Founders: If you want to know the next-most important thing you need to master after building great products, it’s Product Marketing.
You’d be forgiven for not quite knowing what this is all about, because it intersects so many functions in a company that it’s meaning (and meaningfulness), gets obscured.
Simply put: Product marketing about defining your product’s position in the market, understanding who it’s for, clarifying the value it delivers, and turning that into the messaging, segmentation, and go-to-market strategy that gets customers to understand it, choose it, and stick with it. It lives at the intersection of product, marketing, sales, and customer.
It’s not a new idea by any means. Anyone who has spent real time in the trenches building or scaling tech products figured this out years ago. But for some reason a lot Founders still focus on the smaller marketing levers first, like a nice brand,SEO, CRM, paid ads. And pretty much all of those are all handled decently by AI already.
As Geoffrey Hinton – the “Godfather of AI” – put it: “For mundane intellectual labour, AI is just going to replace everybody.” While there are pockets of magic and alchemy in marketing, the truth is a lot of it really does fit that deeply unflattering description.
For most startups, brand barely matters unless you’re part of the tiny fraction of startups that are direct to consumer (DTC). In that world, brand is critical. Liquid Death is an obvious example: a $1.4bn valuation for canned water. Frankly outrageous, but that doesn’t happen without a team who genuinely understand cultural codes, humour, visual identity and community-building. That is brand alchemy and real humanity. Clankers (the Gen Z slur for AI, apparently) aren’t doing that very well (yet).
But for the 90% building software, you can get surprisingly far with an okay name, a half-decent logo, and functional copy. There’s no need to make it bad, but it doesn’t need to be great either. You don’t need a brand agency. You barely need a marketer. And that’s the point: founders no longer lose much by doing the brand work themselves.
The one area they generally cannot do themselves – not well, not consistently, not without slowing the entire company down – is product marketing.
Product Marketing has evolved from a mere marketing function into the single most critical activity for determining whether customers understand your product, choose it, stay, pay, and advocate for it. In most startups, it’s the discipline that ultimately decides whether the company grows at all.
So this all sounds very academic so far, but let’s talk about what Product Marketing actually involves. At its core, it’s a sequence of brutally simple, practical activities.
The Process
Understanding your customer
By understanding, I don’t mean sitting in a room with your leadership team and clapping your hands like seals when the Founder states assumptions about your customer like they’re facts. I mean actually speaking to customers directly, obsessively, and repeatedly. Understanding what they value, what they fear, what they’re trying to avoid, what they dream about, and what they can’t articulate. Instead of arguing for hours about what you think the customer thinks, you should be spending that time listening to the people who already use your product or could use it. When Slack was finding its footing, the team sat with users constantly to uncover the emotional triggers around workplace communication. Those early conversations shaped the product far more than looking inward could have.
Positioning
This is the discipline of figuring out the angle, the story that makes your product make sense in a noisy market. April Dunford is the undisputed GOAT of positioning, and her framework remains the only one I’ve seen truly shift companies from “confusing” to “compelling”. We’ve used it with countless clients and portfolio companies, and we always see results. Read it online (better yet, get the book).
Messaging
Then comes messaging. The words that force people to pay attention. The language that turns a feature into a benefit, and a product into a solution. Stripe’s “Payments for developers” might be the greatest seven-word messaging line in the history of technology. It wasn’t clever. It was true, and the customer who cared the most about their product paid attention.
Go To Market
Everything that came before this was really just Strategy. Go-To-Market is the execution. Who we sell to first. How we reach them. Which channels actually matter. How we package the product in a way that feels obvious to the people who need it most. This is also where sales enablement quietly becomes essential. People love to evangelise about “aligning sales and marketing,” but you can’t align teams around an incoherent story. Sales enablement is just product marketing turned into tools that help your sales team win. One-pagers. Pitch decks. Competitive battlecards. Objection-handling. A consistent narrative. When it’s done well, everyone in the company talks about the product in the same way. When it’s done badly, everyone improvises, and customers get ten different explanations for the same thing.
A logo is not going to save you
The average agency type is probably horrified that we’ve gotten this far without once discussing a mood board of brand archetype, let alone whether your font should be serif or san-serif. But for technology companies, those things only move the needle so far.
The uncomfortable truth most founders eventually learn is that customers don’t buy things they don’t understand. So quite frankly if you suck at explaining what you do, no matter how brilliant your product, you will not be able to sell it. Conversely, great product marketing can have the affect of masking a sub par product – but ultimately, good product beats all, and putting lipstick on a pig only gets you so far. People just don’t buy things that sound the same as everything else. And they definitely don’t buy products that solve problems they don’t feel. Product marketing forces you to confront reality of how your product fits into your customers life.
Founders who ignore this discipline pay for it later. Usually in confused customers, wasted ad spend, or sales teams begging for a story they can use.
The companies that will win in the next decade are the ones with the clearest story. The ones who understand their customer better than anyone else. The ones whose sales team can explain the product in 20 seconds because someone did the hard product marketing work behind the scenes. The ones who know exactly who their product is for, what makes it different, how it fits into the competitive landscape, and how to position it so that the right people immediately get it. The ones who’ve worked out the language that actually lands, the value props that matter, the segments worth pursuing, and the go-to-market approach that isn’t guessing or wishful thinking. The ones who don’t just build a product – they build the story that makes the product make sense.
