Product Managers vs Product Marketing Managers: Transferrable Skills in Connected Yet Separate Jobs

Hello! After attending #20WIP last week* I was inspired to write down my takeaways.

I noticed the theme of finding your own strengths. I also noticed that a lot of the talks and my fellow attendees said that they entered the field of Product Management from various backgrounds. Not everyone starts out in Software Development or Business Administration! This was a big relief to me because I’m starting from Marketing; most recently, Product Marketing. I have personally experienced that there are a lot of overlaps between Marketing and Product and this is even more apparent as a PMM. Come on: it’s Product.Marketing.

This may not be as apparent to others in the Product field or to Recruiters and Hiring Managers. If you haven’t worked in Marketing, you may be unaware of how closely marketing decisions are related to business goals and strategy. Since I have worked both on Marketing teams and Product teams, I thought I’d share my perspective with you!

Of course, there are many other people who have written about the career change and overlap between PMs and PMMs. This is my take on it and I hope you learn something new.

Here are two examples of how these roles are similar yet different, connected yet separate, transferrable yet stationary.

Responsibilities of a Product Marketing Manager:

• Become ridiculously familiar with potential customers and target personas.
• Understand the wants and needs of your target audience and how the product will appeal to them.
• Create strategies to reach your target customer; test and re-test new strategies often.
• Execute a campaign from start to finish, including initial outreach and retrospectives for improvement.
• Work cross-functionally with designers, sales people, business leaders, tech and website managers, and customer experience teams to deliver campaigns and meet strategic goals.

Responsibilities of a Product Manager:

• Become ridiculously familiar with potential customers by developing target personas.
• Understand the wants and needs of your target audience and how the product will appeal to them.
• Create a product for your target customer; test and re-test new product features often.
• Develop a product from start to finish, including early research and retrospectives for improvement.
• Work cross-functionally with marketing, designers, sales people, business leaders, tech and website managers, and customer experience teams to improve your product and meet strategic goals.

Maybe I made these lists purposefully similar. Maybe not. (Hint: I did.) So, I’ll take two of these points and compare them across both Product and Marketing.

1. Create for your target customer. Test and re-test often.

In order to work on anything for your ideal consumer—product, marketing campaign, customer service, sales pitch, website—it is imperative to understand who that is. How they think, what they value, why they trust, who they admire, and where they buy.

Then, whether you’re responsible for the product or for marketing, you apply your duties toward crafting just for that persona. Once you have a viable test item (a product or a campaign message), test it with an audience segment. Continuously test, in circles, in order to improve, learn, and change what you’re offering.

The approaches and skills I just described here could easily be said of either a Product Manager or a Product Marketing Manager! Once you see the overlap in responsibilities, it gets more difficult to differentiate between them. Let’s try another, where the differences are more obvious.

2. Manage work from start to finish, including initial conversations and postmortem feedback.

So this one is more fine-tuned depending on your duties. As a PM, you’ll focus on the development, the “what” and “why,” and the actual parts of the product (whether physical or digital). As a PMM, you spend your days on campaigns, messaging, and all the tactics in between.

Yet, the similarities cannot be ignored! As a PMM or PM, managing a team and coordinating aspects of a product or campaign often include few to no direct reports. Your success relies on influence between teams and deliverables. And the ability to rally different people toward a common goal is super important. In fact, both a PMM and a PM role might be responsible for initial research.

While a PMM might instead focus on “Why should our target audience care about our great product?” rather than “Why are we building this great product for the target audience?” the start-to-finish dedication is just as necessary. And the feedback and retrospective session after a campaign launch or product release are key for both roles to understand any improvements or future goals.

Essentially, both Marketing and Product are business functionalities within a company. They are both focused on meeting high-level goals through strategic alignment and customer empathy.

Should you find yourself in either position, I hope this will give you more perspective into how each role can help each other. Yes, we can all get along! Maybe we’re not so different after all.

*I attended Women In Product’s 2020 Conference for free because I was compensated for my ticket by volunteering during one of the event days.