When organizing a product marketing function, what key capabilities are required vs nice to have?

Part of what makes Product Marketing such an exciting (and sometimes complicated) function is that it can have a wide array of capabilities. The exact capabilities will vary by team and company size, as well as the stage of the company and the business, product, and GTM strategy. 

Still, I’ve found it helpful to have a foundational set of capabilities that I build product marketing teams towards. On my team, we talk about the fact that we don’t expect everyone to be expert in all of these capabilities, but as a team, we strive toward delivering on all of these capabilities. Finally, having these capabilities outlined enables people on the team to choose which capabilities to ‘major’ in and which to ‘minor’ in, similar to the idea of a T-Shaped Marketer.

So, on to the capabilities, which have been heavily informed by a lot of content from the Sharebird community and other marketing leaders. They are:

1. Target Market & Audience Definition
2. Positioning, Messaging, Narrative, and Content
3. Launch Planning & Execution
4. Pricing & Packaging
5. External Evangelism
6. Customer Advocacy
7. Analyst Relations
8. Competitive Marketing
9. Sales Enablement

For even more depth, I highly recommend Naman Khan’s (CMO of Zeplin) podcast and talking to as many other Product Marketing leaders about how they've organized their teams.