5 Essential Product Marketing Tips for CMOs
Advice for any marketing leader working with PMMs
One of the oldest questions in the product marketing book is: Who should product marketing report to?
I’ve written about this before, but but more often than not, PMMs sit under the CMO.
Over the years, I’ve worked with a number of brilliant CMOs and VPs of Marketing. But a few patterns emerge: many have never worked closely with product marketers before. Or if they have, they’ll admit they’re not quite sure what “great” product marketing looks like - but are very eager to see it in action.
Some marketing leaders come in with a clear definition already in mind, but it might be more downstream and executional, focused on go-to-market tactics or conventional marketing work. But, as we covered in a recent post, the best product marketing teams today are leaning upstream. They’re uncovering commercial insights, driving market positioning, and shaping the product roadmap itself.
So this guide is for any CMO, VP, or Head of Marketing who wants to make product marketing one of your secret weapons.
Here’s how to work with product marketers - and get the best out of them.
1. Put Them on Your Hardest Problems
Product marketers are natural problem solvers. They’re commercially minded, curious, and collaborative. They often have a rare, cross-functional perspective: close to Product, aligned with Sales, and embedded in Marketing.
So don’t just give them launch comms or sales decks. Ask them to investigate adoption challenges with your latest product. Task them with cracking your expansion strategy. Use them to diagnose poor retention or reposition a product that’s not resonating. Embed them in the squad that’s starting work on that big new product.
2. Help Them Succeed with the Product Team
One of the trickiest parts of product marketing is sitting between two important, opinionated teams: Product and Marketing.
As a CMO, you can make this easier. Or harder.
Avoid adding to the politics. When you’re bringing a new piece of work to your product marketing team, ask yourself whether it’s going to put them in a tough position. Try to put yourself in the Product team’s shoes when thinking about PMM priorities, as this will get ahead of any misalignment.
Give your PMMs air cover. But don’t cut them out of strategic conversations with Product. When things are getting hot between Product and Marketing, it’s tempting to step in and sort things out directly with your CPO counterpart - but this isn’t sustainable, or good for team morale. Instead, empower your product marketers to build that bridge themselves.
And embrace the cross-functional nature of the team. The best product marketers are so department-agnostic and trusted that, in theory, they could report into the CPO, CRO or CEO and still be as effective as they are under Marketing. That should be your benchmark. So try to guard against any feelings of territorialism over your PMMs - they should be adding value for all of the exec team.
3. Don’t Obsess Over KPIs
A lot of time gets wasted debating what KPIs a PMM should “own”. In reality, most of their work is shared, strategic, and hard to reduce to a single metric.
Instead, give them deliverables tied to outcomes. For example:
Run a diagnostic on why Product X isn’t being adopted and propose a fix.
Produce a quarterly competitive landscape report for the exec team.
Partner with a squad to shape positioning, storytelling and naming for a new release.
Anchor a PMM’s value in the problems they help you solve instead of a metric that they can’t have sole influence over.
4. Don’t Give Them Channels
Product marketers shouldn’t own customer-facing channels. They’re not email marketers, copywriters, or website managers.
Alright, one caveat: I accept that in early-stage startups, it’s normal for PMMs to jump in where needed. Because that’s what everyone in the company is doing. But as you scale, product marketing should move toward a strategy and enablement function - not a marketing execution team.
They should equip your channel owners with what they need to win. Here’s a few examples:
For web: PMMs create the message framework; copywriters write the words; designers bring it to life.
For sales: PMMs shape the narrative and structure; design package it; sales enablement defines the selling method and ensures teams are trained up on it.
For launches: PMMs propose the GTM strategy and positioning; (once they’re bought in on strategy) marketing teams activate across their channels.
Product marketers generate the why and what, so others can deliver the how.
5. Champion Them Inside Marketing
There’s a good chance most of your team doesn’t understand what product marketing does. That’s normal. It’s one of the most misunderstood roles in tech.
You can help. Be their biggest cheerleader.
PMMs bring insights that can supercharge the likes of Brand, Growth, Content, and CRM. They know your product better than anyone. They’re plugged into what’s happening across the company, often being close to the core business strategy. And they often speak the language of Sales, Product, and your customers better than anyone else in Marketing.
So be a champion for them. Loop them into high-impact work. And when grey areas crop up - like who owns messaging or positioning - be the provider of absolute clarity. Empower product marketing to lead their areas of ownership, and make sure they’re set up to do it well.
Bonus Tip: Hire People Who Are Committed to the Craft
Great product marketers see it as a long-term career - not just another marketing job.
Product marketing is now a well-established discipline with proper best practices and a growing talent pool. So I strongly recommend hiring people who are passionate about the craft and want to grow within it for a long time.
Ideally, you’re looking for people with multiple years of product marketing experience, who can give you a great interview answer on the kind of product marketing they’re going to bring into your company. But in certain countries, where product marketing is more nascent, that’s easier said than done. The PMM talent pool can be small. If that’s the case, consider people with adjacent backgrounds:
Former product managers
Those with strategy or commercial experience
Ex-consultants
Or even ex-founders
These profiles often bring the structured thinking, cross-functional credibility, and business acumen that give great product marketing potential. But they should be aware of what they don’t know when it comes to PMM craft.
There’s sometimes an instinct to think ‘I could give that a go - how hard can it be?’ But that mindset underestimates just how far PMM has come in recent years. Product Marketing in 2025 is very much a craft - and while, of course, anyone can enter the function, it should be done with humility and the awareness that the bar is already very high - and only getting higher.
Cheers! 👋
The Product Marketer is a London-based consultancy, helping ambitious companies across Europe - and the wider EMEA region - achieve world-class product marketing. If you’d like to discuss raising your company’s product marketing game, just reply to this email.
This is great and on point. I would add that this is the profile of what the c-level staff should expect and want from PMM. But first it is knowing. Many have not worked with strong PMM teams, so the definition of PMM is muddy for them.