We believe the best way to understand these two roles is that they represent a team - indeed, one of the most important teams in an organization when they’re handled properly. So how can we develop a broad-strokes understanding of product management and product marketing - an understanding that allows for the likelihood that if you work in either of these professions, your specific responsibilities will change from company to company? “Don’t let initiatives fall through the cracks because neither product management nor product marketing owns them.” But you don’t work in a hypothetical company, and you never will.
Of course, that’s in a hypothetical company, where these roles are well defined and don’t overlap in any area.
#MARKETING MANAGER HOW TO#
A product marketing manager’s responsibilities could include training the sales force on how to sell the product, creating marketing materials that communicate product features, and developing the marketing tools and campaigns to attract new prospects and customers. A product manager’s responsibilities will often include owning the product’s strategy, developing and maintaining the product roadmap, and conveying the roadmap to the development team to ensure they build the product according to plan.Ī product marketing manager’s primary responsibility is to communicate the product’s value to the market. Failing to define product management and product marketing responsibilities properly can hamper an organization’s ability to develop the best products possible and bring them to market successfully.Īlthough there are rarely such clean lines of responsibility, we can define these two roles for a hypothetical organization in the following way: What is a Product Manager?Ī product manager has ultimate responsibility for the product.
At the same time, another important function might fall through the cracks because neither product management nor product marketing assumes responsibility for it. In some organizations, a product manager and product marketing manager will struggle to own responsibility for a given function. This challenge is compounded by the fact that the roles of product managers and product marketing managers can vary significantly across companies and industries. One of the difficulties of careers in product management and product marketing is that most people-sometimes even these professionals themselves - aren’t sure exactly where their responsibilities begin and end and where they might overlap with each other. Product Manager: Where Do You Draw the Line?