160 definitions of product marketing

Flicking through the pages of your dictionary, searching for a definition of product marketing?

Pop your readers back in their case, ‘cos you’re frittering away time you’ll never get back.

As everyone in the industry probably knows, product marketing is unique, in that it doesn’t necessarily have a widespread definition; one person’s interpretation can differ dramatically from that of their fellow PMM.

But we’re not one to let you slink away disappointed.

Low and behold the variety of definitions provided by an assortment of PMMs, from an array of industries, markets, and job titles.

In this article, we'll provide a variety of product marketing definitions, including:

Product marketing - the PMA perspective

We’re sure you’ll know by now, we’re very passionate about product marketing; it’s set in our psyche, defined in our DNA, burrowed in our blood.

Like the rest of the product marketing community, we've our own definition of what product marketing is, and why it’s a process warranting the unwavering attention of companies the world over.

So, before we explore the many interpretations contributed by PMMs from all walks of product marketing life, here’s how we define the term.

Don’t agree with our definition? Zero offense taken! 😊

As we mentioned before, a clear-cut definition has proven somewhat elusive, and while this has proved challenging, in some instances, it does open up an avenue for discussion.

So, with that in mind, let’s delve into the debate, and check out what product marketers said when we posed the question whilst researching for the State of Product Marketing Report 2020.

Associate Product Marketing Managers

“We need to make sure we’re building the right product for our customers and communicating the appropriate messages to our customers, consistently.”

Laura Walter, Associate Product Manager at Practera

“We shape external communications of our products and share that within the company so it is a unified message.”

Reanne Barrette, Associate Product Marketing Manager at Esri

“Product marketers figure out how to best bring products to market, foster adoption of products, and ensure your sales team is prepared to sell the product.”

Erin Sumpmann, Associate Product Marketing Manager at LinkedIn

“I see the PMM role in three steps: customer, positioning, and GTM. We market listening and validation, define and execute positioning, and plan product releases.”

Brianna Van Tuinen, Associate Product Marketing Manager at Alyce

“Product marketers translate the market's needs into product execution and strategy.”

Emma Lullo, Associate Product Marketing Manager at Nielsen

“PMMs have an ability to know the product and the customers deeply, and create magic between them.”

Bianca Velasco, Associate Product Marketing Manager at Kira Systems

“We shape external communications of our products and share that within the company so it is a unified message.”

Reanne Barnett, Associate Product Marketing Manager at Esri

“Product marketing represents the customer and the market inside the company, and represents the company in the product and externally.”

Lily Haycraft Mee, Associate Product Marketing Manager at Stealth

“A product marketer is someone who focuses on being responsible for getting the products off the shelf.”

Brian Adam Pratama, Product Marketing Lead at THEO Technologies NV

“A good product marketer is someone who can craft and tell a strategic narrative. One that's communicated internally and externally, in 50 and 500 words, is understood and accepted by everyone from the CEO all the way down - across channels and formats.”

Vaishnavi Ketharnathan, Associate Product Marketing Manager at Chargebee

“We understand what the user wants and show them the ways your product can fulfil their desires.”

Shakshy Seth, Associate Product Marketing Manager at DeepSource

“Product marketing is about helping buyers understand what your product is and how it can help them.”

Gina Carr, Associate Product Marketing Manager at G2

Product Marketing Managers

“We’re the strategic voice of the customer, bridging the gap between product and business worlds, whilst providing deep understandings, empathy and expertise on both sides of the house.”

Greg Davis, Lead Product Marketing Manager at Gusto

“As far as I’m concerned, product marketing is about understanding consumer problems and industry trends and creating products that improve lives through design and storytelling.”

Jordyn Reitz, Product Manager at Medline Industries, Inc.

“Product marketing brings new products to market by clearly articulating its position and value related to the business problems the product solves, to therefore drive demand and usage of the product (and ultimately contribute to the overall success of the business).”

Matt Powell, Product Marketing Manager at Docebo

“Product marketing is the connection point between the market and the organization. It brings relevant insights from the market to the organization to inform product strategy, whilst also delivering product back to the market to address pain points.”

Claire Simpson, Product Marketing Manager at Clio

“In my view, product marketing is the sweet spot between Marketing, Sales and Product. It’s the voice of the product in the market and the voice of the market in the product.”

Tiago Doroana Martins, Product Marketing Manager at Talkdesk

“Product marketing is the process of bringing a product to market; using customer insights to further drive demand, usage and retention throughout their journey.”

David Oragui, Product Marketing Manager at Leadfeeder

“A product marketing team acts as a conduit between the product team, the marketing team and sales to ensure that each is aligned.

The activities of a product marketer vary from research to email execution for feature adoption. What I don't think it is, is to create the entire product strategy and pricing and GTM strategy for sales and marketing.”

Verity Brain, Product Marketing Manager at Tungsten Network

“Product marketers understand the marketing strategies, customer pain points, and product roadmap, and serve as a focal point to align the different parts of the business around the customer.”

Michelle Syu, Product Marketing Manager at IBM

“Product marketing is a strategic role within the product management function that feeds market and customer insights into product positioning and messaging.

"It’s a cross-functional role combining market and customer research, GTM planning, content creation, and customer onboarding and product adoption.”

Joanna Ross, Product Marketing Manager at Nearmap

“Product marketing is a function responsible for product positioning, messaging, launch, and usage. This includes making sure customer-facing teams and customers understand the product.”

Madison Stein, Product Marketing Manager at Envoy

“Personally, as a tech PMM. Product marketing extracts the financial, emotional and business value that a customer can get from a bunch of code and positions that value as effectively as possible - taking into account competition, market pulse and internal sentiment - to grow revenue.”

Sid Bhatia, Product Marketing Manager at App Annie

“Product marketing is about understanding customers, shaping the product narrative and marketing plans, and accelerating product adoption and usage.”

Michael Eckstein, Product Marketing Manager at Buffer

“Product marketing is the hub for all things related to product—driving sales enablement, product launches, messaging and positioning, customer success, content development and management, and heavily supporting revenue goals.”

Bryan Blackburn, Product Marketing Manager at ServiceNow Inc.

“I always think of product marketing as a translation, communication and collaboration layer. You start with translation, making sense of what we’re building, why we’re building it and the desired outcome of the build. Following that, it’s about communicating this in the right way, to the right people.

“Marketing teams need a different view of the story to what CSMs need and so on. The cadence at which you communicate with these groups is also key and feeds into the collaboration layer. It’s all about teamwork and making sure people are enabled and empowered to do their jobs and direct their skills in a way that’s going to better the overall output.”

Emma Shanahan, Product Marketing Manager at Later

(People) Managers of Product Marketing

“Product marketing is the company's voice of the customer. It helps organizations to create value internally and externally by collaborating closely primarily with Sales, Marketing and Products, and with all other company stakeholders.”

Igor Kranjčec, Product Marketing Lead at Lemax

“The discipline of orchestrating coordinated go-to-market strategies and their execution for products/services across disparate functions within an organization.”

Matt Noyes, Product Marketing Lead at Total Expert

“Product marketing is the bridge between buyers and users.”

Yvonne Chow, Product Marketing Leader at Hootsuite

“PMM brings to life the voice of the market internally and the voice of the product externally, so new and existing customers can discover, adopt, and get value from the product.”

Jasmine Jaume, Group Product Marketing Manager at Intercom

“Product marketing provides the partition for all departments to have a common symphony when referring to any products a company offers.”

Cristelle Delaporte, Global Product Marketing Lead at Emarsys

“Product marketing helps companies get the right product, to the right person, at the right time.”

Evelyn Watts, Head of Product Marketing at Shopify

“Product marketing sits at the intersection of sales, product marketing, and the customer and is a key stakeholder in the GTM process.”

Vandana Mehra, Head of Product Marketing at RollWorks

Senior Product Marketing Managers

“The meeting point of strategy and empathy within a company that sources revenue opportunities through product, sales, and marketing initiatives.”

Fiona Finn, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Unbounce

“It is the process of taking a product/feature to the market, by addressing the right customers with the right message and the right channel among others.”

Akshath Dorai, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Freshbooks

“Product marketing translates the voice of the customer into a great narrative.”

Katherine Vasilopoulos, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Amazon

“The role of product marketing is centered on representing the voice of the customer (current and target) in GTM strategy and herding many, many cats.”

Sean Broderick, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Upland Software

“Product marketing is the voice of the customer internally and the voice of the product externally.”

Orinna Weaver, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Intercom

“Product marketing is the glue that brings disparate stakeholders together, to deliver customer satisfaction, commercial impact, and product health.”

Alicia Carney, Head of B2B Product Marketing at Deliveroo

“PMM is a function that develops deep expertise in customer needs, market trends and product capability to develop and execute a GTM roadmap for a particular product or portfolio.

“I often describe my job as part matchmaker (best fit for client and product), part storyteller (building a message that resonates), and part advocate (being the constant internal voice to the team for my solution set and creating tools to help others advocate as well).”

Meredith Wisniewski, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Morningstar

“We’re the interface between product/engineering and sales/marketing. Product marketing owns positioning, messaging, and maybe pricing.”

Justin Pirie, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Twilio

Directors of Product Marketing

“Product marketing enables the salesforce, analysts, and marketing team to take a solution, explain why it's impactful, and spread that message to our intended audience for maximum exposure.”

Sara Kingsley, Director of Product Marketing at Securonix

“PMM is the strategic arm of marketing that sits in the middle of Product, Sales, and Marketing teams. We increase product adoption and value, enable sales to put their best foot forward at all times, and drive the sales pipeline.”

Amit Bhojraj, Director of Product Marketing at Auth0

“Product marketing is about tapping into the soul of an organization, using competitor and customer analysis to build and communicate products that solve customer pain points.”

Marc Fuentes, Director of Product Marketing and eCommerce at Livingston International Inc.

“Product marketing is the process of bringing a product to market and the market to product.

"This includes understanding customer needs, deciding the product's positioning and messaging, launching features or products, and ensuring salespeople and customers understand its usage and value.”

Ricardo Tenorio, Branding and Growth Team at Yuca

“Product marketing represents the voice of the customer to the organization, helping create better products internally, and creating the strategy and materials to ensure the products resonate with the market.”

Angus Maclaurin, Director of Product Marketing at View, Inc.

“Product marketing sits at the center of product, revenue, and marketing, influencing all parties to ensure the company is building and selling valuable products to our ideal customers.”

Katie Dettman O'Brien, Director of Product Marketing at 4C Insights

“Product Marketing identifies and defines the target market, primary buying personas and their buying process, using empathy to connect products with customer challenges and craft compelling solution stories.

We wrap it all up in a comprehensive go-to-market strategy that starts before the customer realises their problem, and ends with customer expansion and product retirement.”

Andrew Hatfield, Vice President of Marketing at Arrikto

“The alignment of Product, Marketing & Sales to solve problems our customers are facing in the market.”

Yoni Solomon, Director of Product Marketing at G2

“The role of product marketing is to help bring a product to market in the most successful way possible and that can take different shapes: doing market & customer research to inform product development and roadmap, creating education that trains internal teams to drive awareness of the product, and creating materials that resonate in market and with our buyers to name a few.”

Megan Haddad, Director of Product Marketing at Nielsen

“Product marketers are the connectors inside an organization. They sit at the center of product, marketing, sales, customer success, strategy, and multiple other functions and help connect the dots between them.

“The product marketer is the company's chief storyteller, responsible for crafting and communicating the value of the product to the customer.”

Seiyonne Suriyakumar, Director of Product Marketing at Dropbox

VPs of Product Marketing

“To be a successful PMM, you have to do two things really well. Firstly, build great relationships with other teams internally. Nothing we work is done in a vacuum and collaboration is at the core of every project - so make friends!

"Secondly, think of people, not features. Whether you sell B2C or B2B is irrelevant - you sell to people. Listen to them, understand them, speak their language. The human element of marketing is probably the most important as a PMM.”

Sarah Din, VP of Product Marketing at Unbabel

“Product marketing enables business strategy by aligning products/services (current or future) to customers and manages positioning/messaging, as well as GTM efforts to generate growth.

“It’s about communicating, so sales reps and customers understand the product, its benefits, and why it’s important to use or purchase. This involves a constant cycle of engagement, planning and GTM efforts. So, in a nutshell, I’d say it’s the hub of how companies can successfully grow or utilize methods strategically.”

Natalie Malevsky, VP of Product Marketing at Culture Trip

“Product marketing connects the dots between the product and the market and should always consider the needs of the customer.”

Jamie Crouch, VP of Product Marketing at RealPage, Inc.

“As a product marketer, I look at myself as the voice of the customer and user. I have to get into their minds so I can help guide the product to a more useful role.”

Jodie Wierzbicki, VP of Product Marketing at Kroll

“The role of a product marketer is to understand the needs of the customer, before designing and building a product that meets them. Then, it’s our responsibility to position the product for other customers with similar needs.”

Darren Reid, Director of Marketing and Alliances at Interactive Pty Ltd

“Product marketing is a function that works at the intersection of the customers, the broad market, the product, the sales/revenue team and the rest of the marketing organization.

“It’s responsible for understanding and steering product-market fit, enabling the sales/revenue team with messaging and content that articulates how the product/solution solves urgent customer needs and helping amplify that message through broad marketing programs - brand, demand gen, website, content strategy, AR/PR, etc.”

Chris Mills, VP of Product Marketing at SalesLoft

“Product marketing is formed by creative storytelling grounded in data-driven insights. Product marketers know their customers, know those customers' problems and the language they use to speak about them. We also know our products and how those products can be leveraged (alone or together) as a solution for customers. We use insights to convey value with messaging that matters for each audience.”

Jessica Munoz, VP of Product Marketing at LiveIntent, Inc.

“Product marketing focuses on distilling product strategy and capabilities into effective positioning and messaging that drives GTM execution.”

Jon Rooney, SVP of Product and Solutions at New Relic

“Product marketing is a master translator between market and company, product and customers, and revenue teams and product.”

Vincent Lo, VP of Product Marketing at Klue

A special guest appearance...

Before we check out how interpretations of product marketing differ amongst PMMs at B2B and B2C companies, let’s take a look at how April Dunford, positioning maestro (and featured author in our PMM reading list 😉) defines PMM… ⭐️

B2B vs B2C definitions

It’s pretty clear there’s a clear discrepancy between how product marketers define their role, irrespective of whether they’re an Associate Product Marketer, or a VP of Product Marketing at the peak of their powers.

How about B2B and B2C? Are there any clear differences between how the role’s defined, depending on where they’ve pitched their PMM tent?

First up to the plate: the B2B market. 👀

A B2B perspective

“Product marketing enables business strategy by aligning products/services (current or future) to customers and manages positioning/messaging and GTM efforts to generate growth.

“It’s about communicating so sales and customers understand the product/the benefits and why it’s important to use/purchase. And this is a constant cycle of engagement/planning and GTM efforts. It’s really the hub of how companies can successfully grow or utilize strategically.”

Jayne-Marie Pooley, Global Product Marketing Director at Kantar

“Product marketing is the bridge between cross-functional collaboration with sales, marketing and product teams. It’s about telling the story, value proposition and ultimately advocating for the voice of the customer.”

Chloe Nicholls, Product Marketing Manager at SimilarWeb

“Product marketing brings products to life through storytelling and engagement with the appropriate audience.”

Cathy Hill, VP of Marketing at Circa

“Product marketing is storytelling. It is able to tell a story of how a product solves a specific business problem in the language that resonates with the client.”

Rita Jackson, VP of Product Marketing at MuleSoft

“Product marketing revolves around the ability to efficiently increase product adoption in the market. This includes market research (customer, competitive, and market trends), GTM planning, cross-functional alignment, sales enablement, launch activities, and measurement.”

David Flores, Product Marketer at Zoom

“Product marketing is collaborating with internal teams to bring a product or a new feature to the market and overseeing its overall success.”

Alessandra Sessa, Product Marketing Specialist at MailUp

“We help a product grow leveraging packaging, pricing, promotions, messaging and positioning.”

Chirag Dhull, Principal Head of Product Marketing at Amazon Web Services

“Product marketing is the growth engine of the company, navigating and orchestrating the needs, wants, and desires of the customer, the product team and revenue teams to drive impact and the bottom line.”

Lisa Travnik, Director of Revenue Operations at RevenueWell

“We look at what the customer needs and work backwards to market solutions that provide them the desired outcomes.”

Lisa Abbott, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Amazon Web Services

“Product marketers highlight attributes of a product that your customers care about, through compelling messaging, visuals, and storytelling.”

Libby Friede, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Better Place Forests

“Product marketing drives the creation of GTM strategies aligned to company growth goals and acts as the glue between marketing, sales and product to execute and measure the effectiveness of those strategies.”

Kim Loughead, VP of Product Marketing at Celigo

“PMMs position products in a way that makes customers want to learn more and makes it easier for sales to sell them.”

Tiffany Tooley, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Salesforce

“The art and science of strategic marketing; at the core you understand your customers and their needs and act as the translation layer between the product and what these users would find valuable, at every interaction with your brand.”

Patricia Vidal, Director of Product Marketing at Prezi

“A product marketer is the person who is the custodian of the message, gets products to market, drives adoption who represents the voice of the customer.”

Phill Brougham, Product Marketing Manager at Trint

So, we’ve checked out definitions of product marketing from all corners of the B2B realm; it’s only fair to give the B2C community their right of reply, right? 😉

A B2C perspective

“Product marketing is about listening to customers, the industry, and product teams to form consistent positioning, messaging, and content to be consumed internally and externally to support KPIs. The output needs to constantly evolve and improve with changes to the product and industry trends.”

Jennifer Dyment, Product Marketing Manager at Datawire.io

“PMM is the function responsible for reverse engineering successful product and business outcomes by delivering strategies, processes, and content that fuel smart product development and effective go-to-market execution.”

Jim Milton, ex-Head of Product Strategy

“Product marketing communicates the needs of the market, presenting products as solutions.”

Gad Mimran, Product Marketing Manager at Yoyo Wallet

“Product marketing is about knowing the user better than anyone on the team, knowing their voice and knowing their needs and connecting that to the product being built and the way you talk to them.”

Nadav Charnilas, Head of Product Marketing at Wix

“We’re the holistic voice of the customer, internally and externally.”

Sean Merriweather, VP of Product Marketing at Publicis Media

“Product marketers assist the product, sales and customer teams with research, insights and content.”

Raghunandan Yerram, Product Marketing Manager at Kore.ai

“The role of product marketing is to help bring a product to market in the most successful way possible and that can take different shapes: doing market & customer research to inform product development and roadmap, creating education that trains internal teams to drive awareness of the product, and creating materials that resonate in market and with our buyers to name a few.”

Megan Haddad, Director of Product Marketing at Nielsen

“As a Product Marketing Manager, it's my job to help bring technology (both products and services) to market. From establishing buyer personas, to positioning and messaging, I work directly with Product, Sales, Customer Support and, of course, Marketing, to drive demand, adoption, usage, and retention.”

Mark Assini, Product Marketing Manager at Voices.com

“It’s our responsibility to engage customers with stories about our product, our community and what we're doing to make our users better at what they do.”

Kirk Bentley, Business Development Director at WordFly

“Product marketing is the connective tissue between product, sales, and other marketing areas. We shape and inform how to sell a product by translating feature functionality into value propositions.”

Jessica Materna, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Litmus

“PMM is the advocate for customers' voice, the story teller for products, and enabler of all touch points between a company and a user.”

Shivang Gupta, Global Product Marketing Manager at ViSenze

“Product marketing is The juxtaposition of all teams, the central node, the team that takes beautiful engineering and defines how it will go to market, because we understand humans.”

Stephen Burg, Product Marketing Manager at Cyberbit

“Product marketing is like a product whisperer and an emergency nurse keeping track of the product pulse, but without a seat at the operation table.”

Anna Kovalenko, Product Marketing Manager at NMI

“Product marketing is the bridge between marketing, product and sales teams; we help establish a better market fit and build go to market strategies.”

Pauline Verpillat, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Meilleurs Agents

“Product marketing differs from company to company but if I had to give a concise definition, I'd say product marketing is the process of bringing a product and its target users together.”

David Lim, Product Marketing Consultant for High-Growth Companies

Physical and SaaS definitions

B2B and B2C companies bring a whole host of products to market, with some orgs specializing in the delivery of a SaaS product, while others hone their skills on solving a customer’s pain points with a physical product.

Before we check out PMM definitions amongst product marketers producing physical products, here’s how their SaaS counterparts define the industry.

A SaaS perspective

“Product marketing is the set of activities responsible for the success and growth of a product.”

Francesco Goldoni, Global Product Manager at Doxee

“PMMs are responsible for owning and creating the entire go-to market strategy for a company’s product portfolio, and leading the execution of this go-to market strategy across a number of key areas.”

Jason Coari, Head of Global Product Marketing at 1E

“We shape the strategic narrative and provide the fuel for marketing and sales.”

Liza Collin, Market Readiness Director at Visma

“Product marketing successfully markets a product to drive new annual recurring revenue, and upsells, if applicable.”

Mohan Kompella, VP of Product Marketing at BigPanda

“Product marketing represents the voice of current and targeted customers in a go-to-market strategy.”

Stephanie Perozo, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Contentful

“A PMM is the Chief Marketing Officer of their product, in the way that a PM is CEO. Neither have direct reports and instead must lead by influence, but each is the final owner and directly responsible individual for their area of ownership - GTM for PMM and research and development for the PM.”

William Chia, Senior Product Marketing Manager at GitLab

“Product marketing is about defining the product strategy and life-cycle and how that is presented to customers.”

Cindy Lockwood, Sales and Product Lead at The Attic

“Product marketers are the conduit between product and sales, responsible for telling the stories of products in the marketplace.”

Gwen Eder, Senior Product Marketing Specialist at UL

“PMMs drive revenue influence of products throughout the customer lifecycle.”

David Panek, VP of Product Marketing at Epsilon

“As product marketers, we sell behavior change and justify switching costs by triggering buying emotions.”

Daniel Palay, Product Marketing Consultant and B2B Buyer Persona Expert

“Product marketers connect the dots between everybody and bring value to customers through their story telling, messaging, positioning, competitive intelligence, analyst relations, pricing and packaging in order to help a company grow by increasing win rates, net dollar retention and expansion revenue.”

Natalie Louie, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Zuora

“Product marketing is one ahead of market trends and is able to influence the company's direction based on that knowledge.”

Giulia De Mattia, Product Marketing Manager at Anyline

“PMMs bring a product to market and define the positioning, messaging and value proposition in a way that internal stakeholders, customers, and prospects will understand.”

Kendra Morton, Product Marketing Manager at Flexera Software

“We create compelling value propositions and deliver them through a variety of means, ranging from presentations to tweets to demos to whitepapers.”

Al Sargent, Head of Product Marketing at InfluxData

“Product marketing teams understand customer needs and pain points, and delight them by bringing to market products that solve their problems.”

Shilpi Sneha, Product Marketing Manager at Cisco Meraki

A physical product perspective

“Product Management and research and development gets products on the shelf, while product marketing owns strategy (and some of the execution) to get it off the shelf.”

Logan Franey, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Dynatrace

“Voice of the market in the product, voice of the product in the market.”

Milind Khandare, Director of Product Marketing at SoFi

“Product marketing is formed of storytellers who help users understand what we do and how we can make their life better.”

Mike Nagel, Manager of Customer and Product Marketing at Evertrue

“PMMs can clearly communicate the value and differentiation of the product, empower their colleagues to share that message (whether through sales collateral or updates to clients) and know when the market requires the product or messaging to pivot, or be re-evaluated entirely.”

Madelaine Jack, Product Marketing Lead at Mercatus Technologies Inc.

“The product marketeer is the interface between product, marketing and other related roles. He/she is the one that knows the product by heart and can translate all the features etc in a way to make it appealing to the audience.”

Johannes Klug, Head of Product Marketing at Bareways

“Product marketing is the group that serves internal customers on behalf of external customers and is the grout between every internal customer-facing function.”

Kimberly Pfluger, Director of Product Marketing at The Predictive Index

“In terms of outgoing responsibilities, product marketers communicate the value of a product. Internally, we bring feedback to the product team.”

Marek Jednaszewski, Product Marketing Manager at GeoSpark

“Product Marketing shapes the positioning of products, leads go-to-market strategies to successfully launch and relaunch products, and is the glue in an organization to enable all teams - sales, customers success, operations, etc. to grow the business.”

Laura Sanchez-Chaparro, Senior Product Marketing Manager at CentralReach

“It’s the responsibility of a product marketer to tie yourself to a product and being involved in the entirety of its lifecycle.”

Shant Abdo, Head of Growth at Dailies App

“PMM is marketing that specifically supports products, how to advertise and target specific customers for these products.”

Nicole Gabelbauer, Marketing Manager at The Angelus Corporation

“Product marketing is where marketing, product, and sales meet. It's the process of bringing a product to market, promoting it, and selling to customers.”

Paige Sutherland, Product Marketing Manager at Vendasta

“Product Marketing is a function that brings in customer insights in product development and delivers on growth ambition for the product by understanding customer needs and addressing them through marketing campaigns/tactics.”

Aashima Praveen, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Revolut

“A team that figures out how to say the right thing, at the right time, to the right people, with the right medium to drive business results.”

Jarvis Karel, Product Marketing Manager at OutMatch HCM

“Product marketers know customers and decision makers best to figure out what is valuable to them and make sure they understand it in every touch point they have with the company and/or product.”

Director of Product and Product Marketing at Rev Worldwide

“Product marketing works with people across the business to drive a consistent and compelling message to customers and the market.”

Jeff Beckham, Director of Product and Content Marketing at Mixpanel

Do PMM definitions alter as companies progress?

Opinions and outlooks can change with time; the likelihood is, looking back 10-years, our mindset and thought processes have altered, somewhat.

With this in mind, could this philosophy be applied to companies with varying degrees of experience when defining product marketing?

Early pre-product market fit

“Product marketing is about reaching the user where they are at with products that matter to them.”

Reuben Raman, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Splice

“Product marketing involves both inbound (translating customer & market trends to product vision) and outbound (translating product portfolio into marketing collateral), in order to help sales win deals.”

Olaf Gietelink, VP of Product Marketing at TomTom Automotive

“Product marketing takes care of what we sell and to whom, with the right words and the right positioning, and makes sure that Sales are well trained.”

Laure Piekielko, Product Marketing Manager at Toucan Toco

“Product marketing is the process of bringing a product to market. This includes deciding the product's positioning and messaging, launching the product, and ensuring salespeople and customers understand it.”

Subhayu Chatterjee, Global VP of Products at GreyOrange Pte Ltd.

“Product Marketing is the science and art of bringing information to the masses. That may be internal or external, but the information has to be timely, relevant, just enough, but not too much, and with a clear CTA. It's product marketing's role to bring people to want to interact with the company for more information.”

Kristin Dyer, Senior Product Marketing Manager at edX

“PMM is a non-stop communication between a company and its existing and potential customers, that helps to build and deliver products that people love.”

Irina Peregud, Product Marketing Manager at Alterra.ai

“Product marketing ensures all different teams march to the beat of the same drum. From product launches to expansion campaigns and everything in between, product marketing acts as the quarterback for every step in the process.”

Allison Rona, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Concord

“Product marketing is the foundation of the GTM strategy. It unites product functionality with market reality and is responsible for helping people understand what, why them, and why now.”

Spencer Grover, Senior Product Marketing Manager at LevelJump.io

“Product marketing is the job of translating clearly the technical product message into a story that shows customers how this product solves their problems in a unique way in order to drive sales and grow the business according to predetermined KPIs.”

JeriAnn May, Senior Product Marketing Manager Consultant at Aventi Group

“Product marketing is the strategic arm of marketing that enables product to accelerate their decisions and sales to operate more efficiently.”

Glen German, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Assurance IQ

Early post-product market fit

“PMMs romanticize the product to demonstrate value to a company’s user, customers, and prospects.”

Scott Shapiro, Head of Account Management & B2B Customer Experience, Principal Product Marketer at Qualtrics

“Product marketers help to develop the positioning, messaging, pricing, packaging, and strategy to get products to market and ensure they reach the right customers.”

Sophie Asher, Director of Product Marketing at Productboard

“We create new ways to convince and attract customers to use your product.”

Olatunji Obaoye, Product Manager at Sanimara

“Product marketers liaise with sales and product teams to create value for buyers and bring products to market.”

Laura Elliston, Product Marketing Manager at Sidetrade

“As PMMs, we know customer's problems, build messaging around the problems the product solves, whilst also focusing on strategic and tactical planning for GTM.”

Jeff Geoffroy, Director of Product Marketing

“Product marketing is the practice of understanding and segmenting customer needs, product capabilities, and translating that understanding into messaging and strategy for reaching those customers.”

David Isquick, Director of Product Marketing at Optimizely

“The product marketing function drives go-to-market for solutions, campaigns, and products. This includes sales enablement, evangelism, and building foundational blocks like positioning/messaging, market research, and customer/competitor intelligence.”

Harry Chawla, Head of Corporate and Product Marketing at Reciprocity, Inc.

“We inject the POV of the customer into the product, and market the product to the customer in the most effective way.”

Brittany Branscomb, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Lyft

“Product marketing is the process of bringing a product to market and helping sales to sell the product to the right customer.

"PMMs are responsible for creating the product's positioning and messaging, launching the product, and ensuring salespeople and customers understand it. Product marketing aims to drive the demand and usage of the product.

“We’re responsible for developing positioning, messaging, competitive differentiation, and enabling the Sales and Marketing teams as well as helping Customer Success teams with expansions and customer retention.”

Ranna Unthank, Product Marketer at Stage 4 Solutions

“Product marketing teams create a strategy for product to roll out, and enable commercial teams to sell the product, supporting this strategy with marketing activation.”

Bárbara Ribó Sangés, Product Marketing Manager at Zappi

Mid-growth with established go-to-market team

“Product marketing achieves customer acquisition, satisfaction and loyalty, while safeguarding the benefits of the company.”

Juan Solís, Product Marketing Specialist at Uponor

“It’s a glue that sticks everything together and delivers the value of the product to customers.”

Anna Shutko, Product Marketing Manager at Supermetrics

“Product marketing is the true nature of the marketing activity where the focus is much more about strategy than tactics. Is all about creating value to the market.”

Felipe Cardoso Barbosa, Product Marketing Manager at Cortex

“PMMs build positioning, messaging, and strategy for impactful reach (and conversion of) prospects & customers.”

Erin Jones, Senior Product Marketing Manager at xMatters, Inc.

“PMMs take ownership of the entire lifecycle of a product for the success of the portfolio.”

Gaurav Joshi, Product Marketing Manager at GC America, Inc.

“Product marketing strengthens alignment between what the company delivers and what the market needs.”

Sonya Noronha, Product Marketing Manager at Street Contxt

“Product marketing involves strategy, revenue driver setting, master product evangelists, as well as GTM planners and partners with Product, Sales and Marketing.”

Dale Schweppe, Product Marketing Lead - IoT Solutions at T-Mobile

“Product marketing teams are connecting between Product, Marketing, Business and Sales, making sure we deliver one aligned messaging across all channels, and speaking in terms of values, not features.”

Lital Piker, Product Marketing Manager at Payoneer

“Our craft is influenced by building a product story worth telling, and telling that story to colleagues and the world.”

Product Marketing Manager at Ably Realtime

“Actions at the intersection of defined consumer demand for specific products that moves another from consideration to buyer on the customer journey.”

Erica Dias, VP of Product Marketing at SAFE Credit Union

“PMMs have a deep understanding of the product and the target customer, and develop and execute strategies to connect the two.”

Ali McCourt Turhal, Director of Product Marketing at Stitch Fix

“Product marketers research customers to determine what gaps we have in our range to make life better for them.”

Karen Fuller, Services Marketing Manager at Asaleo Care

“We’re the nexus of Marketing, Sales and Product, with the customer outcome at the desirable core, revenue potential at the viable core and business rationality at the feasible core. Product marketers are the sensible voice in the room that asks ‘why?’”

Rachael Hooper, Senior Product Marketing Manager at MessageMedia

“Product marketing is the shepherd that guides.”

Daniella Latham, Product Marketing Manager at Kahoot!

“Product marketing is the function that connects Product, Sales, Marketing, and Support/Customer Success together.

"We’re responsible for understanding the marketplace and competitive landscape and use this knowledge to help the Product Manager/Team define and position the product, understand our USPs and the value they offer our target customers/buyers/users, and ensure the Marketing Team understands the messages we want to convey (to each persona)."

Ryan Hughes, Product Marketing Manager at IPV

“As product marketers, we enable the customers in our respective markets to view, feel and adopt the products.”

Jyothish Jayan, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Insider

Late growth/scale-up

"Product marketing ensures the business delivers the right product to the right customer.”

Kristin Freire, Product and Content Marketing at League, Inc.

“We make our company’s product look better, bigger, and easier.”

Julien Sauvage, VP of Product Marketing at Talend

“Product marketing is a strategic marketing role that requires an understanding of the product and various audiences and customers, both internal and external.”

Bonnie Pecevich, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Mux

“Product marketing ensures the company builds products that customers will want, creating value propositions that matter.”

Jean Huy, Head of Product Marketing at Cegid Group

“We're the missing puzzle piece between product and marketing! PMMs help product teams do their best work and help marketing make the best of the product.”

Felix Glahn, Product Marketing Manager at PayFit Deutschland

“Product marketing is the set of activities and strategies behind bringing a product to market, including commercialization, differentiated messaging, and continuous feedback loop with customers.”

Joanne Miguel, Consulting Partner at Emis Partners

“PMMs bring a product to the market with success. Though, the definition of success can be broad, as it’s up to your company to define ‘success’. For me, it is all about surprising your customer and exceeding expectations.”

Felix Chretien, Product Marketing Manager at Flexperto

“Product marketers are the perennial jack of all trades, master of none.

“We use a variety of content formats and interpersonal techniques to bridge the gap between products, marketing, customer success, sales, and the customer in order to bring clarity, unity, and compelling narratives to the products we create.”

Kyle Donley, Senior Product Marketing Manager at TechTarget

“We’re the lynchpin between Product, Sales, and Marketing. The facilitator of messaging and value based propositions to drive awareness and revenue.”

Natalie Mackay, Product Marketing Associate at Fieldwire

“Product marketers investigate and communicate the best way to talk to our customers about how our products can benefit them.

“The work commonly falls into four areas: buyer and market insights, narrative & content development, sales enablement, campaign support.”

Renu Martingale, Head of Product Marketing at Redgate Software

So, there you have it! A deluge of definitions of the exact same thing. Pretty crazy, right?

Wanna add your interpretation of product marketing? Awesome! We’d love to hear your thoughts! Comment below and contribute to the never-ending debate. 👇