Is Product Marketing the Right Career for You? Here’s What It’s Like

What Does a Product Marketing Manager Do? Could It Be Your Next Career Move?

Have you ever wondered, “what does a product marketing manager do?” Curious to know whether you’d enjoy the job? These are common questions, especially for anyone exploring career paths in marketing.

While “marketing” is a familiar term, product marketing is a more specialized niche that sits at the intersection of product, sales, and strategy. To get a clearer picture of the role, I spoke with Kate Obiidykhata, a Group Product Marketing Manager for Percona. From how she spends her day to the hardest and most rewarding parts of the job, she shared what it’s really like behind the scenes. If you’re considering a career shift or just curious about how product marketing works, this conversation is for you. Let’s dig in.

Table of Contents:

• So...what is product marketing?

• What does a product marketing manager do?

• Who hires product marketers?

• How do I get into product marketing?

• How AI-proof is product marketing?

• Is product marketing right for you?

So…What Is Product Marketing?

According to Kate, product marketing is all about making sure the right people know about your product, understand why it’s valuable, and feel compelled to use it. In practice, that means answering four big questions:

• Who is the product for?

• What makes it special?

• How should we talk about it?

• When and where should we promote it?

But wait…isn’t that just “regular” marketing? Not exactly. If traditional marketing is about awareness and brand growth, product marketing is about ensuring a specific product successfully launches and gains traction in the market. Kate had a wonderful analogy to explain it:

The product marketer focuses on strategy, positioning, messaging, and the go-to-market plan. Regular marketing focuses on awareness growth, like a general band promotion. If we say the company is the brand, product marketing makes sure the new album resonates with fans. General marketing would promote the band in general. They would take care of concerts, bookings, tickets, arrangements — everything apart from just the new album.

In essence, product marketing focuses on getting particular products or features into the hands of users. 

What Does a Product Marketing Manager Do?

Kate walked me through a typical marketing strategy for a new feature launch. There are four major steps she and her team work through to ensure a successful outcome. They include discovery and alignment, positioning and messaging, go-to-market planning, and post-launch optimization.

Discovery and Alignment

In the discovery and alignment phase, a product marketing manager is focused on researching the product and audience while gathering internal buy-in from leadership. 

“You want to understand your product and your audience and set up your goals,” Kate said. “Basically, craft the strategy and ensure it’s represented within the company. All of your research — interviews with users, surveys, etc. — all of this should be gathered and presented internally within the company.” This way, you can get buy-in from your leadership so you can move forward with the next phase of the plan.

Positioning and Messaging

According to Kate, messaging and positioning refers to crafting your story around the feature. At this phase, you would identify your messaging framework, ideal customer profiles, personas, and how your product fits within the market. You might also work with the sales team to identify objections that may come up. 

Overall, Kate noted that you’re working to describe why your product matters, what problems you’re solving, and what your competitors are doing. You’ll use this data to inform the third step: creating the go-to-market plan.

Go-to-Market Planning

A go-to-market plan outlines the specific actions, channels, assets, and metrics needed for a successful product launch. “You usually provide an actionable plan on how to execute your strategy, how to make it live, and what deliverables would be best to execute the strategy,” Kate said. “You’d also assign certain tasks to team members and identify which KPIs you’ll be tracking.”

Product marketing managers will typically use the same tactics in their go-to-market plans as traditional marketers will use in theirs. Email, social media, webinars, and events are all examples. However, they’re focused more narrowly.

“The only thing that’s different is the intent and focus,” Kate said. “An email might be an announcement of a new feature. A webinar would usually be something that would drive adoption and explain the new functionality. The focus is on education and the go-to-market strategy versus just any email or promotional campaign that would drive growth.”

Of course, go-to-market planning is complex and has many moving parts. If you’re interested in learning more about how to create a successful go-to-market strategy, visit this in-depth blog.

Post-Launch Optimization

Once your go-to-market plan is launched, you’ll have to conduct regular optimization. You’ll monitor what your customers are saying about the product and how they’re using it. You’ll also look at adoption metrics and the KPIs you set up at the beginning. If you’re not hitting your goals, you might change the messaging or other aspects of the plan to encourage adoption.

Putting It All Together

With so many different stages, the day-to-day for a product marketing manager can be varied. “Almost every day will involve some activity like checking on the progress of preparation, some materials, alignment on some upcoming actions, or refining messaging or positioning,” Kate said.

She also mentioned that communicating with the sales team is a big part of what she does. “It’s important to always remember that our main customer internally would be the sales team,” she noted. “We want to make sure they are enabled with everything they need for a successful sales process.” This might include making sure they have enough sales materials, pitch decks, feature comparisons,  battle cards, and more.

Who Hires Product Marketers?

As someone on the outside of the product marketing space, I was curious to know how companies decide whether they need a product marketer. It seemed to me that a larger corporation might be most in need of them. Before I talked to Kate, I assumed that you’d need separate teams — “traditional” marketers and product marketers. Perhaps some would work on the overall brand and others would be solely dedicated to the product. While Kate did say that’s possible, it’s not that simple.

Larger companies do often have the resources to break marketing into specialized roles. However, Kate argued that the need for product marketers is more about complexity than company size. If you have multiple buyer personas or many technical products, it might make sense to hire a dedicated product marketer to avoid costly missteps during launch and growth. Even small startups can benefit from hiring a product marketer.

How Do I Get Into Product Marketing?

If you’re considering getting into product marketing, you might be wondering how to start. Kate’s advice for beginners: Don’t obsess over technical hard skills. Focus on learning how to navigate ambiguity, collaborate across departments, and communicate early.

Kate also suggests getting into a company with an established product marketing team. That way, you can learn from someone who already knows how to do it well. 

How AI-Proof is Product Marketing?

Almost half of all marketers are worried that AI will replace their jobs. But Kate says that product marketing is a subset that will need more humans in the near future. Mostly, it’s because AI-first marketing tactics just don’t work. She mentioned that some companies are looking to outsource their messaging to AI — and they aren’t experiencing good results.

Content is the first thing that could be neglected. And if you start neglecting your blogs and how you communicate with customers, you might not see the drop right away. But, it definitely prevents you from successful strategy and growth from that deep connection with your customers. They just won’t find you interesting. They may still use your product, but if you plan to scale and grow, it’s definitely not something to neglect.

Of course, Kate does use AI sometimes — but sparingly and strategically. She might ask AI to give her common pain points that a customer might have. From there, she might use it to shape her messaging. However, she’s fully aware that AI often hallucinates and makes up answers. That’s why she always asks it to provide the source of the information.

In essence, product marketing may be a field that’s more AI-proof than other marketing subsets. While AI can help streamline daily tasks, it will never be a full replacement for human-centric marketing.

Is Product Marketing Right for You?

If you’re someone who enjoys cross-functional collaboration, crafting compelling narratives, and thinking strategically about how to bring products to market, product marketing could be a great next step in your career. As Kate shared, it’s a dynamic, people-focused role that blends creativity with business impact.

If you’re still wondering “what does a product marketing manager do,” you can reach out to Kate on LinkedIn. The best way to learn is by diving in — connecting with professionals, seeking out hands-on experience, and staying curious.

About Kate Obiidykhata

Kate Obiidykhata is a Senior Group Product Manager and Go-to-Market (GTM) expert with a track record of launching and scaling over 10 B2B SaaS products. Kate has led product marketing and GTM strategies at companies like CloudLinux, AlmaLinux, Imunify Security, and Percona. Kate specializes in building practical GTM strategies, driving adoption through product-led growth.