What being a product manager taught me about marketing
Product and marketing are usually separate teams with separate goals. Field notes on why the best marketing starts with product thinking, and the PM habits I still use every week.
In most companies, product and marketing sit in different meetings.
Product decides what to build. Marketing decides how to talk about it. They meet at launch, hand over a feature list, and hope it works out.
Having done product work before becoming a founder, I think that split causes a lot of bad marketing. The best marketing I have seen starts long before launch, with the same questions a good PM asks.
Marketing is just product, explained
A product manager spends most of their time on three questions:
- Who has this problem?
- How painful is it for them?
- Why is our solution better than what they do today?
Now look at a good landing page. It answers the exact same three questions. Who is this for, what problem does it solve, and why should I pick this over what I already use?
When marketing feels hard, it is often because those product questions were never answered clearly. You cannot write a sharp headline for a fuzzy product.
Habit one: start with the problem, not the feature
PMs learn to fall in love with problems, not solutions.
Marketing benefits from the same habit. Nobody cares that your tool has a feature. They care that a specific annoyance in their week goes away.
So instead of “we have advanced filters”, I try to write “find the one thing you need without scrolling through everything.” Same feature. Very different reaction.
Habit two: talk to users more than you think you need to
Every PM knows the moment when a user interview completely changes your plan.
For marketing, user conversations are even more valuable, because they give you the actual words people use. The best copy is often lifted almost directly from how customers describe their own problem.
If your marketing uses words your customers would never say out loud, it will feel like marketing. If it uses their words, it feels like understanding.
Habit three: prioritize ruthlessly
A PM’s real job is saying no. To features, to requests, to good ideas that are not the most important idea right now.
Marketing needs the same discipline. You cannot say ten things on one page. You cannot be on every channel. You cannot target everyone.
Pick the one message that matters most. Say it clearly. Let the rest go.
Habit four: measure outcomes, not activity
In product, shipping a feature is not success. Changing user behavior is success.
In marketing, posting is not success. Publishing a campaign is not success. What matters is whether anything changed: signups, replies, conversations, revenue.
This is honestly the habit that pulled me toward building linkutm. If you cannot tell which effort created which result, you are measuring activity and calling it progress.
Habit five: iterate in public
Good product teams ship, watch, and adjust. They do not wait for perfection.
Marketing works the same way. Your first message is a hypothesis. Your first channel is an experiment. The goal is not to be right the first time, it is to learn fast enough to be right eventually.
The takeaway
If you are a founder who feels “bad at marketing”, there is a decent chance you are better at it than you think. If you can explain who your product is for and why it matters, you already have most of the raw material.
Marketing is not a separate skill bolted on at the end. It is product thinking, said out loud.
Post eleven of writing in public. If you are a PM or a builder who suddenly owns marketing, email me. I have been there, and I am still figuring parts of it out.