The Difference Between Product Marketers and Product Managers

What actually separates a PM from a PMM, and why the healthiest teams let the line between them blur.

What’s the difference between a Product Manager and a Product Marketer?

If you’ve worked in product marketing for a while, this might sound like a strange question. Because, for those of us in it, the difference between a product manager and a product marketer is very obvious.

But it’s worth reminding ourselves that it isn’t clear to everyone. For a lot of our colleagues, those new to tech, arriving from a broader marketing background, or simply working with product managers and product marketers for the first time, the two sound pretty similar.

They both sit close to the product. They both talk about customers, launches and roadmaps. I understand the confusion. So this week I want to do my best to pull the two apart and explain the difference as clearly as possible - for you to share as a guide for anyone who needs it.

There are, of course, outlier examples. Some companies, like Airbnb and Apple, combine the two into a single role, with one person owning both the product vision and the story of the product. As far as I can tell that’s still the exception rather than the rule, but it’s worth being aware of, because I suspect it’s where some of the confusion comes from. Everything below describes the more classic distinction, where these are two separate roles working side by side.

What a product manager does

A product manager is the person steering a group of disciplines towards a shared vision and goal for the company’s product(s). They sit where the technical side of the business - engineering, data and design - meets the commercial goals of the company, and their job is to keep all of it pointed towards the same outcome.

The clearest industry definition I’ve come across is Marty Cagan’s. He says the product manager is responsible for making sure that what gets built is both valuable and viable. Valuable to the customer, viable for the business. More than anyone else, they’re the one accountable for whether the product succeeds or fails.

In practice that looks like leading a squad of people. Usually engineers and designers - often a researcher or analyst too - working together to solve a real problem for customers. The PM sets the roadmap with buy-in from leadership, runs the product sprints that get the squad shipping, and is on the hook for hitting launch dates and growing the product to agreed levels of adoption and revenue.

Much of their time goes on collaborating with engineering and design. How best to solve a particular problem. What a great customer experience might look like. What the optimal sign-up flow might be. Where the flaws and the opportunities for optimisation are hiding. They’ll explore new routes for the product too, whether that’s new categories, expansions or capabilities, and they’ll commission and sit in on user research to understand how people actually use the thing they’ve built.

I’ve found that there are different flavours of product manager. Some have a real flair for design and user experience, and they’re brilliant at driving a great product experience for customers. Some come from an engineering background, and excel at getting the most out of engineering teams. And some come from a more business-focused route, often with an MBA, and act more like a general manager, very focused on the numbers and the metrics. Each type brings its own strengths, and there’s no single right way to approach it.

What a product marketer does

I’ve written a full definition of product marketing before, so I won’t relay all of it here. But in the context of this comparison, the simplest way to put it is this:

If the product manager steers the product and technical teams towards the goal, the product marketer is the bridge between the product and the commercial parts of the business. Usually marketing and sales.

Where the product manager owns what gets built, the product marketer owns the story of what gets built. In practice that means setting the positioning for each individual product, and then at the company level, owning the value proposition and the messaging for the full product offering. You drive the go-to-market for every new product and feature, from the launch narrative to how it actually reaches customers. And you tend to own the workstreams that keep the company honest about the market, competitive intelligence, win-loss analysis, and the sales enablement that gives the commercial teams what they need to sell the product well.

A lot of your time goes on getting to the truth of the product’s value and then translating it. That starts with insight, the market, customer and competitor research that tells you what people actually need and how you’re uniquely placed to give it to them. It means defining who you’re for, the ideal customer profile and the buyer personas, so the whole company is focused on the same people. And it ends in clarity, distilling a complex product down to a story a customer can understand in seconds, building the messaging that carries it, and making sure sales, marketing and customer success are all telling the same one. Throughout it all, you’re the voice of the customer inside the building.

The shortest version of the split:

• The product manager owns what gets built and whether it works.

• The product marketer owns how it’s told and how it reaches the market.

Where the lines get blurry

That clean split is useful for explaining the roles. It’s less useful for describing a good working day, because the best PMs and PMMs don’t always respect a hard line between them.

Product managers rightly want a view on the distribution strategy and the story of their product. This should be encouraged. It’s their product, after all. I’ve argued before that product marketing needs a seat at the product table, and the reverse is just as true. A PM who cares about how their product is positioned and reaches customers is likely a great PM.

The healthiest way I’ve found to think about it isn’t a boundary at all. It’s a partnership. The kind where a product manager has such a strong relationship with product marketing that they trust the PMM to own the story and the distribution, with the PM’s input. Because product marketers spend their days obsessing over the most effective way to get a product into people’s hands. When you’ve got someone with that time, expertise, and that focus, you should let them run with it.

So keep the distinction clear in people’s heads, so everyone understands who does what. But the working relationship is a different thing, and there the blurred lines are to be embraced. It’s what good collaboration looks like. What you do need is to know who’s accountable for what, so the team can stop negotiating it and move at speed.

The cleanest version of this is having product management and product marketing on the same team. Where possible, I’d have a product marketer sitting inside the squad the PM is accountable for, alongside engineers, designers, researchers and analysts. The PM still owns the success metrics of the product. Product marketing owns the delivery and accountability for specific initiatives inside that squad. Once that’s clear, everyone can get on with the work.

And then, respect the craft. Product marketing is a craft and a discipline, and the same is true of product management. Product managers are good at things product marketers aren’t, and the other way round. Blur the day-to-day as much as you need to keep the project moving, with people doing whatever needs doing, but let the important calls sit with the person best placed to make them. You want the big decisions made by the right expert, not just whoever has free time.

AI is about to blur it further

The lines are going to blur further still, and AI is the reason.

Product marketers will increasingly mock up the experiences they think should exist, straight from the insights they’re seeing. Product managers will increasingly do their own marketing and content. Both are already starting to happen, and both are acceptable.

Blurring who does the work is fine. Blurring who makes the call is where things begin to fail. Product management should still hold the pen on what gets built and on what a great product experience looks like for customers. Product marketing should still make the final call on positioning and on what good product messaging looks like. AI isn’t yet good enough to make that level of decision, and even when it is, you’ll still want your most important calls made by the person who understands them best.

The short answer

So, if someone new to tech asks you the difference, here’s the version I’d give.

The product manager decides how best to solve a customer’s problem, what to build as part of this solution, and makes sure it works. The product marketer decides how to talk about it and takes it to market. In an optimal setup they work as one team, the PM owns the product’s success, and the PMM owns the story and the distribution that so much of that success depends on.

If you’re setting up these two functions in your own business and want to spar on how they should work together, get in touch. I’m always happy to talk about how best to untangle the two teams.

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