Most tech companies break out product management and product marketing into two separate roles: Product management defines the product and gets it built. Product marketing writes the messaging—the facts you want to communicate to customers—and gets the product sold. But from my experience that’s a grievous mistake. Those are, and should always be, one job. There should be no separation between what the product will be and how it will be explained—the story has to be utterly cohesive from the beginning. Your messaging is your product. The story you’re telling shapes the thing you’re making

Tony Fadell • Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making - The New York Times bestseller

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Modern product marketing managers represent the market to the product team—the positioning, the messaging, and a winning go‐to‐market plan.

Marty Cagan • INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love (Silicon Valley Product Group)

While marketing people will talk to product managers about features that would help the messaging or branding, they don’t define the details of those features or work with the engineers to build them.

Gayle Laakmann McDowell, Jackie Bavaro • Cracking the PM Interview: How to Land a Product Manager Job in Technology (Cracking the Interview & Career)

In many startups the CEO may initially play the role VP product. At some point the organization and processes need to be professionalized and a VP product will need to be hired in. Many CEOs at this point are tempted to hire a “process person” to drive product management as the CEO feels she understands product and just needs someone to execute her

Elad Gil • High Growth Handbook: Scaling Startups From 10 to 10,000 People

Good product managers err on the side of clarity. Bad product managers never even explain the obvious. Good product managers define their job and their success. Bad product managers constantly want to be told what to do.

Ben Horowitz • The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

This schism between marketing and product management is still felt in many tech organizations today, where both departments feel they own the customer and understand the marketplace. However, in most tech organizations, marketing has evolved to be more about owning the brand and customer acquisition, while product owns the value proposition and dev

Martin Eriksson • Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams

So the only way I could master marketing was to bury myself in it—to take the customer journey myself, to touch every touchpoint. So nothing was ever presented to me without context—I would always expect to see what came before, what came after. I’d need to know the story we were telling and to whom we were telling it and at what point of the journ

Tony Fadell • Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

Good product managers know they will get the product wrong initially and that nobody gets it right the first time.

Marty Cagan • INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love (Silicon Valley Product Group)

What I’ve always found is this: give me a great product picker and a great architect, and I’ll give you a great product. But if I don’t have a great product manager, a great product originator—it used to be called a product picker—and I don’t have a great architect, I’m not going to get a great product.