go-to-market strategies. Teams need to continuously assess whether they are aligned on effort prioritization and customer friction aspects of their product development life-cycle.
Continuously ask yourself the following questions to cross-check alignment. If your answers are ‘negative’ or ‘I don’t know’, then you need to restructure how you collaborate internally.
- Are we still aligned on areas of priority?
- What can alter the focus on priorities?
- How were areas of priority assessed and defined?
- How do areas of priority align with the corporate vision?
- Is the product easily reached by target customers?
- Is the product easy to assess? To be pitched by sales teams?
- What are the customer retention/repurchase rates?
Final remarks
Product management and product marketing are different functions that need to partner and align effectively if they are to achieve product-market fit and develop successful go-to-market strategies.
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