Product Marketing Moonstruck

Somehow, Valentine’s Day is upon us, with February arriving faster than you can say, ‘chocolates, teddy bears, and flowers’.

As you well know, we love everything about product marketing, from mesmerizing messaging to gorgeous Go-to-Market strategies, and stunning sales enablement. ❤️

We could talk until the proverbial cows come home about how much we love product marketing. However, what makes the hearts of PMMs flutter? What knocks them off their feet? What makes them well and truly, moonstruck? 😍

Here’s what a handful of our Top 100 Product Marketing Influencers said when we asked why product marketing rocks their boat…

NB: Job titles were correct at the time the list was published. 👍

“I love product marketing as it allows me to join all the favorite bits from previous jobs, e.g., strategy, business development, customer interaction, and market research.

“There’s so much variety and exposure to different parts of a business and it lets you think about where you would like to specialize in the long term.”

Amit Alagh, Senior Product Marketing Manager at LexisNexis

“Today, the companies that win in B2B software all have great products. And they talk about them.

“Why? Because people care about products and want to learn about these tools in a way they haven’t in the past. Companies that tell the story of their products in the best way will win. And you know who does it best? Product marketers.”

Marcus Andrews, Director of Product Marketing at Pendo

“Product marketing is important to me because of what I've been able to learn from doing it. No other discipline has exposed me to as many facets of business as product marketing has.

“Being a product marketer allows me to interact and learn from every team within the business. It's that learning that not only fulfils me but also challenges me to always contribute.”

Mark Assini, Product Marketing Manager at Jobber

“Product marketing is the perfect combination of creative, strategic, and people-oriented. You get to collaborate with different teams and get to the root of problems and solutions.”

Maggie Bean, Product Marketing Manager at Validity, Inc.

“Product marketing is important to me because it’s the voice of the customer; you’re the person at the table across from marketing, product, sales, and others that bring their voice to the table.”

Aaron Brennan, Product Marketer at Dropbox

“Product marketing is important to me because it has given me opportunities I never thought I would have; travelling the world, meeting customers, speaking in public, and launching products.”

Sean Broderick, Director of GTM & Product Marketing at Sitecore

“My friend Kelly Farrell (PMM at Flo) once said product marketing is at the centre of a Venn Diagram where sales, customers, and marketers converge.

"I love this visualization. Product marketers help bring customer needs to life and find solutions to fruition across teams. Few roles allow you to be that collaborative both internally and externally.”

Jen Bunting, Head of Product Marketing, EMEA & LATAM at LinkedIn

“Product marketing champions the customer voice throughout the end-to-end customer journey. By advocating for true customer needs, we can build experiences and products that leave customers better off than when we found them.”

Bree Bunzel, Head of Global Customer Marketing at Dropbox

“Product marketing is around all of us every day, just by existing in the world.

“Think about the laptop or phone you’re reading this on right now. The Bluetooth headphones you used to listen to music recently. The shoes on your feet. The credit cards in your pocket. The toothpaste you used to brush your teeth this morning.

“What convinced you to buy those things? Maybe it was the description of the audio quality of the headphones. Maybe it was the extra cavity-fighting and whitening power of the toothpaste.

“Product marketing is important to me because it can make such a big impact on the choices millions of people make every day. That's powerful.”

Alex Chahin, VP of Marketing at Titan

“I always thought I was pretty good at a lot of things, but never really good at any one thing - until I found product marketing.

“Now, I feel like I’ve finally been able to take control of my career, fully embrace the skills and aptitudes I’ve developed over the years, and shape my future in a way I’d never had the opportunity to do before.”

Anna Daugherty, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Armory

“Product marketing often gets talked about as being a lynchpin of a business, and the best product marketers really act on that. They look holistically at initiatives, they consider the trickle-down impacts of different opportunities, and they blend those insights with both strategic planning and tactical work.

“I appreciate that in my current role, I've had the leeway to spend time each quarter looking at the health of our business unit and our customer experience, and then prioritizing projects that solve problems that can move the needle most.

“It means one quarter I'm spinning up a new post-sale program to help accelerate time to value for our customers, the next I'm digging into why a specific channel is underperforming, and the third quarter I'm focusing on greenspace with my product manager.”

Kristen Ditsch, Head of Product Marketing, Embedded Platform at Workato

“Product marketing is an art and science. Ensuring we have the right insights, collaborating with teams across the business, and driving tangible results takes a special type of person.

“The best product marketers are strategic, empathetic, adventurous, aspirational, and proactive. They uncover what's right, and push to make big things happen.”

James Doman-Pipe, Manager of Product Marketing at Remote

“It’s so important to have that role or function in a business that is always advocating for your customers and building solutions that meet their needs and requirements.

“I feel if you obsess over customers and earn and keep their trust you will go far! What I love about product marketing is that you are really in the thick of it in terms of cross-functional work.

“Each day, you’re working with sales, customer success, product, demand generation, comms, legal, policy teams, customer support teams, the list goes on, so you'll need to work effectively with multiple stakeholders, be empathic, and have the ability to influence their decision-making and get their buy-in.

“You may be an individual contributor in product marketing, but you’re never an individual contributor in the business!”

Michael Drukker, Director of Product Marketing at Genius Sports

“All marketing is product marketing! The best brand, social, sales, or experiential marketing serves to bring your product to life in a way that's relevant to your audience, too.

“Product marketing is a unique discipline because you have organizational leverage at all stages of your business — from developing and designing the product, through positioning and launching it.”

Sam Duboff, Director, Head of Creator Brand & Product Marketing at Spotify

“Product marketing is a role that has an impact across product, marketing, and field-facing teams - having that cross-functional relationship, a really clear value we bring to each initiative, and calling on insight as the voice of the customer and the market means we are uniquely placed to add value.

“Every product marketer is also unique and I’m in awe that so many inspiring product marketers have come from such different backgrounds and career paths, bringing different skill sets to their roles.

“Whether they’re a technical expert, savvy sales pro, compelling storyteller, or strategic launch machine, one thing every product marketer has to have is an “outside-in'' perspective, learning from the market, their competitors, and customers regardless of whatever their area of focus is.”

Louise Dunne, Head of Product Marketing at Linnworks

“I’ve been working in product marketing even before I realized I was a product marketer.

“As a founder, I was leading what was the most important for my startup at that point: defining the product value and bringing this value to the right users via the most appropriate marketing channels. This was crucial for my startup's success in 2015 and this made product marketing my main focus.

“I believe every company should heavily invest in product marketing early on and hire great PMMs from the start.”

Lisa Dziuba, Product Marketing Executive Consultant

“Product marketing represents the right mix of strategy and execution for me. It’s a profession that is built on continuous learning, analysis, navigating uncharted territories, and collecting puzzle pieces that you need to put together to see the big picture.

“But that’s the thing about it; nothing happens if you don’t communicate it well and enable the rest of the EPD and GTM teams to see that big picture. Successfully cross-pollinating these findings and insights across teams, incorporating stakeholders' feedback, and getting buy-in, is how PMMs drive growth for the companies they support.

“This is a true growth role, whether you’re a full-stack PMM, or one that has honed your expertise in one of the PMM pillars (Launch, Compete, Enablement, Partnerships etc,) – you get to be at the nexus of it all, and are tasked with helping the teams around you move the needle.

“What I love about it is that I’m getting paid to learn, think, and drive impact – things I’d want to do every day regardless.”

Shelly Eisen-Livneh, Senior Product Marketing Manager & Growth Lead - PLG Motion at Heap

“Product marketing is important to me because most teams don’t have people that can speak the language of their technical counterparts as well as their creative counterparts - product marketing is this translator and builder between teams - and sprinkles in business and market needs on top for good measure!”

Fiona Finn, Director of Product Marketing at Jane App

“I love interacting with customers and hearing about what problems they are trying to solve. The product marketing role provides opportunities to genuinely help customers do better by listening to them.”

Vishal Ganeriwala, VP of Product Marketing at Citrix

“Product marketing has the opportunity to bring the story of a product to life. The amount of creativity, versatility, and strategy we bring to the stage to orchestrate all the instruments to play a melody that the audience love is remarkable.”

Shreyas Gavit, Product Marketing Manager at Okcoin

“I find it incredibly exciting to be entrusted with the work we do. It’s an honor to be an “ambassador” of products that solve real problems, serving as a key voice and face to help them show up at their best. This role challenges me to use my full skill set every day, and it’s rewarding to see the impact.”

Rebecca Geraghty, VP of Product Marketing at Publicis Media

“Being a product marketer is like being at the centre of a spider web that’s constantly blowing in the wind.

“If you’re a good product marketer, you keep the web connected and keep it from blowing away. Not only does this mean that you have the power to influence each corner of the web (aka your cross-functional partners) but you’re responsible for ensuring that each of those partners gets the information that they need to do their job (sell the product, answer customer questions, etc.).

“With influence comes great responsibility, and when done right, the web continues to grow.”

Hayley Golub, Director of Product Marketing at StreetLight Data

“It’s hokey, but I view product marketing as a craft and I enjoy working to continually improve it. It’s not as romantic as being a chef, carpenter, or musician, but it’s satisfying just the same.”

Ryan Graff, Director of Product Marketing at CometChat

“Product marketing is a rare role in which you’ll challenge yourself consistently, and the upside can be transformational to the business.”

Jerod Greenisen, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Optimizely

“I truly believe product marketing is the linchpin to sustainable business growth and, when done right, sets the strategic foundations for the business.

“From determining the markets we choose to serve, to how we package and price the value of our product, a PMM's work can elevate an entire business.”

Tamara Grominsky, VP of Product Marketing & Lifecycle at Kajabi

“Product marketing is a pivotal function in helping businesses drive the growth and adoption of products.

“A good product marketer merges product and marketing to ensure products are built and positioned in a meaningful way that differentiates them from competing solutions and solves core customer problems.

“A successful product marketer will leverage customer feedback from research and engagement from marketing to understand how to effectively bring products to market that delight.

“And lastly, an elite product marketer knows how to be impactful by driving core business objectives, while on the other hand, a mediocre product marketer knows how to be busy.”

Louis Guerrero, Product Marketing, Monetization Experiences at Meta

“I’ve seen great products fall flat because of poor marketing, and I’ve seen capabilities launched that just had me scratching my head as to why anyone would want or need that. I’ve seen products released with a “build it and they will come” mentality – but that’s nothing more than a line from a baseball movie.

“This is why product marketing is so important to me. It’s the function that builds, orchestrates, measures, and essentially brings to life the story of a brand and its products, capabilities, and services, in ways that mean something to the relevant customer and the market.”

Ali Hanyaloglu, VP of Product Marketing at Amplience

“Product marketers are connectors. A good product marketer is someone who can work effectively across diverse business functions to get work done. Where an organization cannot bring together the interests of product, sales, marketing, and the customer, these functions within an organization can very quickly become misaligned.

“As a result of its function as a connector, the edges of the product marketing role are fuzzy, which means that product marketers have the potential to contribute as a partner to a wide variety of business areas.”

Timothy Harfield, Senior Director of Product Marketing, Intelligent Automation at Pegasystems

“There’s so much talk lately about "marketing" and there are so many aspects and roles - but I truly believe that at its heart product marketing is just…marketing.

We deeply understand our customers, how to position products, connect with prospects, craft messaging, and know which channels our customers use.

Everything else is downstream. Product marketing isn't a “nice to have”, it's the first thing you need.”

Andrew Hatfield, Founder & Marketing Strategist at Deepstar Strategic

“As product marketers, our breadth of knowledge allows us to see many perspectives, and one of the key ways that we deliver value is by helping make connections across the business that no one else can. That’s a powerful unique value proposition.

Alison Hayter, Director of Product Marketing at Loopio

“Good marketing can’t save a bad product and bad marketing can sink a good product. But a good product marketer can improve both.”

Tim Hinds, Product Marketing & Product Owner, Co-Founder at GrokSpark

“Product marketing has enabled me to work on so many interesting projects and with so many different folks across different orgs. It’s such an impactful and fulfilling role. Before I got into product marketing, I didn’t even know what it was (let alone want to be a PMM!) but I’m so glad I ended up on this path.”

Jasmine Jaume, Director of Product Marketing at Intercom

“Product marketing is important to me because we are empowered with bringing together technology, sales, and marketing, three very different parts of an organization that usually only come together for specific reasons - we tie them together regularly and intentionally.”

Kirsten Jepson, Senior Director of Product Marketing at TELUS International

“I believe the product marketing discipline is very important in this hyper-competitive market since it helps buyers and users easily understand the differentiated value of products and solutions that have the potential to help them be more efficient and achieve the goals of their business. Great products need a great story to drive adoption!”

Abhinav Joshi, Director of Product Marketing at Red Hat

"Product marketing is probably the function that allows you to stretch yourself, in terms of skills and experience, more than anything else in marketing.”

Daniel Kuperman, Head of Core Product Marketing & Go-to-Market, ITSM Solutions at Atlassian

“Product marketing is rewarding and exciting because it is highly strategic and touches so many areas of a business. Few other roles have so much opportunity to be so cross-functional and diverse.”

Daniella Latham, Senior Product Marketing Manager - Atlas at Atlassian

“I see product marketers as the General Managers of their business units. We should switch quickly from a long-term strategic POV to a short-term tactical approach. PMMs act like an octopus that identifies cross-org gaps and sends its arms out to bring business alignment and impact.

“As a former entrepreneur, I see PMM as an optimization of my skill set, strength, and passion. This unique position, when it is well defined in the org, enables it to bring a very strategic GTM POV, support and define sales enablement and training efforts, recognize opportunities and connect the dots between siloed efforts across the org.

“The ability to shape PMM from a business yet tech perspective and solve problems in collaborative ways – is my fuel."

Hila Lauterbach, Senior Director of Product Marketing/Head of Department at SpotOn

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