Developers hate marketers
Disclaimer: the title is drawn from a joke made by Dom, it all clears up (with love) in the end 😜
This summer I sat down with Dom Hawes, host of the one and only Unicorny Marketing Podcast. Former guests including marketing geniuses, neuroscientists and published authors, there was no pressure to be the first product marketer on the show (there was!). Not least given one of those previous guests was April Dunford, who is highly revered in the global product marketing community.
While my side of the conversation turned out to exceed my own expectations, mostly down to the wonderful work of their production team, below I aim to summarise that first part of our conversation: ‘Product marketing’s secret role in SaaS success’.
Yet what sort of marketer would I be if I wouldn’t urge you to give it a listen and give them a follow while at it.
Pressure on product (marketing)
Starting with the core P in marketing; product, we agreed that our aim was to uncover the hidden power of product marketing , a role that quietly connects departments.
We dive into why product marketers act as the glue between marketing, sales, engineering, and customer success, transforming technical details into compelling narratives and shaping a company’s product strategy. In any fast-moving market, I highlight why the importance of this role can’t be overstated; it not only breaks down silos, it also drives innovation and broader internal engagement.
Succeeding as a product marketer
Product marketing thrives when curiosity, technical insight, and strategic storytelling intersect. The role requires individuals to explore the technical complexities of a given product, align cross-departmental strategies, and deliver messaging that resonates with target audiences.
Born out of Silicon Valley’s tech ecosystem, the discipline focuses on simplifying intricate products and ensuring they reach the right audience with compelling clarity. This unique focus distinguishes product marketing from traditional marketing roles, which often centre on broader promotional activities rather than product-specific expertise.
As builders and drivers of the Go-to-Market (GTM), product marketers benefit from taking a structured approach which can be (roughly) divided into four distinct phases, each building on the other to create a cohesive strategy.
- phase 1: the legwork — Dive deep into the organisation to understand the product, its roadmap, and the needs of internal and external stakeholders (AKA become the voice of the customer). This involves close collaboration with product managers, engineers, and other teams to grasp how the product works, the problems it solves and how its story (or stories) are currently ‘told’.
- phase 2: the message — Translate this understanding into benefit-led messaging and positioning that simplifies the product’s complexity while highlighting its value. This messaging serves as the foundation for all communication, from boilerplates to campaign materials and beyond.
- phase 3: the assets — Develop materials such as product demos, short videos, and case studies to illustrate the product in action and impact on customers. These assets deepen engagement and provide tangible proof of the product’s value.
- phase 4: the activation — Identify where potential customers are most likely to engage with the product and/or its messaging. Adapt the messaging into stories and narratives that align with the audience’s needs, using the appropriate channels for maximum reach.
This systematic approach ensures that product marketing not only simplifies and communicates complex ideas but also drives alignment across teams and delivers results. By connecting the technical with the strategic, product marketers give their products a voice that truly resonates in the marketplace.
Covering all the P’s
Modern product marketing encompasses much of what ‘traditional marketing used to be’ (Dom’s words), i.e. understanding the product, its value to customers, the target audience, and how to reach them. Dom highlights that we’ve now covered three of the four P’s: product, place, and promotion. And as pricing has grown complex in the world of SaaS, positioning better reflects the marketer’s strategic role in defining a product’s competitive space. Taking a broader, more integrated approach to marketing that spans the organisation, moving beyond the silo of promotion to engage with the full journey of bringing a product to market, fostering collaboration across departments is key.
Building bridges
Product marketers can’t work 7 days a week, and this pivotal role as the connecting force means dealing with a lot of stakeholders on an ongoing basis. More importantly, as the title suggests, they need to like you. Dom points out that although he doesn’t mean it when he says ‘engineers hate marketeers’ there are clearly ‘communication’ issues when it comes to connecting the dots internally. Equally making sure everyone is on the same page with the product story becomes a versatile translator’s job.
Unlike traditional marketing, which is often viewed in isolation, product marketing integrates insights across functions to align strategies and ensure the product meets customer needs while remaining competitive. By acting as such a ‘translator’, product marketers also aim (on a daily basis) to bridge the gap between technical teams like engineering and customer-facing teams like sales, balancing innovation demands with practical product development.
Besides that, they aim to mould themselves into becoming the internal voice of the customer, relying on tools like buyer persona research and win-loss analysis to inform product positioning and messaging. To succeed, misconceptions such as engineers questioning the value of marketing, need to be cleared, illustrating how the discipline ensures products reach the right audience at the right time.
Challenges aplenty, particularly in aligning product marketing with other functions. I emphasise the challenge of managing relationships across the organisation, as product marketing’s impact is often long-term and not immediately visible. Building trust with leadership, sales, and other teams requires sustained effort and patience.
Underscoring that to be successful a holistic go-to-market strategy is needed, one that keeps the product central to organisational focus. This approach involves:
- Ensuring constant communication with teams to understand their priorities and challenges.
- Staying informed about market trends and customer expectations to anticipate shifts.
- Leveraging in-person interactions, even in hybrid work environments, to build rapport and trust with team members.
Ultimately, marketing exists to create customers, the product itself is indispensable to this goal. Product marketing, therefore, plays a dual role: connecting internal departments and ensuring the organisation maintains a market-driven focus, avoiding pitfalls like those that befell companies such as Kodak or Nokia.
Marketing helps ‘create’ the customer
Because our purpose is to create a customer. And that’s what we do — Dom Hawes
Although we discuss product marketing in a more generic context, I’ve mostly worked in B2B product marketing (despite my geekiness for innovation across all industries — see Product Burger series). Yet simply looking at the above B2B buying journey, of which there are various iterations, it quickly becomes clear that a ‘customer’ is actually 7 to 10 people when selling Software as a Service (especially in complex industries such as financial services). Some of whom you will not directly talk to in drawn out sales processes.
So when Dom made this statement I agree that a ‘power flip’ needs to happen, back to the creative thinkers who help reach the unreachable customer. Hence, I believe that in various tech sectors, including fintech, CMO and CPO need to be truly ‘exec’ level roles.
‘Evolution of the customer’ and its creators
In the final stretch I explore why product marketing isn’t just about outward-facing initiatives; it also plays a pivotal role in aligning internal understanding of the product and its value. Even highlighting co-creation journeys that smaller startups conduct with customers, and internal product marketing in larger organisations. In short I illustrate how this function, when given the power, can drive innovation and foster a unified organisational narrative. A narrative that can be repeated by anyone across the company meaning the product story lives more than a thousand lives, reaching ears in many ‘places’ (another one of those devilish P’s).
The concept of ‘internal product marketing’ can often be overlooked. By repurposing existing (or newly created) sales materials, such as a 90-second demo video, product marketers can inform employees about the product’s purpose and value. This knowledge can have a ripple effect, enabling employees to become informal ambassadors for the product. For example, an engineer might share insights with a personal connection, broadening the product’s reach. Internal alignment ensures everyone in the company can articulate a cohesive and compelling story about the product, amplifying its impact both internally and externally.
Internal product marketing can also focus on co-creation (as this process needs a lot of facilitation). Although a bold strategy, involving customers in the early stages of product development, it can help cement product marketing efforts. This collaborative approach ensures any product launch meets customer needs and helps leverage the deep market insights of early adopters. Equally this can’t be done with all products, yet exploring various forms of it means customers bring knowledge of their competitors in too (potential future clients). This co-creation process benefits both parties, fostering strong relationships and ensuring the product’s relevance in the market.
Product marketing across the adoption lifecycle
Drawing on Geoffrey Moore’s technology adoption lifecycle, the product marketer’s role as a navigator through a product’s journey from innovation to widespread adoption can’t be left unseen. A skilled product marketer helps identify pivotal moments, such as customer feedback patterns or overlooked features, and works with product managers and engineers to address them. This dynamic involvement ensures the product evolves in alignment with market demands while maintaining focus on broad, scalable solutions rather than bespoke features for individual clients.
Raising the stage, and the ceiling
This concluding part of the episode covers why product marketing is seen as increasingly important at the strategic level. Leadership teams, where driven by strong CMOs, CPOs or champions in these functions (not yet at the exec level) tend to prioritise this function. While at Ipsos, I advocated for productising research services to create a consistent framework that adds value for both internal teams and customers. Ipsos, and many other companies, are slowly onboarding senior (and junior) product marketers across the UK and Europe.
Underscoring product marketing’s role and understanding its value: driving customer-centric innovation while unifying internal teams around a shared vision. Every business can deploy product marketing with more success, making sure it is a powerful tool for ensuring long-term product success and organisational cohesion.
Dom’s final stretch and cliff-hanger
Dom suggest we drop the ‘product’ as this holistic approach to marketing, means modern day ‘product marketing’ might actually simply be ‘marketing’. A product marketer embodies the essence of marketing by seamlessly bridging external promotion with internal alignment, aiming for a unified organisational mission that resonates at every level — from executives to frontline staff.
Drawing parallels to the famous NASA janitor story, Dom highlights the ambition marketers should have: to ensure the organisation’s mission is consistently reflected at every touchpoint.
Acting as a conduit across diverse functions — product, sales, technical teams, and the voice of the customer — is central to Leo’s effectiveness, he says. This approach, coupled with using language that aligns with business priorities rather than traditional “marketing speak,” enables deeper collaboration and advances marketing’s impact across the organisation.
In the second part of this conversation we dive into a much debated topic, the ‘side hustle’. And here I spill the beans on having made over 250 investments across 9 years, in pursuit of true product innovation…
This article summarises episode 92 of the Unicorny Marketing Show, available on all podcast platforms including Spotify.
