Dual role of Product Manager and Product Marketing Manager

Can and should the same person be responsible for both product management and product marketing for a product?

Couple of years ago, I was faced with that decision while leading a team of product managers. The open headcount I had for the Product Marketing Manager got frozen because of the ensuing financial crisis and lack of visibility. 

The product suite I managed was very technical in nature. To write proper messaging documents, one had to understand the technical intricacies extremely well. I decided that each of the Product Managers will be responsible for both in-bound as well as out-bound aspects for their respective areas of the product suite. As leader of the team, I will ensure overall  consistency of in-bound and out-bound messaging.

Fast forward six months.

One of the top product managers in the team came to my office one day and said, "I feel as if I  suffer from a split personality disorder now. This dual role of product management and product marketing is just not working". In that  1:1 session with the product manager and subsequent sessions with the team, we had honest evaluation of where we stood and whether the dual role was really working for the team.

Some of the key findings from that experience:

• Product management and product marketing are very demanding jobs each in their own right. By trying to do both roles, it's extremely hard to do a good job on either one
• Time management can be very tricky. A Product Manager's day involves handling quite a few "unplanned" events - e.g., handling sales escalations (especially in the enterprise software world). While making trade-off of "what to drop" invariably it's the product marketing deliverable that gets delayed
• Although there are quite a few common attributes, the skill-sets required to do effective product management and marketing in a individual contributor level are fairly distinct. It's hard for one person to be very good at both 
• Having product management and marketing under one leadership within the product division (as opposed to product marketing under corporate marketing) does help in having overall consistency in in-bound and out-bound messaging 

I talked to product management/marketing leads from couple of other business units who were "experimenting" with a similar model. The feedbacks were fairly consistent. They were struggling with similar issues. In a few months time, we were all able to get our dedicated Product Marketing persons.     

In fact, more and more mid-size and big companies (especially in the enterprise software world) are moving towards the following model - you have a General Manager(GM) responsible for a business unit (e.g., your product suite for the Financials vertical). The GM has three or more direct reports - head of product Management, head of product marketing, and head of engineering among them. Head of product marketing ensures that product marketers in his team work closely with folks in the corporate marketing department. Head of product management has product managers reporting to her and partners closely with the product marketers. 

While starting out with a product it might be possible for one person to do both product management and marketing. However, once your product is of a certain level of maturity and/or your company/team is of a certain size, you need dedicated focus on product management and product marketing.