The New Expectations for the Product Marketer

Product marketing is nearly 100 years old.

When the function was born, the job made sense as a whole. You researched the market, you understood the customer, you shaped the story, and you brought the product to market. The pace of business allowed for all of it. Competition existed, but it didn't demand the kind of relentless output volume that would come later. A product marketer could be a researcher and a strategist and an executor — because there was time to be all three.

That balance didn't survive the last decade.

The rise of growth-at-all-costs changed what organizations asked of the function. More launches, more content, more assets, more battlecards, more enablement, more campaigns. More, more, more. Some product marketing jobs became content mills because that's how the exec interpreted the job. The research half of the job, the part that requires time and curiosity and genuine customer relationships, is squeezed out by the sheer volume of execution demands. You couldn't do both. So leaders of organizations chose execution, because execution was visible and measurable and immediate.

The strategic half of the function was pushed to the back burner — and sometimes off the hob entirely.

Then AI arrived. But, conversely it didn't diminish the job of product marketing, it cleared the runway.

The execution work that was consuming the job of asset production can now be handled by AI. It still requires a human to apply judgment to the output, but the content mill problem is largely solved. What used to take weeks takes hours, what took hours takes minutes.

Which means product marketers have something they haven't had in years: time.

Time to do the research that should have been driving the execution. Time to talk to customers in a meaningful way, not just to pull a quote for a case study but to actually understand how they think, what they need, and where the market is moving. Time to sit with the data, connect the signals, and walk into a leadership meeting with a point of view only product marketing could ascertain.

This is not a small thing. For the first time in years, the function can operate the way it was designed to. The outputs (the assets, the messaging, the positioning) will be better because the inputs are better. More valuable to the organization, more relevant to current customers, and more compelling to future ones.

But this only works if the right foundation exists.

What the job actually requires now

AI raised the bar for product marketing. The entry level product marketing job used to require the skills for asset creation, the ability to write a good brief, build a battlecard, and manage a launch plan. These are now table stakes. What differentiates you is your ability to define a story based on judgment, and judgment comes from knowing three things deeply.

The first is your craft. Product marketing is a discipline requiring deep skills — positioning, messaging architecture, market segmentation, launch strategy, competitive intelligence. These aren't instincts and they certainly don't start and stop with templates, they're learned capabilities that get better through experience. The product marketer who knows their craft can walk into any company, in any industry, and figure out what needs to be done. And don't let someone trick you into thinking you need industry knowledge — you don't. They need to understand the skill capacity of a product marketer.

The second is your product. Don't confuse this with the features list, but rather it's the intimate knowledge that comes from using the product — what it does for the customer, where it's strong, where it's weak, and what problems it genuinely solves versus the ones it only partially addresses. This knowledge comes from time spent in the product, with the people who build it, and with the people who use it.

The third, and this is the one most product marketers miss, is how your business makes money. Not in the abstract. Specifically. Where does revenue come from? What does the sales motion look like? Where do deals get stuck? What levers can be used in pricing or discounting? What makes a customer expand versus churn? What does the CFO worry about? When you understand how the business makes money, every strategic decision becomes clearer. You know which insights matter and which are interesting but irrelevant. You know how to frame a recommendation so it lands with the people who have to act on it.

Know your craft. Know your product. Know how the business makes money.

Product marketers who have all three can do something AI cannot: they can sit at the intersection of market intelligence and business strategy and tell their organization something true and useful that nobody else is positioned to see.

Where to start this week

Now that AI is handling more of the execution, the question isn't what to produce, it's where to point your attention first. Start with the biggest intelligence gaps in your organization. Two are almost universally underdeveloped.

The first: win/loss. Not a spreadsheet someone fills in occasionally, but a structured program that produces findings specific enough to change how sales positions and how product prioritizes. If your company doesn't have one, build it. Run it until you have 25 interviews and bring the findings to leadership with a recommendation attached, something that will improve the outcomes. That single deliverable demonstrates a different level of thinking than anything you'll produce in the execution queue.

The second is understanding the money left on the table, specifically, cross-referencing your support ticket volume against revenue at stake. Which problems are your customers hitting most, and what is the dollar value of fixing them versus not fixing them? This analysis connects customer pain directly to business impact in a language every executive understands. It also puts product marketing exactly where it belongs: in the roadmap conversation, with something concrete to contribute.

Both of these are things you can start this week without anyone's permission.

If you're a CMO or lead a team with a product marketer

Before you restructure reporting lines or change anyone's mandate, have a conversation.

Ask your product marketer how they see the function changing, and what they think the organization needs most from them right now. Then listen.

What they say will tell you a great deal. A product marketer operating in the strategic era will talk about intelligence gaps, about being closer to the customer, about connecting market signals to business decisions. A product marketer who isn't there yet will talk about needing better tools, more bandwidth, or cleaner briefs. Neither answer is wrong — but both answers are informative.

Not every product marketer is equally ready to operate in this new era. That's not a criticism, it's a reality. The conversation is your diagnostic. It tells you whether you have someone ready to move the needle forward, or someone who needs a different kind of support first. Either way, you'll know what type of product marketer you're actually working with before you change anything.

The product marketers who are ready will surprise you. Give them the access to do the work: a seat in the roadmap meeting, visibility into pipeline and churn data, direct customer relationships without a chaperone. The return on that investment is significant. And for what it's worth, a product marketer who is finally doing the real job is also one who stays.

What this means for the function going forward

The product marketers who thrive in this era are not the ones who use AI to produce more content faster. They're the ones who use AI to get their time back — and then spend that time doing the research, building the relationships, and developing the strategic perspective that makes the content worth producing in the first place.

The job is better now than it was five years ago. Harder in some ways, but better in the ways that matter. The distortion of the last decade, the content mill version of the function, is over. What's left is the real job.

PMM Means Business is for product marketers doing the work and the leaders who want more from the function. Forward it to someone who needs to read it — in either direction.