Why Product Marketing Deserves a Seat at the Product Management Table

Here’s a truth I’ve come to live by: good product management gets you to market. Great product marketing keeps you there.

For years, I watched teams treat Product Marketing as a last-minute add-on—something you loop in after the roadmap is built and the product is nearly baked. But the companies that win consistently? They invite Product Marketing to the table early and often.

When marketing is integrated into product strategy, we stop relying on assumptions and start working with real-world behavioral data. One example: 70% of B2B buyers now fully define their needs before ever talking to a sales rep (CSO Insights). That means your positioning, your message, and your content need to be sharp enough to make the sale before you ever get the meeting.

Pair that with this: McKinsey found that companies who use customer behavioral insights outperform peers by 85% in sales growth. That’s not a typo.

So here’s the shift: Product Marketing isn’t just the loudspeaker. It’s the early-warning radar. It captures signals from the market, and feeds them back into your product decisions before you waste time building features no one wants.

If you're not using marketing data to inform product choices, you're flying blind—and your competitors are using radar.