I started my career as a marketing project manager before transitioning into building upskilling programs to help adults kickstart their careers in marketing. Currently, I'm with a British startup that specializes in micro-learning for frontline workers — deskless employees, eg. construction workers, hotel personnel, restaurant managers, and taxi drivers. While working in product teams, I've had a chance to witness how marketing and product roles effectively operate both independently and together. One constant remains unchanged: marketing skills are beneficial for product managers and essential for their success in the role.
Recently, Airbnb transformed its product management function, blending it into the role of a product marketing manager. This decision has caused a reasonable debate. In today's tech market, the merging of marketing and product management skills is becoming one of the key areas in career growth.
This article explores how marketing skills can help build a successful career in product management and how active collaboration with marketing teams can help product leaders create great products.
What determines the level of marketing involvement in the product?
Growth strategy/model of the company
The degree to which an organization prioritizes marketing efforts against product development depends on its type of growth strategy.
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Product-led growth focuses on leveraging the product itself to drive user acquisition and growth, relying on its quality and user experience. Marketing supports by enhancing product visibility but does not lead the growth initiative.
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Marketing-led growth focuses on traditional marketing methods like advertising, campaigns, and branding to acquire customers and boost product growth. Business investments primarily focus on marketing the product.
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Sales-led growth concentrates on direct sales through a dedicated team that drives revenue growth. Marketing supports by providing assets and messaging, and generating inbound leads. The goal is to create a seamless customer acquisition and conversion process. Popular in technical B2B products.
In product-led and marketing-led organizations, marketing skills are critical for product managers. In sales-led companies, these skills are less crucial as the focus shifts towards direct sales that are driving revenue.
Size and maturity of the organization
For startups, performance marketing is crucial for gaining an initial customer base and building brand awareness. This is due to their limited market presence and the urgent need to establish a name in the field.
In established corporations, the focus often shifts from performance marketing to brand marketing.
This shift is evident in tech giants like Apple and Google, which highlight brand strength over performance marketing metrics.
In big companies, the role of product marketing managers becomes vital. They bring product and marketing together, translate technical features into compelling use cases and value propositions for end users, and make sure that the product aligns with the market's needs and expectations.
💡 This shift and the introduction of PMM roles highlight a wider trend in the IT market: as companies grow and their products become more sophisticated, a strategic product marketing approach is needed.
How to get the most out of your marketing team as a product manager
✅ Work with Product Positioning and Adapt It Based on Marketing Insights
Product positioning is about highlighting how a product can address the needs of a specific audience segment.
Marketers often face limitations in advertising a product — whether it's character limits in ads or banners, fighting for audience attention is a constant battle.
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Product managers have a great understanding of the market and user demands. They can support marketers in identifying the most impactful areas of the product that might catch potential prospect’s attention.
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In response, marketing can share analytics from various positioning or messaging experiments, that their team has been doing, with the product team. Product managers can learn something new about what specifically attracts users to try the product. This allows them to refactor existing features to cover more prospects’ needs and expand the lead pipeline.
💡 Example: A new brand specializing in eco-friendly clothing initially positioned itself around the environmental advantages of its products. However, conducting user interviews with the non-paying audience revealed a significant interest in fashion and style. The team has tweaked the product positioning to highlight both eco-features and a trendy design. As a result, the product managed to grow its sales and revenue.
✅ Perform User Segmentation
Generally, products that suit everyone don't exist, making segmentation critical for both marketing and the product itself.
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Actively analyzing product data is crucial for understanding how different user segments use the product. It helps identify usage behavior patterns that inspire hypotheses for further product development.
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Additionally, having a close relationship with the marketing department helps in exchanging data insights. The marketing team can share which positioning of product features works most effectively or which user segment it is the most interested in.
Example: A fitness app faced low user engagement. By segmenting their users by activity levels and interests, they found that advanced users exercising 4+ times a week left due to a lack of new and exciting content. The product introduced a new set of advanced workout programs and adapted the user interface to display content based on each user's fitness level. This increased product retention across a few segments.
✅ Test Product Hypotheses with Marketing
Product development is expensive. It's critical to move to product or feature development only after validating the hypothesis about the feature's necessity. Marketing is an excellent tool for the product discovery process, i.e., research.
- In B2C products, you can test product hypotheses regarding the need for a product or feature through quick marketing tests.
💡 Example: An online plant store tested hypotheses about which plant types were most popular in different seasons. They launched targeted marketing campaigns on various plant types on social media and tracked sales. The data collected during these campaigns gave ideas for inventory decisions and marketing strategy, and resulted in increased sales and customer satisfaction.
✅ Sync User Expectations Between the Marketing Image and Product
At the same time, it's crucial to remember that attracting users is only at the top of the funnel. Even if marketing draws in hundreds of users, once they land on the product, users already have formed expectations from their interactions with marketing. The product must match these expectations.
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It’s a common practice to start advertising product capabilities that aren't yet built — simply to test the demand and interest. However, it's vital to avoid setting misleading expectations that the current product cannot fulfill. When users don't find the promised features, they will likely leave. They might even leave you a poor review, and they won’t come back. It’s essential to balance between testing market demand for a hypothetical feature and ensuring that the actual product aligns with what is advertised.
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Aside from that, knowing the marketing channel that the user came from could be used to personalize their first experience with the product. By identifying the user's segment or acquisition channel, the product can show a custom in-product walkthrough, highlighting the features that are most relevant to that particular user. This customized onboarding helps guide users to their 'aha' moment.
✅ Understand the Role of Paid and Organic Traffic
Any product's goal is to learn to grow and develop organically, removing the need for paid traffic. However, as a product evolves, the importance and performance of various marketing channels will change.
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Knowing the difference between different user acquisition approaches and how to interpret their results, you can make more informed decisions about your product health.
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In the example of product-led growth organizations, investments in product improvements might show higher ROI than investments in paid traffic. This is because improving the product and satisfying existing users can lead to natural audience growth without additional advertising costs.
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Try getting actionable insights into what prevents your product from growing organically and what the product can do to drive stickiness and NPS.
Example: Slack's growth strategy heavily relied on organic growth through word-of-mouth and user satisfaction rather than on paid traffic. Their investments in product development and enhancing user experience, as well as the right monetization strategy (eg. limited features in a free plan) led to a natural increase in their user base.
✅ Collaborate with Marketing on Returning or Paying Users
Building upon the previous point, it's important to clarify that often a marketer's main metric is attracting paying users. With users who are already paying, the story changes — retaining the customer to prevent churn and further developing them to spend more within the product is crucial. A good product never remains stagnant; it continuously adds features and new value for the user.
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Having marketing skills provides a good context for creating in-product marketing and the ability to educate users about the product. Essentially, you need to sell your product to users in each session, market new features, and new use cases, and demonstrate how innovations in the product can improve their work.
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Implement in-product notifications, email marketing, or updates about new features to keep users engaged and invested in your product.
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Example: A personal finance app noticed low user activity post-initial registration. They added personalized in-app messages and email marketing to users who hadn't completed a key action within 3 days, highlighting primary and lesser-known features and tips. This approach re-engaged users, leading to an increase in subscriptions.
✅ Analyse User Sessions
A frequent marketing team’s task is to monitor a product's website activity, identify weak points, and adapt it to generate the most interest from users and conversions.
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Just as marketers use heatmaps to understand how users navigate websites, product managers can use tools like Hotjar to analyze user sessions. Analyzing what users do after entering the product helps make decisions, such as optimizing onboarding or highlighting unsuccessful UI decisions causing user confusion on a page.
Example: A graphic design online tool, through analysis of user sessions, noticed many users abandoning the tool midway through creating designs. They identified usability issues and introduced a product tutorial and simpler design templates. This reduced dropout rates and increased the fraction of completed projects.
✅ Calculate CAC and Unit Economics
One of the product manager's tasks is to be responsible for product and business metrics. Depending on the product, these business metrics may include revenue, profit, or additional sales of product parts (upsell).
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It's essential to have a deep understanding of how marketing metrics correlate with product metrics. This involves understanding the relationship between CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) and LTV (Customer Lifetime Value) as well as the ability to calculate unit economics. Unit economics helps grasp and establish product pricing considering the cost of acquiring a customer and market trends.
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Marketing experiments might lead to different CACs and product managers can use these insights to experiment with product pricing.
Example: A food delivery startup initially struggled with high customer acquisition costs. After analyzing their unit economics, they realized that focusing on high-quality locally sourced ingredients increased the customer LTV by 2x. They adjusted their marketing strategy to highlight these premium ingredients, which improved the LTV-to-CAC ratio.
Establish Trust with Marketing Managers
Tensions between marketing and product teams are not uncommon. This tension often stems from differing goals. Marketers aim to attract paying users, but what if the users are unwilling to pay for the product? Is it the fault of marketers for attracting the wrong type of users or the product team for creating a product that doesn't align with users' needs? In reality, it's no one's fault.
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Communicating effectively is crucial. Rather than working separately, both teams should seek collaboration and mutual improvement, eg. work together to find the right segment and messaging to drive overall product growth.
Conclusion
The intersection of marketing and product management roles is critical in today's rapidly evolving tech world. The merge of marketing and product expertise is more than just a trend; it's a strategic approach to ensuring that products not only meet market demands but also resonate with users at a deeper level.
By leveraging the strengths of both roles, businesses can create products that exceed customer expectations, leading to long-term success.
Editor: Tanya Kamenskaya
Design: Stas Yudin