Try Googling for ‘product management vs product marketing’, you will see several results around this topic. Now, try ‘product management and product marketing’, you will once again see the same results.

Having worn both the hats, I found that these product doppelgängers are cut from the same cloth and have more similarities than Google leads us to believe. This is an attempt to underscore the common skillsets these product leaders need to be successful.

But before we get into that, let’s first establish what PM and PMM functions do. I am certain that you found enough textbook definitions out there. So, let me instead take an analogy.

Imagine a high-end restaurant...

Product managers are like the head chefs of a restaurant.

Like the head chef coordinates with sous chefs and other workers to create dishes that people love, PM coordinates with developers, UX, and others to create products that people love. The head chef does not make all dishes himself, but they decide the menu and determine the best people to make certain dishes. They create new recipes based on customer feedback, past experiences, and iterative testing. And most importantly they make sure that scrumptious dishes are being served to the customer as quickly as possible.

Product marketers are like restaurant managers.

Typically a restaurant manager is responsible for taking the dishes to the customer. They take care of the ambiance, name & price the dishes, promote the restaurant, engage the customers and collect feedback. Product marketers do something similar for products. They take care of the website, launch new products, market the product, engage and make recommendations to the users, capture customer feedback, and more.

End of the day, both PMs and PMMs want to deliver a delightful experience for the customer. But, neither can succeed without the other. In fact, both these product leaders fundamentally need the same skills to deliver killer products.

Skills every product leader needs:

Develop OCD, the good kind

Product leaders need to be obsessively customer-driven (ocd). When you build or market a feature, you need to think about all kinds of users — power users vs first-time users, techsavvy vs non-techsavvy users, direct vs indirect consumers, web-first vs mobile-first, loyal vs new, and more.

Viewing the product from your lens, or your organisation’s lens is easy. But putting yourself in someone else’s shoe is far more difficult — what’s your customer’s pain point, how do they perceive your product/feature, how will they use it, where will they search for it, what will they look for, how will they talk about it, who do they listen to, etc. It takes immense focus to sift through the various personas and their journeys. That’s why empathetic, customer-first leaders fare very well in product roles.

Embrace minimum viable mindset (MVP, MVM)

Agile is the name of the game in today’s world. Customer preferences, competition, technology, a lot of things change every day. As a product leader, you need to be ready to shift your product/marketing directions on the fly.

For a product manager, that means leading with an MVP mindset, iteratively building the product, choosing a scalable technical solution that can stand the test of time, and constant A/B testing.

For a product marketer, being agile doesn’t look much different. It’s about embracing the minimum viable marketing (MVM) strategies and letting data guide the way. There’s plenty of literature out there on MVP, so here’s one I developed on how to translate minimum viable mindset to marketing. If you want to learn more, check out my talk for the POTOK conference

Let the data compass guide the way

A ship’s captain knows the general direction he wants to head in, but he needs the compass to stay on course and make the right calls. Similarly, product leaders need to pick appropriate KPIs for all their initiatives so that they can use the data compass in moments of uncertainty.

Here are a couple of examples to illustrate how to force data into everyday decisions:

• If an Executive comes to you and says “I need this feature because it will improve customer experience”, the first thing you need to do is verify. Try and understand why they believe that this feature is more important than something else on the roadmap? What is the cost of not fixing this? Do we have data to back this up? If not, how can collect that data? How does this feature’s RICE score compare with other items on the roadmap?
• Similarly, if your demand generation team wants to rerun a campaign this year because it was a success last year, then you once again need to verify. How many leads/opportunities did the campaign generate? What is the cost per lead? How does it compare with other campaigns? Any external factors that can affect this campaign this year? If the results are really good, why not increase the investment?

So, push for data. Always! If you don’t have it, then run A/B tests or surveys to get some data to back up your gut-based decisions with data.

Speaking of data, I’d love to hear your feedback. This is a reflection of my experience building and marketing products. And I realize that these roles take a variety of shapes based on the industry, company, and product lifecycle. So, please share your take on PM vs PMM / PM & PMM in the comments below. Feel free to reach out to me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/nishkadi/ to discuss further.