What does a Product Marketing Manager do?
As discussed previously, great product marketing creates marketing strategies that drive business growth.
So what does that actually mean?
Let’s look at this in terms of both key product marketing responsibilities and the work that is undertaken to get there.
- Conduct customer, market and competitive analysis — this includes analyzing market and competitive data, financials, sales and customer data, and product usage data (behavioral analysis). With this information, you would identify key improvement areas and opportunities for your product, marketing, and business and then create documents or presentations to communicate these ideas.
- Acquire and synthesize customer insights — this includes managing research vendors or teams conducting research for your business, conducting primary research yourself, and analyzing secondary research. With this information, you would synthesize key insights and takeaways.
- Develop strategies based on insights and analysis — you would be responsible for developing the elements in your product marketing strategy and creating presentations to communicate these. You will also create business cases and opportunity sizing in order to determine priorities, which includes creating financial data models and resulting documents.
- Communicate with and influence stakeholders, leadership, and cross-functional teams — in many cases, you work with other teams to execute the marketing strategy so you need to spend time selling ideas and influencing to action. You’ll spend your time here crafting executive presentations and emails and hosting or attending lots of meetings to gain alignment.
- Lead and manage project execution — in some cases, you work with project managers but in most cases, you lead execution of launches and other key initiatives with your cross-functional teams.
The details depend on your company’s specific product marketing role:
These are largely the responsibilities of most product marketing managers, but the balance of your work will be different based on priorities and the initiatives you are focused on in any given time. The balance of your work will also differ based on how product marketing is defined at your company as you may take on more or less hands-on roles in these areas or others. For example, you might be deeply involved in developing the marketing plan or this may be owned by a different team. Here’s a sample day-to-day in the life of a product marketing manager.
How does this description fit with what you have experienced as the role of product marketing managers?
If you’re just starting out in product marketing or considering a career transition, check out my product marketing classes:
- Product Marketing Bootcamp class for new and aspiring marketers to learn the essentials of end-to-end strategic product marketing so they can launch with confidence. Learn more.
- Product Marketing Resume Boost is the only online course that teaches you how to tailor your resume specifically for product marketing manager roles. Learn more.
