My Product Management Toolkit (66): what any PM needs to know about Product Marketing

10 min readApr 25, 2025

For some time now, Apple has merged product marketing and product management into a single role. Take a look at the job description for an Apple Vision Pro Product Manager that I came across recently:

As a member of our Product Management group, you’ll represent the customer throughout a product’s journey. You’ll develop and apply insights to help infuse innovative features into our product-development process. Together with our team, you’ll work to craft groundbreaking ideas into tangible products that excite the world.

At Apple, we combine product management and product marketing responsibilities into a single, cross functional Product Management role that collaborates with engineering, finance, legal, marketing communications, public relations, market research, sales and support for maximum impact across the organization.

As a product marketing person at Apple your role is to “own and drive the product centric marketing strategy” for a specific product line. The Product Marketing Manager (PMM) acts as the spokesperson for their product in the market.

While Apple isn’t unique, most companies will have separate product management and product marketing functions. However, that doesn’t mean that Product Managers shouldn’t get involved in product marketing or that PMMs shouldn’t be part of the product development lifecycle. Early in my career I made the mistake of thinking that my product would magically land in customers’ hands, and I’ve worked closely with my PMM peers ever since.

Too often, PMs make the mistake of being so immersed in the design and build of (what they think is) a great product idea. They assume the product will take off, treating product marketing as an afterthought at best. I believe that product marketing should be part of any PM’s toolkit. All good product ideas and build efforts will have been in vain if people don’t use your product because it wasn’t marketed well.

Irrespective of whether your organisation does or doesn’t have a dedicated (product) marketing function, every Product Manager should drive impact, value and distribution — three key aspects that underpin most go-to market strategies:

Impact — Developing a product starts with a thorough understanding of customer impact and clarity of the outcome(s) the customer is trying to achieve. The Product Manager is responsible for continuously sharing their customer understanding with marketing colleagues, to make sure that customer impact is reflected in the go-to-market messaging.

Value — To figure out the right value proposition for your product, you need customer empathy. Tonnes of it. Have you got a clear mental model of your user? If you’re building a B2B / SaaS product, are you clear on the pain points of the buyer vs the user of your product? What use cases will the solution serve? What are the benefits your target customer will get from using the product?

Distribution — From Day 1, Product Managers should be thinking about how to get a product in the hands of the customer. What are the best distribution channels that will drive product adoption? What go-to-market messaging will you use to sell your product? Which sales tactics are likely to be most effective? If you’re working with a Product Marketing Manager make sure you learn their language. Ask them for example about events, campaigns and channels that they’re working on. It might be that your product can get exposure to customers as part of a much bigger platform, and advocating for your product to be included in these platforms is a big part of the PM/PMM collaboration.

There are five critical go-to-market aspects that PMs need to be comfortable with (either so that they can execute a go-to market plan or partner effectively with the PMMs on their team):

1. Market sensing questions

As product people, we’re in a great position to get continuous customer insights about what product marketing expert Martina Lauchengco refers to as market-sensing questions:

What are customers trying to do? (Jobs To Be Done)
Do they recognise and prioritise this problem?
What’s motivating them to solve the problem?
What compels them to take action?
What in this product delivers the most value?
Who is most likely to value and buy this product?
What do people need to see or hear to become customers?

You can see that these questions aren’t geared towards getting customer requirements. Instead, the questions focus on understanding customer pain points and the value they expect your product to deliver.

If you’re building a B2B / SaaS product you should work especially hard to distinguish between the buyer and the user of your product, as these can often be two different cohorts. To fully understand the buyers’ needs and pain points you could use the SPIN selling method and the four questions that underpin this method:

Situation — Situation questions help you understand the basic facts about the buyer’s current state. Sample questions: Can you tell me about your current workflows and processes? How many people are in your department? What is your approach to [use case]?

Problem — Problem questions are used to uncover more details about the problems (prospective) customers are facing. Sample questions: How important is solving [problem] to your business? What are the biggest challenges you face? How much time do you spend on [task] each week?

Implication — Implication questions are used to help you understand the impact of the (prospective) customer’s problem. Sample questions: How does this impact your customers? Has this [problem] ever negatively impacted your KPIs?

Need-payoff — Need-payoff questions focus on understanding the urgency and impact of solving the problem for the prospect. Sample questions: Why is being able to carry out [insert process or operation] important to your organisation? How do you think a solution for [insert process or resource] would help your team?

Answers to these market sensing questions can be gathered by talking to (prospective) customers or observing how they’re currently solving for a specific pain point. These answers will feed into the “product story” and “product positioning”, which we will cover in points 2. and 3. respectively.

2. Product story

Creating a compelling story that communicates the value of a product to a relevant audience. The story should be clear, authentic and easy to understand, with a clear call to action.

The PM is in the best position to ensure that the story is grounded in actual customer insights, quantitative (e.g. analytics or surveys) or qualitative (e.g. user interviews or observations). A common pitfall is to over-index on what we want to tell customers about our product, and not paying enough attention to what the customers actually want. The product needs to be positioned as a solution to a customer outcome or pain point. Ideally, you want your product to be perceived as a ‘painkiller’; indispensable in taking the customer’s pain away.

We often talk about new product launches, but it’s only the first chapter of the story. A compelling story to introduce a new product is a good start, but you need actual product usage to make the story stick in people’s minds. This often means asking customers to change their habits or perception of best practice. Change can cause anxiety or friction, particularly for B2B buyers and users as they’re used to using your product in a certain way.

Product managers and marketers can’t afford a “launch and forget” approach; you need to focus on change management, buyer / seller enablement and adoption after you’ve launched the product. A shared KPI between product and marketing can be very helpful here: instead of “launch product X by June 2025” we should set an adoption goal, e.g. “have 100 paying customers of Product X by December 2025.”

It means that we need to have a compelling story about why it’s worth customers making the transition, without putting your original product down or making those buyers or users question your previous go-to market messaging and product benefits!

3. Product positioning

Product Managers should have a clear picture of how their product is perceived in the minds of its target customers, relative to competitors. Product positioning is about comparing your product against the competition; explaining why your product is unique or better compared to alternatives. I learned a lot from April Dunford — a world-leading positioning expert — and her take on what makes for great positioning:

The customer’s point of view on the problem you solve and the alternative ways of solving that problem.
The ways you are uniquely different from those alternatives and why that’s meaningful for customers.
The characteristics of a potential customer that really values what you can uniquely deliver.
The best market context for your product that makes your unique value obvious to those customers who are best suited to your product.

Understanding your competition helps clarify your product’s differentiated value; the value you can deliver that no other alternative can. It’s important to test your positioning statements with your (target) customers to understand the place your product holds in the mind of your customers and how they compare your product.

4. Value based pricing

Your product pricing should reflect the value that your product will deliver to specific segments. Especially with the rise of agentic AI, businesses will focus even more on how products will contribute to specific outcomes as part of their revenue path. For example, how can agents help my business reduce operational cost or recommend the right products to users? PMs should have a clear view on the what, why, who and how that underpin a product’s pricing model.

What — What are the unit economics of your product?
Why — What does the “path to value” or “revenue path” look like for the target customers of your product?
Who — Who are your target customers and how do you segment them? How do they perceive value?
How — How will your target customers measure the value of your product (think about value metrics around productivity gains or CSAT increases, for example). Also, what are the switching costs associated with your product? The differentiated value perceived by the customer needs to be significantly higher than the cost / effort involved in implementing and adopting a new product.

Your insights around customer pain points, perceived value and competitive alternatives will feed into your pricing and packaging strategy, outlining a clear upgrade path for customers. The pricing and packaging strategy for your product should also align with your chosen go-to-market motion (GTMs). In B2B, there are three main GTMs: self-serve, sales-led and hybrid and how you package your products needs to fit your GTM of choice.

Then there’s the question of how customers will be exposed to pricing. Will customers be able to see pricing on the website or will they find out from the sales team? Whichever channels you use to communicate, it’s important that the messaging about the different packages and their value is consistent across the (digital and human) channels.

5. Prioritising marketing effort

Assessing and prioritising the marketing effort required for a product release is another important aspect for PMs to consider and collaborate with their marketing colleagues.

There are different ways to determine the level of go-to-market activity needed for a product or feature launch. There are two methods that you can consider here. First, assigning whether a release is a P1, P2 or a P3. Is your product or feature a new invention that is most likely to attract new customers (P1)? Is it a solution that is mostly relevant to existing customers (P2)? Or will it simply bring your product up to par with the competition (P3)?

Alternatively, you can prioritise the marketing effort for your product releases based on expected customer and business value. How impactful will the new feature be for the customer? What will be its impact on business’ profitability? How does it contribute to business priorities?

Whichever prioritisation method you pick, it’s important for the PM to engage early with the PMM and the Sales team, explaining what they’re looking to build and who will benefit from it. This serves two purposes:

Getting early buy-in to pull resources from marketing and sales when you need them to support any launch and adoption activities further down the line.
Making sure that your product is aligned with the business strategy and the customer segment(s) that your sales team is targeting.

PMMs are often in a great position to keep PMs honest about business impact and ideal customer profiles. Even if it’s a small feature or something that is considered a ‘table stake’ it’s important for the marketing team to know about. This way, marketing can help bolster the product story with the origin story of the feature.

Main learning point:

Product marketing isn’t just the Product Marketer’s job — it’s a fundamental responsibility that shapes your product’s success in the market. As a Product Manager, you need to collaborate closely with marketing from day one, understanding that even the best products fail without proper go-to-market execution. Remember that your job isn’t done when the product ships — it’s done when customers adopt and love what you’ve built, resulting in the desired business impact.

Special thanks to Jasmine Jaume, Emily Jackson, Orinna Barton and Louis Debatte-Monroy for their feedback on earlier drafts of this article.

Related links for further learning: