Product marketing vs. products management

Product marketing is different from product management in high-tech companies. Whereas the product manager should take a product's requirements from the sales and marketing in order to create a product requirements document which will be used by the engineering team to build the product. The product marketing manager creates a marketing requirements document,, which is used as source for the product management to develop the PRD ( product requirements document)

In other forms the product manager creates both the marketing requirement document and the product requirements document), while the product marketing manager does outbound tasks like giving product demonstrations in trade shows, creating marketing collateral like hot-sheets, beat-sheets, cheat sheets, data sheets, and white papers. The product marketing manager should be skilled not only in competitor analysis, market research, and technical writing, but also in more business oriented activities like conducting ROI and NPV analyses on technology investments, strategizing how the decision criteria of the prospects or customers can be changed so that they buy the company's product vis-a-vis the competitor's product, etc.

Product marketing in small businesses

In smaller high-tech companies or start-ups, product marketing and product management functions can be blurred, and both tasks may be borne by one individual. However, as the company grows small businesses need to concentrate on creating good requirements documents for the engineering team. they need to hire someone else due to analyze the market, influence the "analysts", press, etc. When such clear demarcation becomes visible, the former falls under the domain of product management, and the latter, under product marketing.

What most of the small businesses need is to hire a Product Marketing Engineer, who is able to market their product in an effective way.

product marketing vs product management