Hello and welcome back to another episode of Lessons in Product Management. I'm your host, Jon Fontenot. And on today's episode, we're going to talk about a topic that is near and dear to me.
It's why product marketers hate product managers. I know that's a bit of a hot take opening, but in a lot of ways, it's true. Product managers don't... typically have the best relationship with product marketers and it's really unfortunate so i'll start with the end in mind why should product managers have a good relationship with product marketers well
I've mentioned this a lot in my writing. I mentioned this in my book. I've mentioned this in other podcasts, but I have a friend who used to work at IBM as a senior product manager, and I had him on my podcast many years ago. And he said, you know, the reason why the partnership with product marketing is so important is because if you were a product manager who came up with the cure for cancer, but
customers didn't know that it existed. They didn't know how to get it, where to get it, how to administer it, what the cost of it was.
If they didn't know those things, then your cure for cancer wouldn't really matter, would it? Because it wouldn't do anything. People wouldn't know where to get it, how to use it, and so it would just sit there, right? And I think it's a perfect analogy for... relationship between you know value creation and value realization where as product people it's our job to identify what the pain points are in the market to customers
What's going to be valuable? What can we build a business off of? And what's going to create value for our customers and the users of our product? But at the end of the day, if we don't get distribution right, if we don't get messaging and positioning right, If we don't get branding and aligning the brand promise with the value that we actually deliver through the product, if none of that works, then the product doesn't succeed.
No matter how good the product is, if you're trying to sell the product to the wrong channel and to the wrong customers, where there's a value mismatch between what perceived value is and the value that your product actually creates, whether it's...
You know, a misalignment in messaging, a misalignment in how we're positioning ourselves in the market so we're actually attracting the wrong types of customers. All that stuff matters to the success of your product. So you as a PM could be scratching your head. saying, why isn't this product successful when at the end of the day, it might be the go-to-market function that's failing. But if that's happening, it's not product marketing's fault. It's not the sales team's fault. Whose fault is it?
It's ours. As product people, it's our job to make sure that there's alignment between the value we're creating and how we're bringing that message to market. And if I have product marketing friends listening to this, they're probably going to message me. Not too happy that I just said that, but it's true. Okay.
It's not our job to run messaging and positioning and whatnot, but we should darn well be opinionated about it as product people. I hate the concept of throwing things over the fence, whether it's to designers, to engineers. Like we get that as PMs, right? Like people hammer that home all the time on social media and podcast about this disdain and hate for throwing things over the fence.
to designers and engineers without any context whatsoever and just saying, hey, go make this thing pretty or hey, go build this thing as fast as you can because I'm trying to ship on time for my deadline. People hate that. That's not good product management. Well, neither is it good product management to throw things over the fence to the go-to-market function, namely the product marketers who are responsible for taking things to market.
If you've ever had to play the PMM role, you should get this. If you have the good fortune of having a good product marketing partner, you should really understand this because it makes their job incredibly hard.
if they don't have the context that you do which brings me to the whole point of why product marketers hate product managers in a lot of situations that's one reason the second reason is the whole concept of agile gets so misused and abused where even product marketing teams now product marketing leaders who have adopted this catchphrase of agile product marketing whatever that means
can ship stuff every two weeks or four weeks or six weeks or whatever our agile cadence is, right? And so you have product managers and product teams cranking out features every couple to four weeks. And PMs are running with their hair on fire, PMMs, trying to keep up. And I've seen some organizations try to combat this by creating release tiers and a tier one gets this kind of go-to-market activity and tier two gets this and a tier three maybe gets nothing.
And I think, you know, we're chopping the leaves of the tree instead of getting to the root of the problem. The root of the problem is we still act like we're in silos. And it's a big problem because it goes back to that word I used earlier of context. Even if somehow you had a unicorn PMM product marketing manager who could keep up at the pace that these, you know.
fast-moving, agile product teams move at. And they could crank out stuff every two, four, six weeks, whatever the cadence is, and use all the... the goodness of ChatGPT and all these tools out there to run faster, the problem still remains of like that cancer analogy. If you don't have the context, how can you produce good work?
It's the same thing as a product manager. If we don't have the strategic context from our CPO, our VP of product, our director of product, if we don't have that strategic context about what the broader organization is trying to accomplish. How can we think like a CEO? How can we think about the big picture? How do we start to understand how our work fits into the bigger picture? And we think more expansively than just getting, you know.
like narrowly focused on this local maxima of like how do i optimize my number that's what that's where product teams get in trouble and that's where you see really weird things happen in product is where people get so narrowly focused into their little thing that It's like everyone's rowing in different directions and everything comes out of alignment. It's terrible. I've seen it. It's not fun to work in. And I've heard other people who've worked in that environment and it's not fun.
So let's come full circle here. The reason why product marketers have a disdain for product managers and the product function a lot of the time and and why you see a lot of like hate-filled memes on linkedin and twitter about you know the the release time frame of oh yeah you're releasing a new feature what like in two months and it's like two weeks nope nope tomorrow
And the reason why that resonates so much with product marketers is because they always feel that way. They always feel like something is coming up that they had no clue about. They're completely blindsided by it. And how do we solve this problem? Well, it's quite simple. be a good partner, right? I like, I'm going to go back to another example. I read a lot of books. There's a great book called Shape Up.
And I think a lot of the book shape up is good. But one thing I disagree with is there's like this almost explicit. call to action to say, hey, the PM or the designer, or maybe a PM and a designer at most should go into a room and figure things out and come out and have some work that's worth doing for the next six weeks.
It might be a gross overgeneralization, but there is some explicit stuff in there about like one, at most two people really fleshing out what you should be doing. When in reality. Like there should be a partnership when it comes to discovery. There should be points at which what you're learning in discovery gets shared broadly. And, you know.
whatever stakeholders you want or need to include and that's great but at minimum you should have a regular sync with your product marketing team or your dedicated product marketer however your org is set up So they understand. What are you learning? Bring them into your interviews. I've had product marketers sit in on customer interviews so they can get firsthand experience and context. And they're thinking and seeing things from a go-to-market lens while we're looking at things from a product.
development standpoint and a product strategy standpoint. And so we're looking at it through different lenses to begin with, which helps us have more constructive conversations early on and leads to better outcomes later. Right. So bring your product marketers into the process early when it comes to discovery. So when it comes time to say, hey, we've actually prioritized this thing.
They understand the context. They understand the value. They're on the email threads. They have the recordings, right? They have everything they need to be equipped for success because you enabled their success by bringing them in.
to the process early which is important because part of their job as product marketers is enabling the success of the go-to-market function so if you as the product manager enable the success of the people who need to enable the success of who's selling and supporting your product, then your product is probably going to be more successful.
which is only going to help in your KPIs, the impact you have on the business. So it's in your best interest to do this. And it's befuddling that so many PMs don't do it. And I have to assume it's because... There's just a knowledge gap or a lack of awareness or understanding that this is something you should do. Which is why we have a podcast episode about it and I hope it gets heard.
broadly and shared broadly so we can solve this problem and actually create more value in the market. So thanks for joining me today. I hope you enjoyed this lesson in product management and I will see you next week.