Enhance success with strategic product management and marketing

Highlights

You’ll learn about the importance of:

• Early involvement: Engage product marketers and managers early for deeper product insight
• Cross-department collaboration: Work with engineering, sales and support teams for innovative solutions
• Clear roles: Define roles based on strengths, not titles
• Transparency: Maintain open communication with regular updates and feedback loops
• KPI monitoring: Measure and adjust strategies for optimal performance
• Contentstack solution: Use Contentstack's CMS for consistent channel content, efficient collaboration and improved product data management

Transform your approach to product management and marketing today.

Keep reading to learn more!

Like Rome, creating successful products in a single day is impossible—it takes time and effort. Many teams and stakeholders work together to create a product that everyone envies and two such roles are product management and marketing. These two might seem similar but are worlds apart even though both are after the same things—a great product, satisfied customers and a profitable company. 

The product management and marketing departments work closely to ensure smoother interactions between the product and its users. But did you know that where product management ends, product marketing begins?

To clarify the confusion, this article covers the difference between product management vs product marketing, how they work together and where they find common ground. 

What is product management?

Product management guides every step of your product’s journey, helping you deliver within budget and on time while hitting business goals. Product managers combine engineering, marketing, user experience and design to bring products to life. From brainstorming and market research to development, launch and even post-launch tweaks and improvements—product management takes care of everything. 

Most product managers understand their business plan, market and audience to deliver high-quality products. Depending on the company, product managers may need IT skills and technical expertise to manage their product strategy.

What is product marketing?

Product marketing is the process of bringing products to the marketplace to drive demand. It’s all about getting the word out about a new product or service. Using various marketing programs and tactics, a product marketer builds awareness, grows revenue and increases sales. Product marketing creates your product’s images and builds a position in the market before launching the product.

Product management vs product marketing

Roles and responsibilities of a product marketing manager and product manager

Roles and responsibilities of a product marketing manager

A product marketing marketer (PMM) ensures a product's successful launch and reception to the market. Their primary responsibilities include:

• Driving product awareness
• Creating and building the product’s image and branding
• Developing and executing go-to-market plans
• Creating sales enablement material
• Planning and managing product launches
• Managing the product’s online community and presence
• Analyzing market trends
• Developing a deep understanding of the competitor and market
• Creating blogs, guides and case studies to educate customers

Roles and responsibilities of a product manager

A product manager (PM) shapes your product’s vision to match the company’s strategic goals and meet customer needs. Their primary responsibilities include:

• Researching the market to understand customer needs, requirements and market trends
• Bringing together what the company wants and what customers say and choosing features to add to the product
• Coordinating and communicating about a product or service with management and stakeholders
• Making sure the product and its features fit the customer's requirements
• Gathering and analyzing feedback from customers
• Creating multi-year roadmaps for products

Common causes of the friction between product management and marketing

Recognizing and addressing the common cause of the friction between product management and marketing helps your product succeed:

Misaligned goals and objectives

The roles and responsibilities of product managers and product marketing managers differ. PMs work on product features and help you solve product problems, while PMMs work on market readiness and user engagement. 

Lack of clear communication channels

When PMs and PMMs don’t interact with each other, misconceptions and misinterpretations seep into your teams, drifting you away from your objectives. Without set protocols, several bottlenecks and hitches occur in the product’s life cycle and marketing processes.

Discrepancies in timing and approaches

Product launch timelines set by PMs might not always sync with the marketing schedules planned by PMMs. This misalignment creates friction due to conflicting approaches in product release cycles, leading to rushed or delayed marketing campaigns.

Unclear role definitions

Lack of clear roles and responsibilities causes the duties of two or more people to overlap. When there are no well-defined roles, there is likely to be a conflict, and the two teams will pull the wrong strings, which lowers productivity.

Resource constraints

Limited resources can strain both teams as they struggle to meet their goals. Whether it’s budget limitations or personnel shortages, insufficient resources can heighten tensions, especially when both teams compete for the same resources to achieve their objectives.

How does Contentstack help product management and marketing?

Contentstack solves many problems for product marketers and managers. It provides an easy-to-use headless content management system (CMS) that allows quick updates and keeps content consistent across all channels. 

Product marketers can deliver tailored content with personalization features for increased user engagement and conversion rates. Plus, it integrates with marketing automation tools for smooth and efficient campaign management, ensuring relevant content at every customer journey stage. 

With Contentstack, you create localized content, helping you adapt to market changes. It enhances efficiency and scalability, making it perfect for large-scale marketing efforts and product launches.

Case study: How MoneyHero Group transformed product data management with Contentstack's headless CMS

Over the past year, MoneyHero Group streamlined how it manages product data by improving its game with Contentstack’s headless CMS. Now, their product data is more organized, consistent and reliable across different markets, which means they can roll out new content faster. The content teams love the bulk and scheduled publishing features because they make updating products quick and easy. Thanks to this smoother process, they've cut their tech stacks from 97 to 20, slashed product release times from six weeks to under a week and improved the customer experience by hitting Web Vitals targets on over 90% of their web pages.

After using Contentstack, Andrew de Ridder, Head of Application Engineering, said:

“Having accurate and up-to-date product data and page content is absolutely critical to a product aggregator and Contentstack is a key tool that helps MoneyHero Group and its various brands manage this mission-critical data. Contentstack also provides many tools and APIs that let the engineers at MoneyHero Group build out exciting and fast user experiences across all our websites.”

Read the full case study here. 

How do product marketers and product managers work together?

Make your product marketers and managers work as early as possible

One reason conflict occurs is that the product marketing team feels they don’t have all the information they need about the product’s strategy, making them ineffective in their work. Only when product marketers know the product details in depth do they encourage their team to pitch the products to prospects. This helps them create collateral pieces that resonate with your target audience. 

Product managers must ensure that the product marketers are included as early as possible— from the product planning stage. When this happens, your marketing team delivers superior marketing messages. 

Focus on cross-departmental collaboration

Working with different departments, such as engineering, sales, and customer support, adds fresh ideas and strategies and helps you build innovative products. Focusing on teamwork taps into different expertise and viewpoints, propelling your business ahead. Cross-departmental collaboration allows you to spot potential issues early, share key insights and develop well-rounded solutions to meet your stakeholders’ needs.

Define the roles and responsibilities

Remove the notion that product managers and marketers feel constrained or restricted because they have to follow a set of responsibilities. Such an approach is unproductive. Why? Your product’s success is at stake, and defining boundaries does more harm than good. While defining roles and responsibilities matter, base these responsibilities on which team and people can perform an outstanding job for a desired set of actions. 

For example, if a product management team member is excellent at creating marketing collaterals that drive conversion—it shouldn’t matter whether creating marketing collateral is a product marketing task. Use this strategy early on in the product planning process to ensure the success of your product. 

Did you know that 80% of product managers are involved in go-to-market decisions and half of them are involved in marketing decisions related to pricing, so, never define responsibilities based on someone’s title or your existing notion of the department they belong to. 

Maintain transparency and communication

Open and consistent communication is key to building trust and keeping everyone on the same page. This means not sharing updates but listening and inviting everyone to contribute. Product teams can create product roadmaps that are accessible to the marketing team and vice-versa. 

Regular updates, team meetings and feedback loops keep misunderstandings at bay, address concerns and build a collaborative spirit. Plus, transparent communication lets you spot potential issues early on, allowing you to tackle them head-on and keep things running.

The more your product management and marketing team communicates, the less confusion there will be and the more successful your products will be. 

Monitor your KPIs

Measuring key performance indicators helps you gain insights into performance. Different teams can adjust strategies to increase performance. For instance, by often checking different KPIs, marketers can identify potential challenges they need to address, spot potential areas of improvement and make decisions to ensure higher productivity. 

FAQs

What is product management in marketing?

Product management in marketing oversees a product’s journey from conception to market delivery, ensuring it meets customer needs and aligns with business objectives.

Does a product manager do marketing?

While product managers focus on product development, they collaborate with product marketing teams to ensure the product's market fit and successful launch.

Are product management and marketing related?

Yes, both functions are interdependent. Product management develops the product, while marketing ensures it reaches and resonates with the target audience.

Learn more

Product marketing and product managers are related job titles because they often contribute to customer success. The key ingredients to customer success are a quality product, a sales strategy and the right messages at the right time. Talk to us today to learn how to link product management and marketing to ensure the products meet the required standards.