Respect the Craft
Investing in proper product marketing experience and expertise has never been more important.
Product marketing is under pressure on two fronts right now. On one side, hiring well in this space is increasingly difficult. On the other, AI is reshaping how some leaders think about what they actually need from a product marketing team. Founders and CMOs are asking themselves: “Do we really need to hire for this? Can’t we just use AI tools?”
And yet the demand is clearly there. There are more than 600 roles live on The Product Marketer’s new jobs board PMM Jobs alone, which tells you businesses are still investing in this function. And, so often, when I chat with founders, they tell me their biggest business challenges come down to product marketing - be it positioning, storytelling or GTM. They know it matters. The question is whether they’re investing in it properly.
So this is a bit of a rallying cry. Not just for PMMs, but for anyone thinking about building out their product marketing function. Above everything else, respect the craft.
Hire for product marketing experience
It’s tempting to treat industry experience as a deal-breaker when you’re hiring a product marketer. Your product feels complex. Your audience might be technical. Surely you need someone who already understands the space?
But your product shouldn’t be that complex when it comes to communicating it to customers. It might be complex on the inside - a lot of products are. The job of product marketing is to make sure that complexity doesn’t show up in your messaging, your positioning, or your sales conversations. And a great product marketer can get up to speed on your industry and product pretty quickly. That comes with the job.
Where I’ve seen companies fail, again and again, is when they’ve brought in someone with strong industry knowledge but not enough product marketing experience. Product marketing is such a varied and singular role that without that foundation, people struggle. They get overwhelmed by the number of stakeholders, the competing demands, the sometimes baffling situations the role puts you in. They don’t know how to navigate the difficult relationship between PMM and sales, or how to influence product without owning the roadmap. They haven’t been through it before.
An experienced product marketer has. They know how to run a positioning process properly. They know how to build ICPs, battle cards, sales enablement, great sales decks. But beyond those processes, they’ve built the interpersonal skills that make product marketing actually work inside a business - the stakeholder management, the cross-functional influence, the ability to find a common language for the whole company to talk about the product in the same way.
And then there’s curiosity. Good product marketers are particularly curious people. They tie everything back to insights and make sure decision-making is grounded in something real. They know how to think like a product manager, think like a salesperson, and think like a marketer - all at once - so they can represent all of those teams in conversations with each other.
Great product marketers are hard to find. They’re rarely in market, and when they are, they tend to get snapped up quickly. In Europe specifically, finding someone with more than five years of product marketing experience is still surprisingly rare. If you find someone who is passionate about the craft, can articulate what product marketing actually is, and has that depth of experience - jump on the opportunity.
I should say that this isn’t about closing the door on people transitioning into product marketing from content marketing, sales, product management, or elsewhere. That needs to happen. We need talented people coming into the function. It’s more about being intentional. You and your team are already the industry experts. You’ve got product and market knowledge in-house. What you almost certainly don’t have enough of is strong storytellers who can turn all of that knowledge into something compelling and easy for your customers to understand. That’s the gap a product marketer fills.
AI can’t do your product marketing for you
The second challenge is the growing feeling that AI can replace your product marketing team. The logic goes: just give it the inputs and it’ll produce battle cards, value prop docs, positioning frameworks - maybe even run the whole process.
It’s logical. The tools are impressive. But again we need to respect the craft of product marketing.
Product marketing is an established discipline. It has a defined set of responsibilities and requires real judgement. You still need people - albeit maybe a smaller team than you would have built five years ago - to set the bar for what good looks like. To be accountable for recommendations and decisions. To prevent competitive intelligence turning into a 40-page document that no one reads. To apply the kind of strategic thinking that makes the difference between work that sits in a folder and work that actually changes how your business sells.
We can all see the promised land of where AI will get us to, but there are still too many mistakes. Too many hallucinations. Too much confidence in outputs that need a human to sense-check them. You can’t fully outsource your product marketing to AI. But I do think product marketing powered by AI can be one of your most valuable functions.
I’d compare it to engineering. In theory, you could have AI write all of your code now. You could get rid of your entire engineering team and just tell Claude Code or Codex what to build. But would you? Would you take that risk, knowing that nobody in the business would actually know what good looks like, or what to do when the tools go down?
Product marketing is no different. The tools can amplify the talent of your team, but they’re not a replacement.
This matters more than ever
Product marketing as a discipline is more important than it’s ever been for tech businesses. It’s increasingly hard to stand out. Markets are more crowded than ever. The companies that invest properly in how they position, message, and go to market are the ones that will win.
But resist the temptation to staff it quickly and easily - whether that’s with people who haven’t got product marketing experience, or with tools you think can do the job on their own. Be intentional. Respect the craft.
And if your business has a product marketing need and isn’t quite sure how to approach it from a staffing and tooling perspective, I’m always happy to chat.
Rory Woodbridge is a London-based product marketing consultant working with fast-growth European tech companies. Get in touch here.