Is Airbnb making a mistake by clubbing PM & Product Marketing ?
Gartner published an article titled " How to Future proof your Product Management skills" in 2022.
To remain competitive, one has to go beyond the existing skills of UX, Tech & Business in the venn diagram mentioned in the cover image of this article.
What was needed in 2020 may not be suited for 2025.
While I completely agree on developing the skills across the functions, you cannot go beyond the possibility of owning the function.
Yes, I agree that as a PM - one needs to come up with positioning exercise,write an email copy, come out with a H-1 Message in website.
While all these are required, one cannot get actually in to the core responsibility of al these specific functions.
My thoughts why this might be a bad idea to expect a PM to do a PMM role especially in the context of digital products.
The Birth of Product Management
Product Management as a function came from FMCG and adopted in tech product during the 80's
The concept of product management began to take shape at P&G when Neil H. Mcelroy laid out in a memo with a job title of “Brand Men”.
Their responsibility is to drive end to end management of product Lifecyle - from creating products , branding , promotion and sales.
In the 1950s, P&G introduced the role of the "brand manager" to manage specific product lines. These brand managers were responsible for developing brand strategies, conducting market research, coordinating advertising campaigns, and driving sales growth.
Although not explicitly referred to as product managers at the time, these early brand managers laid the groundwork for the product management discipline that would emerge in the coming decades.
Evolution of roles
Multiple roles evolved from a single product role based on scale and business objective.
Why PM alone cannot do all the above functions ?
Industry context and Finite resource
The big difference - The Industry is different and the economics change accordingly. In a consumer domain industry like FMCG /FMCD - there are individual department's who own the business growth and sustainability
-Sales & Distribution
-R&D
-Promotion - ATL (eg.Media campaigns) BTL ( Inperson promotions)
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-Trade Marketing / Customer Marketing
A brand Manager or Product Manager in a FMCG firm's major role is to collaborate with the above function's and drive the assigned brand - Top line ( Revenue growth)
Similarly
A Product Manager in digital space is involved in each stage of Product development and launch by collaborating with the Dev Team , Marketing, Sales & Customer Success.
The problem here is merging the roles when there is finite time , resource and skillsets.
Expertise and Focus:
Product development and marketing require different skill sets and areas of expertise. Product development involves understanding customer needs, designing user experiences, managing engineering resources, and overseeing the technical aspects of building a product.
On the other hand, marketing involves market research, positioning, messaging, campaign planning, and customer acquisition strategies.
Trying to excel in both areas simultaneously can spread one's focus too thin and potentially compromise the quality of work in each domain.
Time Constraints:
Lets face it - PM's have 8 to 10 hrs and an effective 6 to 7 hrs of work hrs
Stakeholder alignment , Customer bug fix follow up's , roadmap planning, discovery call , Jira ticket creation.
All the above firefighting makes the existing time fly and one has to constantly juggle between tasks.
Adding marketing responsibilities on top of these can overload the product manager's schedule, potentially leading to compromised decision-making, delayed product development, and reduced effectiveness in both areas.
Collaboration and Perspective:
Effective product development and marketing often require collaboration and input from multiple stakeholders.
By having separate individuals dedicated to product management and marketing, different perspectives and expertise can be brought to the table.
This collaborative approach encourages diverse viewpoints, allows for specialization, and promotes better decision-making based on a wider range of insights.
Scalability and Growth:
As a product gains traction and the business scales, the workload and complexity of product management and marketing increase.
It becomes increasingly challenging for a single individual to handle all aspects effectively. Specializing in one area allows for scalability and the ability to bring in additional team members or resources to support the growing demands of product development and marketing.
While some product managers may have skills and experience in both product development and marketing, it is generally more effective and efficient to have dedicated professionals in each role.
At the end to deliver and drive product growth , a PM can play a role of orchestrator instead of Jack of all trades.
Contributer vs Owner
A PM can contribute to GTM strategy, Positioning, business growth instead of completely owning the departments.
To build great products and drive stupendous growth, one needs consistent involvement across marketing, sales, dev and customer success.
There is a difference between accountability and responsibility.
At the end when everyone is responsible - No individual is accountable.
Marketing @bluecopa | Voice of the CFO | Talk about CFOs and FinOps every week
1 年Hi Jayanthan, I think there are esteemed marketing minds here to better answer this but let me try to articulate my thoughts in a couple of sentences. I feel the role by definition will only focus on PMs with higher GTM quotient over other. These people will focus more on the product launch and distribution as opposed to its ideation and build whilst being involved in all. However for a B2B case, the PM is expected to be the strategic thinker who takes in input from the GTM teams and customer on what product functionality is good/bad, what's needed and other variable inputs for arriving at the decisions around build (Roadmap). Once this is done, depending on the PM, there is little to no support on how it is built (if involved tech and dev skills). After the product is ready, the B2B PM now demonstrates it to the Marketing function who will now focus on the launch and distribution whilst the PM goes back to the next round of ideation and build. Hope it made sense :)
Product Marketing Manager | Customer Pulse Translator | Mom | Ex-Amazon
1 年Ah, this is an interesting discussion. Glad you brought it up Jayanthan. While I am totally for Product-PMM alignment, loading up the plate for PMs by including product-fit validation, messaging and positioning creation, pricing, GTM strategy and execution, sales enablement, market research etc will only cause overwhelm. Sure you can have multiple people handling each of these, still it removes the aspect of subjectivity that a fresh pair of eyes who hasn't been closely involved in developing a product can bring in the form of PMM. I loved the recent discussion about the same exact issue by Yi Lin Pei. Lots of valuable insights. Here is the link - https://www.dhirubhai.net/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7078048589771350016/
Product Manager at Phenom | Conversational AI | Chatbot | SAAS | Generative AI | Ex-Accenture | TEDster
1 年Great piece! I think this experiment will show the way forward in the upcoming years
Business Storyteller | Fractional CMO and Growth Consultant for HRTech, Startups, SaaS | LinkedIn Creator Program Top 200 Creator | Interested in Career Pivots, Books, Personal Branding for Founders/Sales and Parenting |
1 年I feel it's ok to do it this way. At the end of the day, a product needs to be marketed to their ICP. While you need product specialists for sure, when they also think from marketing standpoint, the question of certain features or prioritising one feature over other could be well answered by them. This also moves product teams one step closer to customer, which will really benefit the overall business. I am not saying all product engineers need to know marketing, but when they do it, it will help the overall business.