 Well, welcome back everyone. We're going to jump right on in here. So Carlos mentioned in his presentation right before the break about all the comments about the role of product marketing and PMM. So I just want to have a quick show of hands. Who in this audience has heard at least some mention of the role of the product manager at Airbnb and the demise of the role of product manager. Quick show of hands if you've heard that at all. All right. For those of you who haven't heard it. I do recommend there was a popular podcast Lenny's podcast that came out this past weekend. It's worth a listen to if you actually listen to the dialogue. I think it's more about the coming together of product management and product marketing and less about the demise of the product manager, but the demise of product management gets many more clicks in social media. And this whole kind of commentary originated back at the Figma conference a few months ago. And that was actually the origin of this panel. Because that dialogue has started all sorts of chatter and banter about like, where are the lines? How does product marketing and product management partner effectively together? So what we did was we brought together a cross functional panel here. I mean, most of you are product managers out there. You've got a few marketers on the stage here. So we're going to share our perspectives about the role of product management and product marketing and sometimes how those roles collide. But before we jump into the meat, we want to do a quick round of introductions. So if each of you could just quickly introduce yourself and share a bit about how these product managers in the audience can use your products. Let's start with you, Ritu. Welcome, everyone. I hope you're having fun so far. My name is Ritu Kapoor and I'm the CMO of Product Board. I live in the Bay Area with my two kids, 11 and 16. The 11 year old still loves me. Before I got to Product Board, I was CMO at a company called Lobb, which is in the direct mail automation space. And before that, I was VP of product marketing at Automation Anywhere, which is in the RPA space. Actually, before that, I was in the RPA space. Actually, before that, I was in engineering and product roles, but I'm going to be dating myself here if I tell you how many. And when I first was introduced to Product Board about a year ago, I remember thinking I would spend countless hours banging head against wall as both a product marketer and a product manager, just trying to figure out what customers want to see from the product. And in fact, I would have really saved those hours. So at this point, I believe we have 6,000 customers who work across both commercial and enterprise, both mid-market and enterprise. And the three things that really, that I will take out from what they tell us and the value that Product Board provides them is really, A, it's a system of work for the product manager. Purpose built for their needs. It's not for the project manager. It's not for the engineer. It's really a way for them to do their daily jobs in the right way without friction, whether that's writing features packs, whether that's prioritizing features, creating roadmaps, aligning with their teams, things that they need to do on a daily basis. Just make it simple. The second thing I hear from them is being a central source or finding Product Board to be their central repository for all customer feedback, all stakeholder feedback. And being able to take all of those different pieces of feedback would be hundreds and thousands. And getting the insights and using those insights to be able to do their jobs well. And I'm glad that both of you use it as well. I'd love to be able to talk to you a little bit later about Product Board. And the third thing I hear, and for me, this is the most important, is alignment with your go-to-market colleagues. Often it's a silo, product works. In one part of the room, go-to-market works in the other side of the house. So how do you basically make sure that the entire company is aligned on one product vision? People know what you're building. People know how you're building. Your salespeople are able to present the most up-to-date roadmaps to their customers without having to pull product managers in the room. And just even looking at revenue targets for each feature, all of that together, I think for us, Product Board really becomes that system of work, that central repository, that go-to-market alignment that product managers are looking for. So anyways, I'm a big fan. Thanks, Ritu. So my name is Karan Mubai. I'm Senior Director of Product and User Testing. I've been in product management or in product roles for about over 20 years now. I spend a number of years at SAP, at Business Objects and a variety of companies both here in the Valley and based in Vancouver, Canada. So for fellow Canadians, welcome to beautiful San Francisco. At User Testing, we lead a movement to bring human insight and empathy into your product experiences. And one of the things that I'm excited about is we enable product teams and everything from user research, designers, product managers and our colleagues in product marketing to really get at the why behind what's happening with your product. So we're inundated with a lot of data in our day to day lives. We have a lot of great tools that bring us a lot of behavioral data and we really help to dig in further underneath that and really get at the why of what's happening, interactions with the users, discussions with the users of your products and your experiences. I'm really excited. I'm the token product manager on this panel of marketers but obviously filled with a room of colleagues here. So thank you for bringing us on. Hey folks, this is Arshal. I'm a principal product marketing manager at Amplitude and I have an engineering management background. I've worked in both startups and enterprise companies across a range of roles from product management, solutions consulting and now product marketing. Amplitude is a digital analytics platform that you as a product manager can use in order to build better products. And so you can use Amplitude to look at user behavior and journeys, understand metrics like conversion, retention, monetization of your users in your products and then take that to derive insights and decide what actions you can take on your users and those actions could be deploying A.B. tests and experiments. They could also be deploying marketing campaigns and Amplitude will be there along the way to power and enable all of those. So I'm excited to be here on this panel and looking forward to the discussion. Thank you so much for those introductions. So let's jump into the first question. So product marketers and product managers, they worked very closely together. Some companies product marketing reports into product management, sometimes reports into the CMO, the marketing organization. But putting that aside, there sometimes is some overlap. I'd love for you each to kind of share like give me one specific example of the situation where there's been some overlap between the product management function and the product marketing function and what was the negative consequence of that overlap? And let's start with the product manager on the stage. Let him go first. Yeah, so this has definitely been an experience that I've, you know, from company to company, you go to and one of the things I recommend to every product manager, you join a new company, there's always an established product practice, whether it's product marketing, product management. And within that, there's the roles that have been doing the functions in and around product management or product marketing for a fair bit of time. And you come into it, you don't know exactly who's doing what. And where the friction or the issues tend to happen is, you know, you haven't really established those norms or understood the practices that are there within the company. So a lot of times pricing and packaging comes on. I think that's very common. And, you know, I think others can probably touch on that. Anytime you bring up pricing, you lose up about an hour in every meeting discussing that. But the issue that I had at a previous company, when loss analysis between sales, marketing, product management, we always were discussing like, who should actually be running this? Why is it important? Obviously, there's a lot of insight in understanding why you want a particular deal or why a customer may have chosen a different solution. And then, so there was this constant discussion and friction around who should be leading that, why it's important for us to having that. And ultimately at the end of the day, it's just you want that function to be happening. You need the outputs of that to really help drive your decision-making. So I don't get too hung up on the ownership rather than making sure that we are doing the different things that we need to across the teams and that we are getting the output and the data that we want. But before we move on, what happens when it's not clear? What are some of the negative issues when you don't know who's owning the competitive intelligence? You don't know who's winning. Ultimately, it either falls on the floor because you're not dealing with that friction within the company and so people sometimes naturally don't want to have friction with their colleagues, whether that's in a new environment or an existing one. And so you're either not doing it well or it's being done across the board and so you end up having an issue where you're running the same program in multiple areas. That's not really efficient and are you really sharing the data or doing that effectively? You look pretty stupid in front of your customers if you're sort of being repetitive. But I think the one that I tend to see a lot is you're not dealing with it head-on and really addressing the underlying problem, which is you need to effectively collaborate in order for this to work well. That's great. I'll be you, Darsall. Yeah, pricing and packaging for sure. So a while ago, I was at a startup where we were going from a one product to a multi-product company and the product manager for the new product we were launching had strong opinions on how we would go to market, specifically selling it and packaging it as an individual skew or its own product. And as we spoke with our executive buyers at all of our customer accounts, we started to learn that they don't actually see those products selling individually or buying them individually. They see value when they buy the first, the core product and then use the additional one with it. And so as you can imagine, as a result of that, we had to have a number of alignment and stakeholder conversations to try and think about a new pricing and packaging strategy where we sell it as a platform as opposed to individual skews and then to answer your question, the result of that is delays and really just time that could have been spent building additional capabilities or launching something new is spent debating these factors inside. And I want to agree with what Quran said that there's an element of deduplication of effort. So when you are duplicating efforts, as a product marketer, I'm telling the product manager, here's what should be or what should not be on your roadmap that's counterproductive to them and conversely, what's counterproductive to product marketing is if there's roadblocks to rolling out faster when it comes to pricing and packaging. And so where overlap exists, it's really duplication of efforts can be counterproductive and leading the time delays but where overlap includes alignment and going to market, I think that can be a stronger facet for the company as opposed to not having that at all. All right. Ritu, how about yourself? Yeah, I mean, pricing and packaging for sure and the other thing I'll bring up is competitive strategies. So I think the audience show of hands if you've ever filled out those massive Excel sheets for the Gartner Magic Quadrants and the waves with your product management colleagues or product marketing colleagues, it takes weeks because and it really showcases the differences in how both teams look at competitive strategies, stops down, bottoms up and just trying to get alignment is the first three weeks of that Gartner survey. The negative consequences of having this misalignment or having this overlap in job duties is not acting on the insights you have. Product marketing goes and brings their own product marketing management is looking at their own versions of these insights and you're sitting on them instead of acting on them and what suffers is the market, the go-to-market teams, the users that are waiting for you to act on the feedback and act on the insights that you've gotten. So the market suffers in the end. And just to build on what the panel has said from my own experience, one of the negative consequences is morale, right? And there's a challenge when there's a duplication of efforts towards something you think you're about ready to launch, then all of a sudden there's a disagreement for the people actually doing the work, the more hands-on folks that has a significant implication both to the product marketers as well as the product managers because that lack of connection at the top can really impact their day jobs, which leads us to... So those are some of the negative consequences. What have you seen in your careers work positively? How have you seen product marketing and product management effectively work together and collaborate together? Let's start with you, Raju. So I think the most effective working relationship is when you start with exact alignment. Your product leader and your marketing team leader are joined at the hip. They have regular syncs. They have conversations around resources, around prioritization, even right down to the everyday activities. And when it starts with that, then those projects and then those, I think working relationships are just a lot better. And when done right, that team is that's responsible for both acquisition, retention, activation, expansion. That customer journey is phenomenal. When those two work together and there's alignment from the top, you have kick-ass products. You really do. Let me go. I couldn't agree more with what you said. In fact, just going back to your last point, a lot of times when it's the actual practitioners, they know that this function is there. And a lot of times they're sitting there struggling and trying to work through that dysfunction. So I love the follow-up, which is how do you sort of get past that? How do you effectively collaborate? I think I referenced that you need that alignment when you're going into a new org or you're in an established org of who is doing what function and couldn't agree with Ritu more because these were the priorities that we're working on. How are your respective collective teams that are going and tackling this, sometimes in the same org, sometimes in different orgs, going to do that effectively and do that collaboratively. I think one of the things that I've shared with my teams or I've tried to do myself is start early on. You're working on your planning, bring your product marketers very early into that planning so that you're aligning on the releases. You're aligning on what you're messaging and your themes are around those releases. You can get a sense of where you're going directionally so that we can talk about the pricing and packaging much earlier rather than later. It's like, oh, we wish we could have done this this way and taken it to our customers. So I think really early effective communication between the two functions is really critical and really focus on what are the white spaces where you know you need to go and do more. We all use different frameworks out there that tell us what we should be focused on as product managers or product marketers. And there is overlap in those as we discussed a minute ago. And if you can, there are areas that you're just, as an organization, you're not focused on and you're not doing. And if you can take those, one of my biggest pieces of advice to any product person, no matter the role, is go and find those white spaces where your organization isn't doing the things that they should be doing and go and try to focus those and learn on those and bring your colleagues into those learnings as you're going about doing it. And I think collectively you'll rise the effectiveness of your organization. I love that approach of the white spaces. I just want to build on that for a moment because I hate this answer that it depends, it varies, but the reality is every company is a little different. And that line between product marketing and product management really does vary from company to company. So when you go in and you identify where those white spaces are, then you can assign for lack of a better term and say like, hey, this is a function that could go to product management or it could go to product marketing. Who's going to do it? It's not happening right now. Someone should do it. Who's the best student to do it? And then who has the bandwidth? I do want to transition to some questions from the audience. Some of you guys submitted questions via LinkedIn. So I really, really appreciate that. So I'm going to do the best job I can at articulating them. One question that came up from multiple people was early on in the product development lifecycle, really early on, what role does product marketing actually play? The underlying theme, these were all questions from product managers saying like, hey, I've got my product marketer early on in the product lifecycle, but I don't know what they should be doing. So I'd love your perspective. Let's start with you, Richard. So I think I come from the startup world, so I'll take that view on it. A lot of times, both product marketing and product management are going out and validating the founder's vision to be quite honest. Product marketing is going out and validating the ICP, building upon what the founder's vision was on who they wanted to sell to, validating the needs, looking at market trends and trying to determine what would this MVP look like. That product management then takes some bills and product management at that point early on owns the customer feedback loop. And then once you do have an MVP, I've seen product marketing takeover and try and package the benefits and try and figure out how you then take that message and then feed that back into the market. But I just really found a lead in companies that I've been in and been validating the founder's vision. Yeah. I think, Darshil, you'll have a unique perspective on this being the product marketer on the panel. Yeah, so how many people remember the first ad of the iPod out here? It was not 5GB in your pocket. It was 1,000 songs in your pocket. And so, you know, as you're working with your product marketer early on, they can help you look at your ideal customer profile, buyer personas, use cases. If you're expanding or planning to ultimately scale across multiple verticals or even expanding into local markets like APAC or EMEA, how can your product go to market in those regions? They will have expertise there or will no partners there that you can work with to get insights early on. And ultimately, as a product manager, you know, you don't want to build something and hope that people buy it or it just sells. You want to build something that is aimed at solving customer problems. And so your product marketer can help you with thinking through those and crafting your product to look like a solution set. So as you start thinking about your sprints and your roadmap, you're less hung up on individual features within that roadmap and more thinking, hey, how is this going to help us with our early alpha and our MVP? Are we going to be able to solve those main problems if so we're ready to go into GA? If not, we're just not. And it's less about feature versus feature and more about solution at that point. Some of your answers naturally dovetail to the next question that we got from some of the people via LinkedIn. And the question was, who owns customer insights? Right? Frequently, the product marketing team wants to be the voice of the customer, voice of the market. But then the product managers are also very involved in listening input as part of the beta programs and ongoing, right? So I think that you're very natural to speak on that based on where you work to start. I've loved your thoughts. So where's the line? Great question. I mean, I think as a company, we think that everybody should be focused on customer insights and customer feedback. So I don't think that there's a right answer. I think you're right. Voice of customer programs exist. They live in product marketing or marketing teams. But we all know that as product managers, if we're not talking to customers, we're also not doing our job. So I think it's really dependent on the type of customer feedback that you're trying to do. If you're doing discovery or early on, just trying to get an understanding of where you might take your product or your particular experience, you're going to have your product or research teams really focused on that. Whereas if you're thinking about messaging, feedback, win-loss analysis, some of that may be later on and really closely aligned with the product marketing team. So I don't think that there is a bright line in terms of this team owns customer insights or feedback. If you talk to our customer success teams in our organization, they also feel that they have a very important stake in gathering or discussing that with customers. So I think it's really the type of feedback that you're trying to gather, really drives who might be leading it, who might be bringing those insights to the rest of the organization or using different tools to capture it and get those insights broadly distributed within the org. Darcy, do you want to give a shout? Yeah, so when it comes to feedback, I think the company's only be successful if everybody is customer-centric. I don't think any one team should necessarily own it. But that being said, when it comes to product feedback, so feature requests, bugs, product-specific enhancements, that should be more directed towards the product team and the product marketing team can own executive buyer feedback. So how is this product helping us drive value? They should own customer advocacy, so helping generate customer success stories that you as a product manager can use to take a social proof and sell more of your product. And really, at AppleDude, we have a strong process where customer success and sales teams are closely involved anytime there's interactions with any members or any types of customer feedback that we're collecting. Like many of these things, I do think it's a team effort, and I think this customer feedback is one of those things. Many times, I've seen that specifically in like a beta program, the product manager and the product marketer attach at the hip, and that during the beta program, the product marketer might own the customer feedback, but the product manager is right there with them listening to all the feedback, but making sure it happens is sometimes relies on the product marketer. But again, it does vary from company to company. Richard, do you have anything to add on this question? I'm going to do a shameless plug for product board here. Two sets absolutely help when you have a centralized repository, whichever one that will be, and have customer feedback in there. You don't have to keep going back to the customer. You're not constantly knocking on the CSM's door to try and get all of this feedback, and whether it's whichever team goes out and gets it and is able to log it in a central repository, people can go back, the other team can go back and take a look. And you know constantly, it's not who gets it, it's how it's being used, and I think that's the difference. Any team can go out and get the feedback but more teams need to use it. So just using your product board example, are there specific use cases that product marketer is used product board for? Like what specific use cases? Absolutely, so when you look at a roadmap and you have all of these capabilities and feature sets in the roadmap, most of them should be customer-defined. So if you look at all the feedback that came with a particular feature set from product board, that absolutely changes the game for a product marketer and the product manager built the feature set. The product marketer now doesn't have to go out and ask a million questions about that feature set because he's already seen the feedback on why it was built and what customers were asking. So messaging and positioning is the game changer. Got it, absolutely. So we're running a little short on time but one quick question. So there's this kind of evolution and Carlos spoke about it in his last presentation like that. A lot of product leaders are effectively becoming GMs of the business, right? I would just love each of your perspectives as like, where do you see the roles of product marketing and product management evolving over the upcoming years? What changes do you see happening? Let's start with you since you're at the far end. You know, I think for product marketing specifically and if you guys have heard of this growth marketing term, I see that role in the growth marketer and the product marketer become one person. Just AI is giving us so many data sets, so much data to be able to look at. PLG is taken off. I think just having that sort of data, you need a growth marketer's head and you need a product marketer's heart. So I do see that become one person and focus specifically not so much on acquisition but on activation. And I see product managers really focus on, you know, more empathetic product managers, really focus on retention and expansion. I've seen these roles evolve in the 20 years pretty constantly and depending on the org. Even within an org, they've evolved over the years. My role at SAP started as a product manager. It became a solution manager, which I would say was much more akin to a product marketer before I went back to, you know, quote-unquote product management. So I think there is a, you know, this idea that these roles might come together. There's so much breath to cover in terms of effectively doing the roles in the job of product that I think there's going to be distinct roles within all organizations to continue. Now, maybe in a B2B organizations, it's a little bit more bright line and distinct in a B2C organization. As you referenced, Brian Chesky in Airbnb has brought product management and product marketing closer together and established a more program management function. So I think this is a constant evolution. I think Ritu's accurate and that there's so much data, this idea of growth marketing and product marketing really coming together is maybe a somewhat evolved role of product marketing. We see that increasingly being pretty critical in terms of activating your customers. Yeah, I tend to agree with growth marketing and product marketing. I'd even add that, you know, at the practitioner level, as you start thinking about all the jobs that need to be done, you know, organizations will keep changing titles and who's going to do them. But I don't see one individual owning everything from product road mapping, sprint planning, working with design and engineering counterparts, and also running campaigns, thinking about positioning, messaging and everything that that entails. And so these roles are going to continue to intertwine and there's going to be more interoperability between the two, but I don't think they're going to completely merge into one and going to be done by just one individual, but at the practitioner level. And as a product manager, that being said, I'd recommend to this audience, start thinking about and working closely with your product marketing counterparts. Because the more you think about your buyer persona and the value and use cases they're trying to solve, the stronger your product is going to be. And also you're going to go to market and have a better alignment and launch with your marketing team. I'm going to build on some of the things that each of the panelists had just mentioned. We two did a good job at calling out growth. That was something that we didn't mention to this, but that is like the third leg of this duel between product, product marketing and growth. They're all participating in these various PLG and self-serve aspects. So they'll continue to be tight collaboration. I share I've been in this industry for more than 20 years and when I started, product marketing reported in a product. It was effectively a product role with a specialized skill. Over time, sometimes it more frequently reported into marketing, which is great. Regardless of the reporting structure, there has to be very, very, very tight collaboration and that's only going to continue. So I think that's some of the, you know, LinkedIn banter about, you know, product management going away and becoming product marketing. I think that may be some specific use cases. That may be true, but the reality is that there's going to be a need for specialized functions, especially for the people doing the work. At the top level, there's just going to need to be increasingly more collaboration and alignment. But for the doers or practitioners, there's going to be just plenty of work to do. And with that, I want to thank the panelists for being here. I want to thank all of you for joining. And if you want to learn more about any of the companies that they work at, they all have boosts out in the back. So let's give the panelists a quick hand.