What role does User Experience research play as the key driver for both product marketing and design teams to align behind the same end user needs?

What I love about product design teams is how differently they think and create. They tend to be really amazing at information design. PMM can create strong foundations – let's say user personas – and UX researchers and designers might totally reimagine how to display personas relative to their own projects. That can open up a new world of thinking for PMM – and more practically become an asset used by PMM for a variety of work (onboarding new hires, design new creative takes on messaging, channels and campaigns). 

Those nuanced new panes of perspective can help PMM explore new ideas, keep their work and the outputs to buyers fresh and innovative. 

User Experience research is an important double-click into overall market opportunity analysis, going deeper into a detailed examination of how a given persona/role completes certain tasks or solves certain issues around use cases that have been identified as being most important. Basically, once you've identified (or at least hypothesized) "we want to help a certain group of people do certain things faster/easier/cheaper/better," UX research uncovers and lays out exactly how those folks do things in their current workflows, dissecting the pros, cons, bottlenecks and limitations so that both the product teams and product marketing teams have a complete "before" picture of the use case you're going after. As your product or solution is designed and prototype, UX research (often conducted by a dedicated UX or Product Design team that partners with PMM) can work closely with existing or prospective customers in a tight feedback cycle to iterate until the complete product experience is sufficiently better to bring to market broadly. PMMs should be plugged into this tight feedback cycle to make sure messaging is anchored in real customer sentiment.