I recently came back from a company-wide meeting which brought together all of its products and brands, along with their sales and marketing teams. It should be noted that although some brands had their own marketing teams, there weren’t very many who also had my role: product marketing.
Safe to say I had a few entertaining conversations during this time where person after person asked what exactly I did as a product marketer. It felt a bit like the scene in Office Space, where the consultants asked one of the employees, “what would you say you do here?”
This was amusing to me, and I began to feel like a bit of a unicorn, that mythical creature that had only been heard of, but never seen. But unlike the unicorn, my position is very real--and very rewarding.
But to be fair, product marketing is a role that not every team has. Marketing...yes. Product management...check. But product marketing? Uhm...
And which world does the product marketer live in? Does this role live in the marketing team or the product team? Yes.
If organized correctly, the product marketing role really does have one foot in the marketing world with with the other in the product world. As a product marketer, I live in intersecting worlds, where numbers meet creativity and the abstract meets the quantifiable. The quote by Steve Jobs is a great way to view the product marketer’s role: “technology alone is not enough. It's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields the results that make our hearts sing."
I thrive on customer numbers (licenses, churn, module usage). I also live on campaign metrics, sales and marketing funnel, quantitative and qualitative information. There’s an old saying that “In God we trust, all others bring data.” This is a product marketer’s life—data lays the foundation for all that we create.
My role is to ensure that we don’t just list feature after feature—missing the opportunity to directly connect with the prospect, demonstrating the benefit our product—addressing their pain points. As the old saying goes, know thyself—and how it addresses thy customer’s pain points. After all, what good is a product if it doesn’t address the great problem of our prospective customers. Also, what good is a great product that addresses a customer pain point—but is so poorly communicated that the prospect is unable to grasp its true value.
It is my job to ensure that in a cluttered marketplace of ideas, a clear, compelling message is consistently communicated across the organization. To ensure focus on the value we provide and clarity of the benefits we offer.
So what would you say I do here? Well, says this unicorn, I make our product look good, our sales team happy, and our customers happier.