Product Marketing vs. Product Management: Where the Lines Blur and Why It Matters
Product marketing and product management often get lumped together—or worse, confused for the same thing. If you’ve ever wondered, “Aren’t they basically the same people?” you’re not alone. But while they share common ground, their roles, goals, and impact on a company are distinct.
The rise of product marketing as its own discipline didn’t happen by accident. It emerged because companies kept running into the same problem: product managers were focused on building the right product, while marketing teams were trying to sell it—but neither fully understood the other’s world. That gap led to misalignment, missed opportunities, and, at times, frustration on both sides.
So, what exactly sets these two roles apart? And more importantly, where do they overlap in a way that can drive real business impact? Let’s break it down.
Understanding Product Marketing and Product Management
Before we compare these two seemingly similar professions, let’s begin by looking at the definitions of each one to understand what they are about.
What is Product Marketing?
Product marketing is about the process of showcasing your product, or certain features, to the market and making sure that your target audience is noticing, engaging with, and adopting your product.
This process usually includes the following elements:
- Defining product messaging: Understanding how you will represent your product to the public and creating a message that shows your value proposition and resonates with the pain points of your personas.
- Product positioning: Understanding the market segments that you want to target and the way you want to enter that segment.
- Pricing strategy: Product marketing managers (PMM) will work closely with the leadership to also define the pricing model based on different factors, such as competition, perceived value, cost of operations, and more.
- Go-to-market strategy: Your launch plan on entering the market, establishing yourself in there, and actively increasing your share of the overall pie.
- Marketing strategy: Your market plans consist of the channels you will focus on - social media, SEO, paid ads, as well as the different tactics you will employ such as demos, webinars, different ways to optimize your backlink profile, etc.
P.S., Learn how the 4Ps of Product Marketing can ensure your product has a successful go-to-market plan based in a comprehensive product marketing strategy.
Overall, the product marketing team is responsible for the initiatives that help your product enter and establish itself in the market of your choice.
What is Product Management?
Unlike their counterparts, product management teams do not bother much (unless you’re in a startup) with the promotion of the product in the market. Instead, they focus on building a great product that users love and ensure an overall positive customer experience for their target persona.
Product managers will usually work on the following aspects of the product:
- Solving user problems: They will understand what users need and build features that can solve them.
- User experience: A major part of the product manager’s day-to-day is to work closely with design teams on creating fantastic UX designs and journeys that make it easy for the users to navigate through and use the product.
- Strategic management: The product manager’s role also assumes creating a product strategy and aligning it with key stakeholders to make sure that everyone in the company is going in the right direction.
- Data-driven decision making: PMs will also use software to identify user behavior, and define and track core product KPIs such as retention and activation to decide on building certain features or picking specific designs based on the data they obtained from these metrics.
To effectively manage all these responsibilities, product managers rely on specialized tools that help streamline workflows, track key metrics, and align teams. From roadmapping and user research to analytics and stakeholder collaboration, the right product management software can make a huge difference in execution and decision-making.
If you're looking for the best tools to support your product management efforts, check out our curated list of top product management tools to find the right fit for your team.
Key Differences Between Product Marketing and Product Management
Now that we have a clear overview of what these two professions are about, let’s compare them and understand their key differences. Specifically, we will look at a couple of key product aspects and understand how each of these professions is involved in them.
Product Delivery Workflow
We will begin by looking at the typical workflow of building and delivering products. It is the set of actions that product companies take to create value for their users in the form of features or entirely new products. Your workflow usually starts with ideating and ends with post-release support and analysis.
In the workflow above, product managers are usually responsible for steps 1-3 which include the process of understanding user pains, coming up with ways to solve them, validating their ideas, turning them into features on the product roadmap, and building them.
Product marketing managers, on the other hand, are responsible for steps 5-6. Their job is to understand how exactly we will launch the feature, the key milestones, timelines for the launch, the channels we will use to promote it, and the way we will present that product feature to the core audience.
So, the workflow will look like this:
If you have noticed, I did not talk about steps 3 and 7. This is because launch, post-release support, and analysis are phases that PMs and PMMs share. We will discuss this part in more detail later.
Key Success Metrics
Considering the different areas of product delivery that PMs and PMMs focus on, their metrics will differ too.
Product managers will focus on retaining users and providing them with excellent user experience. Therefore, the metrics of their choice include:
- Retention rate: the percentage of users who have been continuously using your product during a certain time period.
- Activation rate: the percentage of users who have used your core features and experienced your value proposition.
- Adoption rate: the percentage of users who have used your features at least a couple of times. It means that they did not try it once and abandoned it.
Product marketing managers, on the other hand, will look at KPIs that measure your product’s performance in the market overall. These metrics include:
- Market penetration: the percentage of the target market that is using your product.
- Brand awareness: the size of the audience that recognizes your brand and core value proposition.
- Sales growth: Self-explanatory, measuring the change in your MRR and ARR over time.
Some of the shared metrics between these two disciplines include customer satisfaction scores, NPS, and others.
Deliverables
Next, we need to understand the artifacts that PMs and PPMs produce as a result of this work.
For product managers, the key deliverables are:
- Product Strategy: showcasing the steps to take for product success.
- Roadmap: the prioritized list of core features and capabilities with key milestones.
- PRDs: detailed product requirements for engineering and other teams.
- Product Performance Report: showcasing the health of the product.
The deliverables for product marketing managers are quite different and include these:
- Product Launch and Marketing Strategy: Explain when, how, and where the product launch will happen.
- Market Analysis: showing the state of the market, the actors in it, as well as the latest market trends.
- Communication Strategy: including the list of channels to use as well as templates with messages for communicating with users.
Finally, product marketing managers will also work with the design team to produce your marketing assets such as banners, SMM post images, and others.
Time Horizon
The final aspect that I want us to focus on is how far in the scale of time these two professions are operating.
Product managers focus on the long-term results of your product and aim at fulfilling the product vision. Their plans can span several years into the future.
Product marketing managers are operating at a relatively tactical level and focus on results that are achievable within several months or quarters.
Overlapping Goals and Collaborative Efforts
While PMs and PMMs generally operate in separate phases in the product lifecycle, they do share certain goals and activities with each other.
In terms of shared goals, they both focus on the overall level of customer satisfaction and aim to create pleasant experiences both in the form of features and marketing communication.
The second shared goal is product growth. While using different strategies for this, both aim at building a sustainable engine for acquiring and monetizing users from their target market.
Now, let’s look at the activities that PMs and PMMs collaborate on.
Firstly, it is the product launch. The launch date is usually set in the product marketing software as a result of PMs confirming that the product will be ready by then and the PMMs picking a date that is most suitable from the marketing standpoint (e.g. before Christmas shopping spree).
Next, is the post-release analysis of the product. While each one uses its own set of KPIs to measure the performance of the product after launch, there are also metrics that they share. The most important one here is the acquisition rate - showing the number of new users that sign up for your product.
Essential Skills & Qualities for both Product Marketing and Product Management Professionals
In order to succeed in your company as a product manager or a PMM, you will need to have certain hard and soft skills. While these two professions share quite a few skills (e.g. analytical mindset, user empathy, and excellent communication), most of the skills required to succeed at are different.
Product managers, for instance, need to excel at the following:
- Strategic Thinking: Your ability to derive a long-term plan for achieving your vision.
- Prioritization: When you look at several important features and are able to pick the most important one.
- Cross-functional Team Management: You will be the person aligning and connecting the work of multiple teams.
- Problem Solving: You need to find solutions to everything from customer pains to product workarounds for technical problems.
Product marketing managers, on the other hand, will mostly focus on this skill set:
- Market Research: It’s about your ability to uncover crucial information about your market, competitors, and users.
- Creative Thinking: You will end up taking many creative approaches to reaching your audience and sparking their interest in your product.
- Sales: While you are not part of the sales team, you will still need to know how to sell your product to users with your messaging and communication.
- Emotional intelligence: You will need to sense the emotions of your audience in order to win their hearts with your marketing content.
Overall, PMMs will need to be great at getting the message across in the market, while PMs will need to excel at solving customer problems.
The Impact of Product Marketing and Product Management on Business Success
The final aspect that I would like us to discuss is the influence of PMs and PMMs on the overall success of the product and the company behind it. Will I tell you that the impact of one is more than the other? Of course not, it will not be an apples-to-apples comparison because the impact each has on the business is different.
Instead, let’s understand how the work of each one is affecting the success of the business.
Starting with PMMs, their contribution includes:
- Increasing market share
- Improving brand recognition
- Accelerating revenue growth
The impact of product managers’ jobs, on the other hand, is about these aspects:
- Out competing the market with innovation
- Satisfying customer needs
- Ensuring operational efficiency
Overall, as a business, you cannot truly get rid of one of them and hope that your product will continue growing in a sustainable manner as both PMs and PMMs are critical for the success of your company.
The Right Roles for the Right Results
Despite their similar names and overlapping responsibilities, product managers and product marketing managers serve distinct roles in your company, each handling critical aspects of the product lifecycle.
Ensuring both areas are covered—whether by two specialists or a single hybrid role—can make the difference between a well-aligned product strategy and one that falls flat.
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