Effective Product Marketing

by Adam Bullied on May 8, 07

Ever have one of those days where things feel like they fit into place? Well, I’ve had several of the last couple of weeks. And it’s all thanks to product marketing.

I don’t pretend that I’m a marketing guy. Yeah, I get the concepts. I understand the fundamentals well enough to converse and help out with strategic activities, but it’s not my bread and butter. Now, if you are lucky enough to get solid marketing folks into your organization, and your organization is software, I encourage you to read up on the interaction between product marketing management and product management.

Let me help by saying this: they are not the same thing. Software product manager’s, unless they are explicitly focused on marketing, should not try to take the reigns here.

Wikipedia has a great article on product marketing, even with a section explaining this. The biggest favor you can do for yourself it to get folks on board with the idea that product marketing plays the biggest role in gathering the feedback.

Yeah, I get it. I wrote a pretty up-front article on Sales running development. Now, I still believe that this is a bad idea, with a couple of lightweight exceptions. Those lightweight exceptions, funny enough, roll right into providing market feedback.

This is where it becomes so clear where MRDs and PRDs start factoring in. Marketing takes the lead on the marketing requirements document, while product management takes the lead on the product requirements document, with each group meeting somewhere in the middle to ensure the key components of each thing remain clear.

At least, that’s how I see it. And it’s become quite clear to me how valuable solid product marketing efforts are.

  • http://www.brainmates.com.au nick coster

    Hi Adam,
    It is this challenge around role definition that is one of the biggest challenges for product management. Here in Australia we have been using some very clear definitions of roles within the product management domain.
    Product Marketer – responsible for identifying market opportunities and product selling points.
    Product Planner – responsible for translating the market opportunity into a formal document that describes the customer problem that needs to be solved. It does NOT define the solution.
    Product Architect – Responsible for finding solutions to the customer problems that are defined in the Product Planners document.
    These three roles bridge the space between marketing and product development. In most organizations that I have worked with the Product planner is completely missing. No-one really takes the time to research and focus on exactly what the end user wants and is willing to pay money to have. We assume (often badly) and go straight to creating a solution.
    We are running a training session on this in August in Sydney if any of you readers are interested. [http://www.brainmates.com.au/?page_id=48]
    –nick coster
    brainmates – product management people

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