Why founders need to think like product marketers
The bridge between vision and revenue isn’t messaging. It’s product marketing.
👋 Hi, I’m James. I write Building Momentum to help you accelerate B2B SaaS growth through product marketing, GTM strategy, sales, and marketing.
Hi founders and CEOs (or, if you’re not one, read this - then share it with yours):
You don’t get to opt out of product marketing. Either practice the fundamentals or hire someone who has (and actually listen to them).
From the moment you pitch your idea, you’re already doing product marketing: translating what you’ve built into something the world can understand and buy. The challenge isn’t doing it. It’s doing it deliberately.
You actually make hundreds of small product marketing decisions every week. How to describe a feature, which story to tell, which customer to prioritize…
But these decisions are treated as surface-level choices, not strategic ones.
… and the strategic decisions you need to make? They rarely get the depth of thought they deserve.
You’re the first PMM
Whether you’re just getting started, scaling, or even the head of a huge organization, you’re still the first product marketer.
You’re listening to customers, spotting patterns, refining the pitch, connecting the market to the roadmap, thinking about monetization, the second-order impact of brand, the sales motion and metrics… the list goes on.
That is product marketing.
You’re shaping who your product is for, how you explain it, the value it creates, and how your organization takes it to market.
The issue is that many leaders don’t dive into product marketing fundamentals as much as they understand fundamentals of other departments. It feels soft compared to finance or product, even though it’s even more foundational to success. It’s not given the same gravitas or the same investment of energy.
Why? Maybe it’s because you think it’s a ‘done deal’ - you’ve decided direction, it just needs to be executed. Or maybe it’s because you’ve only ever experienced the tactical side of product marketing through decks, messaging, and product launches. You’ve never seen it as a way of driving strategy.
But every go-to-market problem you face (like misaligned pipeline, weak differentiation, confused customers) - and every opportunity! - can be traced back to positioning, messaging, and clarity. That’s product marketing.
But as the business grows, you - and others - learn things, recognize new patterns, make new decisions. But these are treated as intuition rather than a discipline - so the process you go through - from collecting inputs, evaluating, making decisions, and directing execution - isn’t really systemized.
You see it every week: someone updates the deck without telling sales. Product ships a feature nobody knows how to position. Marketing plans a campaign around a half-remembered ICP from last year.
None of it’s intentional… it’s just what happens.
The opportunity cost of product marketing can - no joke - quietly make or break a company.
Strategy fragments between marketing, sales, and product. Stories split. The quality of execution, from your perspective, weakens.
But nobody is wrong… but nobody is right, either.
Why PMM hides in plain sight
When it works, it feels invisible. The story clicks, sales flows, customers get it, product features launch, the roadmap is great…
PMM isn’t words, copy, decks, and launch campaigns. It is the work that turns strategy into something executable and believable - a translation layer between what you build, who it’s for, and how you sell, market, and support.
As a function, it refuses to fit neatly into an org chart. It touches everything:
Product, because it supports on what to build, why, and how they are launched
Marketing, because it defines what to say and to which audience
Sales, because it gives people a story that wins opportunities
And so doesn’t fit in anywhere… and thus is treated like an add-on.
Some non-specialist marketers can do some parts of PMM, as can a sales leader… But seeing the whole thing, holistically? That’s unique to product marketers.
What product marketing actually does
Without a bridge, everyone works hard but on different interpretations of the plan… at best loosely coordinated… at worst, completely isolated.
The signs are everywhere: product sprints forward without a clear story to support, sales learns about launches from Slack, marketing spends budget amplifying a message that doesn’t match what customers are actually saying.
PMM connects three things.
Product - what you’re building, and why it matters
Market - who it’s for, and what they care about
Revenue - how you tell the story so people buy (and stay, and grow)
When those are in sync, magic happens. Everything compounds.
When they aren’t, you get friction.
Product launches land flat. Why? Many potential reasons.
Sales teams improvise: you end up with non-repeatable wins, and poor-fit customers
Marketing teams optimize for engagement instead of traction.
Product and leadership start losing confidence in marketing altogether. You hear the same lines: ‘We need to go harder.’ ‘Our message isn’t landing.’ ‘This launch didn’t create a buzz.’
The problem isn’t volume. It’s focus.
Energy gets redirected to activity instead of alignment. Everyone looks busy, but is anyone really moving forward? Probably not.
The easiest way to see the difference is when it’s working versus when it’s not
At Kayako, Alicia and I worked really closely with Jamie, the co-founder responsible for marketing and sales.
We built a tight-knit feedback loop on how the business was executing across product marketing fundamentals.
What segments were working best? What did our best-fit customers actually value most? Which use cases were signals of retention and which were distractions? How were our sales team adopting the message? How can the product roadmap support go-to-market efforts?
We sat together in the office (waaaay before Covid) - so casual conversations, adhoc questions, and everyday riffs were a core part of our day-to-day.
That alignment meant launches hit cleaner, pipeline grew fast, and the story held together. When strategy, product, and marketing speak the same language, everything feels easier.
Founders/CEOs 🤝 Product marketers
The best founders already think like product marketers.
You:
Listen until they can explain the problem better than the customer can.
Name the outcome precisely. “Save time” isn’t strategy. “Reduce onboarding from three weeks to three days” is.
Build narrative before noise. They shape how the market thinks before trying to sell to it.
In an ideal world, I think product marketing should report to a co-founder or CEO. I’ve done this three times, and it’s been the most successful model. Rather than add another layer between how a CEO sets and directs strategy, through a marketing or product leader who translates it through their own filter, a PMM<>CEO/co-founder reporting line is more likely to be doubly effective at the strategic impact level.
If you’re a founder, here’s how to make the partnership work.
Give PMM real inputs. Share revenue targets, retention data, deal analysis, roadmap trade-offs, business contraints. Don’t just hand over feature lists or to-dos… give context (or better yet, let them feed into the context too)
Involve them early. Bring product marketing into roadmap and pricing discussions, into go-to-market decisions. If they only see things when it’s time to “launch,” it’s already too late.
Back their insights. When PMMs surface uncomfortable truths — listen. They’re often the first to see what the market really thinks, and can accurately judge how execution will be perceived by the market. At Kayako, I discovered several failures in our sales process that, once raised, led to a significant restructure that grew us faster and stronger.
Align incentives. Tie success to revenue, not vanity metrics. Clarity and traction take longer than a single quarter to measure.
The best metric for PMM success isn’t top-of-funnel activity.
Instead, look at improvement in revenue quality:
Win rate within the ICP
Shorter time to close
Higher expansion rate
Improved retention for the customers you actually want
Those are the signs of clarity compounding.
Give authority and enforce trust. Encourage sales and product to listen and engage with PMMs. Often, product marketers try, but without authority it can fall flat. Prioritize PMM as an authority within the org.
When your business treats product marketing as a partner, not a service, the return is exponential. You’ll make better decisions, move faster, and build a company that actually knows how to tell its own story.
Product marketing is THE multiplier
When founders start thinking like product marketers, the shift is immediate.
Meetings get shorter because everyone already knows the story.
Sales cycles get faster because customers recognise themselves in your message.
Product decisions get sharper because you can see which use cases really drive revenue.
Strategy stops being abstract. Clarity becomes a competitive advantage. It compounds.
Every new hire, every campaign, every launch builds on the same foundation instead of starting from scratch.
That’s what product marketing really gives you: momentum.
Product marketing is a discipline you need to practice from day one, not something to delegate later.
Whether you’re starting out or scaling, make it intentional. Do product marketing on purpose.