Product marketing vs. product management

Today's sermonette: Make sure the whole of your marketing effort exceeds the sum of the parts by knowing the difference between product marketing and product management. In case you're ever asked, the following should clarify things. If it doesn't, and your questioner persists in a state of bafflement, it may signal something dysfunctional within your organization, beyond the normal (and normally healthy) creative tension and conflict that comes with the territory. There are five basic roles and responsibilities of product marketing: 1. Defining market opportunities, strategies and the requirements for getting into a market, a.k.a., market penetration 2. Determining price, package, message. 3. Promotion and revenue. 4. Establishing "position": where your product resides in the mind of the people you want to reach -- which, you should note, is already a crowded space. 5. Talking up your company ("evangelizing") to the people whose opinions hold sway in your industry. Compare and contrast all of the above with product management: 1. Bringing requirements in from the field and from customers. 2. Defining and validating the product, and benchmarking it competitively (how does it stack up to the competition?). 3. Product release and customer satisfaction. 4. Building and differentiating the intellectual property that gives rise to your products. Note that marketing defines the market opportunity, while management defines the product. And how both functions require an active marketing gene to see the world through customers' eyes. Each responsibility has direct impact on the role of the other. They are interdependent. Opportunity for conflict? Absolutely. That's why they pay you the big bucks to keep order and ensure that one plus one always equals three. Stay tuned for more on this subject.