Natalie Rothfels is an Operator in Residence at Reforge and runs a leadership coaching practice. She has held product leadership roles at Quizlet and Khan Academy and was a classroom teacher before that.
Adam Fishman is an Executive in Residence at Reforge. He was the Chief Product and Growth Officer at Imperfect Foods, VP Product and Growth at Patreon, and Head of Growth at Lyft.
Why Marketing-Product Collaboration is so Important
Building and growing a business is a team sport that requires everyone to be on the same page. This is especially critical for product and marketing teams, who cannot move the business forward without each other. A product without customers is just a project. Customers without a meaningful product are just an unhappy audience.
We’ve seen the evolution of this relationship over the past few decades. It used to be that the product itself could be subpar so long as marketing could get it off the shelf. Then the pendulum swung: the product should be so good that it can sell itself without marketing. Today, as competition across industries has gotten stiffer, it’s become clear that both are critical for success. Companies that treat marketing and product as the sum of “1+1=3” alchemy can distinguish themselves in the market.
Yet the relationship between product and marketing is surprisingly contentious because it’s a direct reflection of where power is held in an organization. When relationships are built off of power rather than partnership, they can all too often turn into contentious “me vs. you,” or “us vs. them” situations.
Many marketers have never worked with collaborative PMs, so they struggle to influence the roadmap and bring their unique insights into the product development process. Many PMs incorrectly assume that marketers own only acquisition and miss how marketing can actually help clarify and craft what gets built and why.
Wherever there is ambiguity, complexity, and multiple stakeholders, it’s all too easy to try to (re)gain a sense of control by resorting to self-protective behaviors like land-grabbing for ownership, siloing work to avoid slow decision making, or pointing fingers at others when initiatives flop or don’t lead to impact.
Yet no individual alone is solely responsible for bringing a product to market from definition to development to distribution. It’s both possible and necessary to improve this key partnership. To do so, marketers and product managers need to understand:
What causes the partnership to unravel
Three strands that form a stronger partnership
What happens when marketing and product don’t collaborate well
How to strengthen the partnership today
What Causes the Marketing-Product Partnership to Unravel
People often conflate collaboration with clarified roles and responsibilities, where each party has what they need to go off and do their own portion of the work. While that’s certainly better than no clarity, the real goal of the marketing-product partnership is to work together to create something stronger and more durable than what each individual could create on their own. That happens not in the clear separation of work but in the connection of disparate strands and insights, well-integrated together.
Unfortunately, this integration is rare because it requires three foundational strands that commonly unravel between product managers and marketers: trust and respect, collective ownership of goals, and long-term strategic planning.
Trust and Respect: How it Goes Wrong
The Problem: Lack of understanding of and respect for what each person does (and the value it provides).
Product is ultimately responsible for development, and marketing is ultimately responsible for distribution. But there’s a bunch of gray area in between, especially for companies that have product-led growth where traditional distribution mechanisms are embedded within the product experience itself.
These gray areas — research, design, messaging, segmentation, value-prop development, targeting, data infrastructure, and even persona-development — can be a great source of friction because marketers and product people often aren’t effective at translating their perspectives for each other. Worse, both product and marketing may misunderstand their respective roles in the product development process. Given there are many different types of marketers (performance, lifecycle, product, content, brand) and different types of product teams (core, growth, platform, innovation), when it’s not clear what each function does or why it’s valuable, the foundation of the relationship will erode.
Marketers may feel that they’re already providing tons of market feedback to product yet nothing is getting listened to or built from it. Product may be triangulating input from 100 different stakeholders to prioritize what’s high leverage and feasible. Both care about what gets built and why, but trust gets fractured in a thousand tiny ways along the process:
What matters to one person may be totally opaque to the other
How one person is thinking about the problem may be totally different and unexpected
How each person’s work is evaluated may be in complete opposition to each other
What role each person plays in areas of mutual interest can lead to territorialism.
Ultimately, if you don’t understand what the other person does, how it can amplify your work, or why both perspectives and skills are necessary for the product to succeed, the foundation of the partnership is unstable at best.
Unfortunately, you can end up in a dynamic where there’s not only a mismatch about responsibilities but each side can point to the other about who’s at fault. In 2020, Audible’s teams rallied behind the launch of a new all-you-can-listen subscription tier. At the time, the goal was to broaden the appeal and drive growth, but the initial launch had lower uptake than expected. There was a tension between whether marketing had done enough to raise awareness or whether the product and/or content weren’t right for the customer base. The shift occurred once the teams came together to evaluate how consumer content and discovery preferences, which drove the product experience, intersected with consumer willingness-to-pay and decision factors, which drove the positioning and marketing. Afterwards, everyone was able to see the value of working towards a cohesive view.
- Jameelah Calhoun, Global Head of Product Marketing, Eventbrite
Collective Ownership of Goals: How it Goes Wrong
The Problem: Siloing goals by function, leading to collateral damage.
Teams end up with functional KRs when the marketing team and product orgs either lack strategic direction, or are more concerned with their individual successes than progress against a shared strategic goal. This is often made worse by OKR processes that cascade down to the individual level, encouraging people to put their own performance goals at the forefront of daily work.
When goals are siloed by function, teams unrealistically assume they can get their work done independently, when in reality their work is highly interdependent. It’s easy to be willfully unaware of the other team’s priorities, only to understand the downstream consequences when the fire has already started burning.
There were times at Patreon where the product team announced changes that then led to thrashing and problems on the customer side, and marketing was left to clean up the pieces. Tensions can easily swing the other way — the marketing team does something that creates buzz for a moment, and the product team will say “How is this beneficial for users and our business over the long term?”
The Problem: Using different yardsticks to measure success.
With a lack of respect and siloed goals, teams usually end up with different ways of measuring their own performance (whether or not either measure is a real indicator of business outcomes).
Sometimes this shows up in what data is getting tracked and measured: Product may use internal usage data to understand customer satisfaction, while marketing may use external surveys to understand brand affinity.
Sometimes this shows up in what gets optimized: Product may focus on improving feature usage, while marketing may focus on improving feature awareness.
Sometimes this shows up in what insights are driving decision-making: Product may believe existing usability issues should be prioritized to improve retention, while marketing may believe that the product isn’t targeted to the right audience.
Sometimes this shows up in what work is deemed valuable in the first place:
“The biggest disconnect I’ve seen tends to be around metrics and measurement. The classic example is around marketers who are more brand-oriented and less performance-oriented hitting up against product people who are metrics-oriented. That manifests in a misunderstanding or tension around product prioritization and roadmap. Marketing wants engineering support for something but can’t explain the ways in which it’s going to create direct impact, or product wants to hit OKRs around growth numbers but can’t find an easy way to work with marketing to quantify the impact of what marketing is doing.
- Jonathan Hillis, EIR at Reforge and Founder, Cabin
Long-Term Strategic Planning: How it Goes Wrong
The Problem: Lack of stable strategic foundation leaves too much for individual interpretation.
Sometimes dysfunction that appears at the IC-level is actually attributable to dysfunction at the leadership level. Executives need to do the legwork upfront to define and communicate a clear company strategy based on how the business grows, what the main levers for that growth are, and what’s fundamentally moveable. If they don’t, they leave too much room for each individual to interpret what matters and why.
At AMC’s DTC startup, before we changed to embedded growth pods, teams were much more fluid. As the business grew rapidly, people would switch around depending on business priorities. The problem with that was that we had a lot of people looking at their individual trees, but not enough looking at the forest and seeing what was actually burning. It was hard to give people concrete areas of ownership. Switching to embedded teams that aligned to the customer journey helped us to ladder everything clearly to the overall business goals, giving everyone a much better understanding of the big picture strategy and priorities.
- Saleem Malkana, EIR at Reforge and former VP of Product at AMC Networks
The Problem: Anchoring on different priorities through different insights.
Marketers and product leaders have varied but mutual interests. Shared information and consistent communication is required across them all:
Customer insights: Who is our real target customer, where do they spend time, and how does our product integrate into their lives? How are different segments using the product, and what are their unique pain points and needs?
Market positioning: How is the market changing and what new opportunities are on the horizon? What is their perception of our brand? How are we differentiated from other offerings?
Product pricing and packaging: What is our offering and how is it priced for our audience’s needs?
Planning, validation and roadmapping: What should get built and why?
Understanding core operating and business models: What stage are our core acquisition, activation, engagement, and monetization loops in and how effective are they?
All too often, though, teammates don’t get explicit about these factors, so marketing ends up anchoring on one thing as the most important insight, while product anchors on another. This generally results in two differing views on reality and success, making it hard to move in lockstep in the same direction.
If you’re interested in more deeply understanding how marketing and product teams can improve their cross-functional partnerships, sign up to receive this free Marketing Strategy lesson, “Defining Product Marketing and Dispelling the Myths.”
3 Strands that Form a Stronger Partnership
To increase the chances of the business succeeding, product managers and marketers need to intentionally focus on developing their relationship across the same three themes: trust and respect, shared goals, and long-term planning.
Trust and Respect: How to Improve
Trust and respect is the foundation of every relationship. If you don’t understand what the other party is bringing to the table, value their perspective, or view them as a partner rather than provider, everything else downstream gets harder. The relationship will continue to strengthen when there’s proof of success: the better integrated you are, the better chance you’ll have at hitting your goals, and the more likely you’ll see the value in each other’s work. This is a positive feedback loop for the next project.
You don’t want the first interaction you have with your product or marketing counterpart to be explicitly asking them to do something, particularly if it isn't in their best interest or priorities. But you can’t know those things until you understand how another team operates and why. Instead of coming in and bringing all your (seemingly wonderful) new ideas or asks off the bat, first start a shared understanding of how the other team operates, what their priorities and goals are, and with the problem or hypothesis of what the team is really trying to solve. Then back into the collective best approach from there.
Brittany Bingham, VP of Marketing, Guru
Collective Ownership of Goals: How to Improve
Marketing and product teams will be more successful when they have shared ownership and accountability over goals. In order for marketing to do more than offline communication and messaging, they need to have access to engineering and be embedded in cross-functional teams. When teams share goals, it’s much easier to not compete (over KRs, over resources, etc).
It takes time, evidence, and education to change perceptions of marketing from a launch service to a strategic partner. I direct my team to take advantage of every micro opportunity to show their partners what marketing strategy looks like, as many product managers may not even know what marketing can really do. In the context of a launch for example, product may simply expect a list of tactics to support them. Marketing needs to show them that there’s a strategy that supports the tactics. Why are we doing certain programs or channels over others? How will we measure marketing success at launch and afterward? How does marketing fit into the customer experience at large?
- Eileen Buenviaje Reyes, VP Product and Growth Marketing, 1Password
In order to move forward your customer outcomes, it’s a x-functional team sport. You have to make sure that each team has clear skin in the game and know that one team cannot be successful without its counterpart. At Imperfect Foods, the acquisition marketing team and new customer experience team shared explicit goals (even though they were functionally different teams), which meant by definition and proximity they had to collaborate. Separate goals will breed separate outcomes and fractured focus. Plus, this gives folks the opportunity to learn and respect the art of each of the domains.
- Adam Fishman
Long-Term Strategic Planning: How to Improve
If there’s no strategic underpinning to the work getting done, PMs and Marketers may ultimately just be throwing pasta at the wall. Clarity up-front about what the strategy is, what levers are most important, and what makes the team believe those levers are movable makes everything else easier to reason about. Teams that align on strategy and share goals and accountability will find it easier to prioritize, measure impact, and develop a trusting partnership.
Integrating these three threads is work that’s never “done.” Being able to connect the dots (including an understanding of the market, the business, and each other’s roles) in insightful and actionable ways is a key differentiator of great partnerships.
Caroline Walthall is Director of Product Marketing at Quizlet. She describes the opportunity on the table when PMs and Marketers weave together well:
Product typically shows up as the “inside > out” leader in an organization whereas marketing often shows up with an “outside > in” leadership stance. With product doing so much in the day-to-day to set the vision, manage internal resources, build products, and understand performance, marketing typically spends more time understanding market trends, talking to customers, fielding campaigns, and sharpening the way the product and brand shows up in the world. When these two orientations meet in the middle and reach alignment, it gives a company greater confidence in the overall strategy. Instead of leaving one piece out of the equation, left to be figured out through pure trial and error, the core value hypothesis is validated and grounded in data.
- Caroline Walthall
Patrick Moran, Reforge EIR and former Global Head of Growth Marketing at Spotify, describes that if teams are not aligned on long-term strategy when they’re making initial go to market plans, there will be misalignment around product, audience, marketing channels, and messaging, causing launches to fall flat.
When launching Spotify in India, the content library was constrained by several factors including licensing costs. This required the team to get creative with a smaller content library upfront. They decided to focus on curated playlists, knowing that a more robust content library with local appeal was required for long-term success in the market. Marketing and product were both willing to trade off a more complete content experience for faster speed-of-entry into the market. They then had to partner early to figure out which audience in India to target given the constraints on the available content. They decided to initially position the product launch around expats and people with affinity for more Western music, knowing that launching broadly to India without more local content would ultimately fail.
According to Patrick, teams typically do one of three things in this situation:
They let the product launch and simmer without actually putting any marketing out there. This enables them to gather more customer feedback without putting the marketing spend behind it yet.
They do a major launch, with multi-channel campaigns and widespread spend.
They do a staggered launch that requires iteration, and continual refining of audience, messaging, and value prop as more customers are targeted.
Spotify in India was an example of the third case, and required product and marketing teams to collaborate deeply upstream, with the same constraints, to figure out the long-term strategy. Without it, marketing would have been inclined to try to sell something that product couldn’t deliver, or product would have built something without knowing if it’s likely to be adopted in-market.
- Patrick Moran
Earlier in the product development cycle, marketing should be bringing market, competitive, or customer insights into the product strategy discussion as often as they can. A key insight about how a customer approaches a problem or buys a product can make a big difference in how the product gets built or goes to market. Plus, marketing and product often look at the same research through slightly different filters. For example, if a team is redoing an onboarding flow, product may be looking at it through the lens of “which tasks do I want them to complete and how can I get them to complete them easily?”, while marketing may be looking at it through the lens of “does the customer understand why we want them to complete the task (and what value it will provide)?
- Eileen Buenviaje Reyes
What Happens When Marketing and Product Don’t Collaborate Well?
So far we’ve talked about what usually goes wrong in the partnership and what factors are critical for bringing the threads back together. When teams don’t integrate well, the impact goes well-beyond the interpersonal: both customers and the business suffer.
There’s a disjointed customer experience.
Handoffs of customers that reflect the org chart will lead to disjointed user experiences. Bad experiences lead to latent churn. Teams may try to fix this systemic issue (we don’t share common strategic goals, we’re siloed, etc) with single-point interventions (this project didn’t go well because the requirements weren’t well defined) when they need to think systematically rather than simplistically.
Marketing may set too high of an expectation with customers, only for the product to disappoint and fall short. Alternatively, the product may do a great job meeting customer needs but customers may never discover the value without clear and powerful marketing to position it.
- Eileen Buenviaje Reyes
Surface metrics move, but don’t lead to real business outcomes.
When PMs or Marketers overly focus on surface-level metrics without understanding how they serve as inputs to meaningful drivers of the business, they’ll end up reaching a local maximum of optimizations. Teams are held to account for only the metrics they own or can reasonably move, but teams must disambiguate between metrics moving and real progress being made. For example, focusing on how many people register for a free account is rarely indicative of the quality or intent of those customers. If Product or Marketing teams anchor on surface metrics without shared counter- or health-metrics that indicate true causal relationships to business outcomes, they’ll spend a lot of time optimizing things that don’t matter all that much.
Market moves, but product lags behind and loses traction.
Great marketing teams are adept at understanding how the market is moving and how those insights can be funneled back into brand and product.
Guru is a company wiki that works in your workflow, so the information you need is always at your fingertips. Brittany Bingham, VP of Marketing, has been keeping a pulse on the market with her Product Marketing team to identify how things are shifting.
There’s a convergence of categories that Guru participates in (ranging from knowledge management to wikis and more). Practically, this means that companies that would have historically been seeking point solutions for different use cases (company wikis, internal comms, etc) are now finding that there are commonalities in the painponts that these tools solve, muddying the categories yet creating an opportunity to emerge as a single tool that can fit multiple needs. Our Product Marketing team has been listening and making sure that we’re keeping a pulse on that shift and using that to inform how we message and develop the product.
- Brittany Bingham
The product team delivers, but the marketing team can’t get behind the vision or quality.
Lack of shared goals often breeds unclear and mismanaged expectations about how things are getting prioritized, how impact is getting measured, and when something is “done.” If marketing invests resources in building out full multi-channel campaigns or more, they often want to make sure the product has been well-validated and isn’t just a test.
Product teams often orient towards more agile approaches and speed-to-market, whereas marketing tends to need to see a certain level of quality and market interest to make a case for a big launch. Over-marketing an unfinished or MVP product rarely ends well.
- Caroline Walthall
Commitments to continued improvement are much easier when long-term planning and shared ownership is held by both Marketer and Product Manager.
How to Strengthen the Marketing-Product Partnership Today
It’s very possible to improve your relationship today. As with any goal, try to start with the foundation first — trust and respect — before you move on to tie together the other unraveled strands.
In 2016, [Tinder] launched a Genders feature that added 50+ genders that people could select to better express their identity. At the time, the company wanted to add broader options for sexual orientation, but it ended up falling off the roadmap. In 2019, a particularly passionate PM found some time to add Orientation to the roadmap. This was the equivalent of adding a multi-select box to the product — not a big product feature. But, marketing jumped in and turned it into an event for the brand which included a PR campaign, videos on the feature and how Tinder has changed lives for LGBQT+ users. A simple product feature (a couple weeks of work) got turned into a major event due to tight coordination between marketing and product. As one example, the product team worked with GLAAD to determine which orientations to add to the feature.
- Ravi Mehta, Co-Founder and CEO, Scale
Ravi’s example boils down to three observable behaviors that led to a foundation of trust and respect, making execution far easier:
There was a lot of respect between teams, especially from product to marketing. They understood each other and the value each team brought to the org.
Marketing deeply understood the product experience and was often ahead of the curve in thinking about how the product could fit into people’s lives. This through-line made it easier to know what to prioritize and why, making it easier to relay the insights back to the product team in a way they could understand.
There was always cross-pollination between product and marketing around a shared goal. When everyone’s on the same team trying to move in the same direction, collaboration beats out competition.
To take a step today, sit down with your counterpart and non-judgmentally evaluate the strength of each thread. Find one you want to commit to working on more together, and get started.
The free lesson, “Defining Product Marketing & Dispelling the Myths” from our brand new Spring 2022 program Marketing Strategy is just one way we deep dive on cross-functional collaboration. Apply today today to access programs, live events, and career-building resources. Enrollment for Spring programs ENDS SOON!
