Making Product Marketing Essential for GTM
How Product Marketing Earns Its Place
I was once hired to lead product marketing at a company where the board demanded the role, but no one knew what to do with it once I arrived. Product and marketing were clearly defined, but deeply siloed. So, where did I belong?
It wasn’t easy, but the challenge forced me to wrestle with an essential truth: product marketing is misunderstood because its power is underestimated. When done right, it doesn’t just support go-to-market—it orchestrates it.
Why Is Product Marketing Necessary?
Product marketing doesn’t look the same in every organization—so the reasons it’s needed won’t either. That’s why the most important question you can ask isn’t what the role does, but why it’s necessary here. Maybe your product team is buried in roadmap execution and too stretched to champion new features once they ship. Or maybe your marketing team is chasing big brand moments and generic value props, while the real differentiators—the ones that move the needle—go unnoticed.
In those gaps, product marketing finds its purpose. When done well, product marketers don’t just fill in. They amplify. They align. They help every team do their best, most focused work—connecting strategy to execution, customer insight to messaging, and product value to revenue.
In a startup, that path is rarely straight. You might start with messaging, jump into enablement, then find yourself reshaping pricing or GTM strategy. And that’s okay. Because the real value of product marketing isn’t in doing one thing—making the whole machine work better. That’s why the role matters. Not because it owns a lane, but because it connects them.
Be clear, be confident, and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it will continue to evolve, and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later, it will take care of itself. It always does.
““Life truly begins when you put your house in order.””
Tool Up
The fastest way to be misunderstood—or worse, ignored—as a product marketer is to keep your work invisible. If your strategy lives only in your head, on a sticky note, or buried in a spreadsheet, no one else can build on it. No one knows what you’re driving—or why it matters.
The fix? Tool up. Get your work out in the open. Build a system for visibility and prioritization that matches the rigor of your product and marketing counterparts. Use kanban boards, Gantt charts, swimlanes, weekly reports—whatever it takes to make your efforts tangible and trackable. When your work is transparent, everything gets easier: You can say no to distractions. You can walk the executive team through your roadmap. You can justify how you’re investing time and budget—not with opinion, but with evidence.
By using shared tools and frameworks, you demonstrate alignment. You show that product marketing isn’t operating in isolation—it’s operating on purpose. And that’s when the real momentum begins: not just clarity of execution, but a shared belief in where you’re going.
IMAGE: Use a variety of frameworks, such as the Entrepreneurial Strategy Compass from or Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle to define why the product matters, what makes it different, and how to communicate its value clearly across teams and touchpoints.
Core Messaging
Every great go-to-market effort starts with one question: Why do we exist? What’s changing in the world that makes our product necessary—not nice to have, but urgent and inevitable? Product marketers must be the stewards of this story. It starts with crafting the company’s promise: What we solve, why it matters, and what sets us apart. This isn’t copywriting. It’s alignment. Mission, vision, and positioning—made visible, repeatable, and accessible to everyone across the company.
Messaging frameworks help bring this to life. What pain are customers living with? What transformation do we offer? What makes us meaningfully different? Clear answers to these questions become the foundation for launches, campaigns, and conversations—and a signal that we see the big picture fast.
IMAGE: Define a clear, accessible message that defines what makes the solution necessary, different, and valuable in a changing world.
From there, we dig deeper: How does the product actually work? What connects, what scales, and where does value grow over time? We map that out—visually and simply—so sales can sell it, marketing can promote it, and customers can understand it.
When product marketing owns the message, it aligns strategy with story—and makes it easier for everyone else to bring that story to market.
“The fastest way to lose is to watch your competition win.”
Competitive Intel
I’ve never loved competitive intel—but it might be the most critical role product marketing can play. Why? Because while others obsess over feature parity or winning the next demo, we can bring clarity. We stop watching the competition just to react, and start using their momentum as a mirror: to sharpen our differentiation, amplify our strengths, and call out the white space others are missing.
When we’re new to a company, we have a unique lens—the customer’s. We aren’t burdened by internal assumptions. That’s why we’re the best positioned to map the market honestly, assess alternatives, and name uncomfortable truths about gaps in positioning or missed opportunities.
IMAGE: Recognize where you win, acknowledge where you lose, and reframe the purchase criteria with where you excel alongside proof points to help in their customer communications.
Great product marketers don’t chase competitors. They contextualize them. They build battle cards and win/loss insights not as an end, but as tools to refocus attention on what makes us essential—not a knock-off six months behind.
Yes, this work might feel like nights-and-weekends effort at first. But it’s the foundation for credibility. It earns trust. And when done well, it turns product marketing into the voice that keeps the company focused not on reacting, but on leading.
Sales Narratives
At some point, especially in B2B, every product marketer gets asked to “fix the deck.” It can feel like thankless work. But here’s the truth: once you’ve defined how your product works, why it matters, and where it wins—there’s no one better equipped to shape the sales story.
Sales is the engine of revenue. When we elevate their pitch, we elevate the business. And suddenly, product marketing becomes not just helpful—but essential. By crafting sales narratives, we sharpen our storytelling, deepen our market understanding, and step into a more strategic role across business development and customer success. Translating technical release notes into punchy one-pagers or demo scripts isn’t just enablement—it’s evangelism.
Build the core: a master deck, demo flows, and messaging templates. Then centralize them. Make access easy. If internal resources are scarce, bootstrap it yourself—or bring in agency partners until the team scales.
Support sales like it’s your primary customer. Because in many ways, it is. When sellers succeed with your help, the rest of the organization sees what product marketing is really capable of: accelerating revenue, reinforcing value, and making the company’s promise feel real to every buyer.
Personas + Value Creation
Few things will isolate you faster than questioning how well your team knows its customer. “Personas” outside of UX often sound dismissive—but the truth is, most organizations don’t share a real understanding of who their users are, what they care about, or how your product fits into their lives. And that’s where product marketing can lead.
IMAGE: My favorite go-to framework, the Value Proposition Canvas, drives product-market fit by clearly defining customer profiles, mapping pains and gains, and aligning value propositions to the real jobs customers need to get done.
We step into customer-facing conversations. We observe, listen, and empathize—not just with what users say, but with what they feel and do. This is empathy mapping, not feature scoping. It’s about surfacing human truths—not assumptions—to reveal unmet needs and spark new value. When product marketing brings this insight forward, we unlock better collaboration. Suddenly, we’re not handed a feature and told, “Make a deck.” We’re part of the conversation that defines what should be built, based on real pain and real opportunity.
This is how we extract true value propositions—not just features but outcomes, not just benefits but transformations. When we ask, “How does this reduce a user’s pain or amplify their gain?” we challenge the team to reconnect with what matters. In doing so, we make product marketing not just useful but indispensable.
“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.”
Roadmap Communication
Product marketers are expected to know what’s coming—and make sure everyone else does too. We help sales, marketing, and support teams plan, budget, train, and launch with purpose.
But here’s the catch: in startups, roadmaps are fluid. Product priorities shift. Resources get reallocated. So while the organization may expect product marketing to communicate the roadmap, product teams might not even agree on which version is real.
IMAGE: Product Marketers should proactively create their own roadmap built around the proven stages of our craft that are true of most any product or service: discovery, strategy, definition, planning, execution, and feedback.
This is where we lead. Instead of waiting for certainty, we build our own product marketing roadmap—structured by stage: discovery, strategy, planning, execution, and feedback. This framework helps us communicate what we need to do, when, and why. We take it to product, sales, success, and leadership—not just to share, but to collaborate. And something powerful happens: by showing a clear, thoughtful plan, you get invited to help shape the plan. Suddenly, product marketing isn’t just reacting to the roadmap—it’s influencing it.
Yes, stakeholder requests will shift your timeline. That’s okay. Every time you adapt and deliver, you prove your value. And the more you’re seen as a planner, a strategist, and a connector, the more indispensable you become.
Content Strategy
If product marketing is new to your org, then “marketing” has likely meant PR, events, paid media, branding, and social. What’s often missing? A consistent story that communicates your product’s newest superpowers. That’s where product marketing steps in. Our job is to carry fresh value propositions into the world—to stress-test them in media moments, keynotes, campaigns, and content. But doing that well means translating complexity into clarity.
IMAGE: When we translate complex product innovation into stories that resonate, we unlock amplification. We empower our media teams to tell the right story—not just the easiest one.
Your agencies and content teams don’t need a full spec sheet. They need a story. Not “ISO-27001 certified,” but “trusted to meet the highest standards in data security.” Not “restful API doc published,” but “now integrated with the world’s largest underwriting network.” When media teams are handed raw technical info, they recycle old messaging. But when product marketing distills the essence of value—the differentiators that matter—we give them the fuel to stand out.
This is how we make product launches louder, content more compelling, and marketing more magnetic. It’s not about owning content. It’s about shaping it—and in doing so, shaping how the world sees what makes us great.
“Experience begins in the parking lot.”
Customer Testimonials
Whether we call them users, customers, guests, or simply people—the truth holds: nothing beats the power of a trusted voice sharing a real story. Word-of-mouth remains the most powerful form of marketing, and when product marketers help spark and shape it, we move from useful to indispensable.
Yes, partnering with customer success to profile a great customer for the website or social is a solid start. But the opportunity runs deeper. We can influence onboarding experiences with satisfaction surveys, build communities around product releases, and enlist power users as brand advocates or thought leaders for campaigns and events.
We can bring in outside voices to validate a product's impact when it launches. When executives prepare for public speaking, we can source partner stories to support their message. When onboarding hands off a customer, we can stay involved to strengthen the relationship.
The magic happens when we stop thinking of testimonials as isolated quotes—and start treating them as connective tissue between product, brand, and customer. This isn’t just feedback—it’s proof. When product marketing facilitates that proof, we become the trusted stewards of customer truth and of the stories that inspire others to believe.
With everything in place—customer insight, market analysis, messaging, sales enablement, and community building—we’re ready to step into our highest-impact role: owning the go-to-market strategy.
GTM Strategy
With everything in place—customer insight, market analysis, messaging, sales enablement, and community building—we’re ready to step into our highest-impact role: owning the go-to-market strategy.
This isn’t about claiming more territory. It’s about earning a seat at the table through contribution. Because we’ve consistently helped teams align around essential intent, our input isn’t just welcomed—it’s trusted. Now, we can influence pricing models, packaging decisions, and rollout timing alongside sales, finance, and ops.
But it doesn’t stop at strategy. We bring structure. Whether it’s designing a test framework, leading a launch workshop, or analyzing post-release feedback, we know how to connect planning to execution—and turn insights into momentum.
Once that trust is in place, the rest flows more easily: whitepapers, landing pages, demos, training content, even customer campaigns. What used to feel like scattered tasks becomes a unified system, powered by the shared understanding that product marketing is not just about what we say—it’s about how we help everyone succeed.
This is the flywheel moment. From project by project to end-to-end ownership. From supportive function to strategic force. And now, everything you came to do? You finally have the platform to do it—at scale.
About me:
As a Product Marketing Alliance Ambassador exploring how tech and storytelling drive industry change, I’ve discussed this blog’s topic several times. I’m a GTM strategist who’s led growth for supply chain, ecommerce, and sustainability-focused startups. I’ve helped to shape retail and logistics innovation at companies like Standvast, Trove, and Everledger.
