What is the Difference Between a Product Manager and a Product Marketing Manager?

What is the difference between a Product Manager and a Product Marketing Manager?

After all, whether it's a real thing or virtual software, both are responsible for product releases of customer-facing items. To ensure the success of a product launch, both must organize diverse groups inside a corporation.

So, what is the difference between the two roles?

The simplest way to explain the distinction is that product managers are in charge of leading the production of a product, whilst product marketing managers are in charge of leading the product's go-to-market (GTM).

Let’s dive deeper into the responsibilities of the two roles.

1. Product Manager

A product manager is responsible for performing the following duties:

• Sets the product vision and the product roadmap, including new products and new features
• Identifies which customer pain points to target, through both user interviews and metrics
• Articulates business value of the product
• Documents required functionality of the product, and may write out user stories or test cases
• Ships the product alongside software engineers, designers, QA, analysts, and others in the product development team
• Manages stakeholders of the product and aligns them to the product strategy
• Advocates for the end-user and shapes the customer experience within the product

The product manager is focused on identifying what customer problems to tackle, and is typically embedded as part of an EPD (engineering / product / design) organization.

Most importantly, becoming a product manager takes a specific set of skills, experiences, and certifications.

2. Product Marketing Manager

A product marketing manager is responsible for performing the following duties:

• Identifies a coherent marketing strategy for the product
• Conducts competitor analysis & market research
• Shapes communication & product positioning  
• Identifies the product features to spotlight and empowers the sales team with clear value propositions
• Explains benefits of product features via customer-facing messaging
• Leads product demos & presentations
• Sets up marketing campaigns for demand generation
• Selects the appropriate pricing strategy for the product
• Provides guidance throughout the lifecycle of the product, ranging from minimum viable products to fully mature products

The product marketing manager is focused on empowering go-to-market teams such as sales, support, customer success, and account management.

The Roles in Practice

In an ideal world, the product management team is clearly separated from the product marketing team, so that both teams can focus and specialize. This most frequently happens in larger organizations. However, in many smaller companies, a single person will be responsible for both roles, often acting as a product manager who must also take on a marketing role once the product is ready for release to customers. In addition, some companies will have product managers and no product marketers, and this structure appears most frequently when the PMs work on websites (the products) that aren’t directly sold to customers.

Why might a single person tackle both roles, especially in smaller organizations? That’s because both roles need to have the following skill sets:

• Customer obsession
• Mastery of both qualitative feedback and quantitative metrics
• Strong communication skills
• Drive to execute at a quick pace to unlock maximum impact
• Deep influence to align stakeholders to the strategy

In resource-constrained environments, the same person can flex to tackle both areas of responsibility.
At the end of the day, both roles are critical in a company that releases customer-facing software, so product managers must work closely with product marketing managers to ensure that the end product fits the right customer segment and customer needs.