Product Marketing Doesn't Know What Strategy It's Translating
The go-to-market narrative and the actual strategic bet stopped talking to each other about three reorgs ago. Nobody seems bothered by this.
There’s this moment that happens in every product launch I’ve seen. Product marketing gets handed a PRD, maybe some Figma mocks, possibly a Loom of the roadmap review if they’re lucky. Then they’re supposed to build a launch narrative that explains why this matters to customers.
Nobody told them why it actually matters to the business.
So they make something up.
Actually, that’s not fair. They reconstruct a strategy from artifacts and educated guesses, like trying to figure out what a meal tasted like by reading the recipe backwards from the dirty dishes.
The thing is, there usually was a strategic intent. Someone, somewhere, made a bet. Maybe it was about moving upmarket. Maybe it was about defending against a competitor. Maybe it was about finally addressing technical debt that was costing millions. But by the time that intent reaches product marketing, it’s been through so many translations and telephone games that the launch story has nothing to do with the original reasoning.
I watched this play out last quarter. Engineering had spent six months rebuilding the permissions system. The actual reason? Enterprise deals were stalling because we couldn’t support their compliance requirements. Sales was haemorrhaging revenue. The CEO had explicitly said this was make-or-break for moving upmarket.
Product marketing’s launch angle? “Empowering teams with flexible access controls.”
I’ve watched this movie three times now. The ending never changes.
Nobody was wrong, exactly. The feature did enable flexible access. But the strategic bet was about enterprise revenue, and the positioning made it sound like a nice-to-have. The demo showed someone adding a colleague to a project. The case study featured a 50-person startup. The email campaign went to the entire user base.
Three months later, leadership was asking why enterprise pipeline hadn’t moved. Product marketing was asking why adoption was lower than expected. Engineering was asking why they bothered.
This isn’t a one-off. The strategic intent exists in one place. The product rationale exists somewhere else. The go-to-market story exists in a third location. They’re all internally consistent. They’re just not consistent with each other.
Leadership makes a strategic bet in a closed-door session. Product translates that into features based on their interpretation plus whatever engineering thinks is feasible. Design translates product’s requirements into flows that actually work. Product marketing translates all of that into customer benefits, except they’re working from specs and screenshots, not strategy memos.
Each translation is rational. But the cumulative effect is like that game where you whisper a sentence around a circle. By the end, “we’re betting on enterprise to hit our revenue targets” becomes “teams love collaboration features.”
The really weird part? This might be working as intended. Not consciously, but systemically.
If product marketing actually knew the strategic bet, they’d have to own outcomes tied to that bet. If the launch narrative explicitly said “this is for enterprise revenue,” and enterprise revenue didn’t move, that’s a failure. But if the narrative is vague enough, “empowering teams,” well, teams were empowered. Launch succeeded. Nobody’s to blame when the business results don’t follow.
“It’s plausible deniability by organisational design.”
I started noticing this after the third time I heard a PMM say “I don’t have a seat in strategy conversations.” Which is true. But why? The standard answer is hierarchy and access. PMMs aren’t senior enough, or strategy happens at the executive level.
Actually, that’s not quite it. I think it’s more pragmatic. If you tell product marketing the real strategic bet, you’re creating accountability for whether that bet pays off. If you keep them at arm’s length, they can execute tactics without being tied to strategic outcomes. When things go wrong, it’s a marketing execution problem, not a strategy problem.
This serves everyone, in a way. Leadership gets to preserve the illusion that strategy is driving everything. Product gets to focus on building without worrying about market positioning. Product marketing gets to optimise for launch metrics instead of business outcomes.
Everyone has cover.
The cost shows up later. In enterprise deals that don’t close because the positioning doesn’t match the product. In existing customers who get confused by announcements that don’t connect to their problems. In engineering teams that build things nobody buys because the market narrative was wrong from the start.
I talked to a PMM last month who’d been at her company for two years. She’d launched maybe fifteen features. When I asked her what the product strategy was, she laughed.
“I know what we’ve shipped. I can tell you our messaging pillars. But why we’re building what we’re building? No idea.”
She’s good at her job, by the way. Her launch campaigns hit their metrics. Her content performs well. She’s just executing tactics in a strategic vacuum, and everyone’s fine with that until they’re suddenly not.
The companies that have sorted this out, and there aren’t many, make product marketing responsible for translating strategy into markets, not features into benefits. That means PMMs need to understand the bet before they craft the narrative.
Intercom did this reasonably well for a while. Their PMMs could articulate why they were building for specific segments, not just what the features did. When they launched their Resolution Bot, the narrative wasn’t “AI helps your team.” It was “you’re spending too much on support, here’s how to fix it.” Strategic intent, product capability, and market positioning in alignment.
But that’s rare. Painfully rare.
Most of the time, product marketing is playing a game where they don’t know the rules. They’re building launch narratives based on guesswork and previous patterns, hoping they’ve read the subtext correctly.
Nobody tells them if they got it wrong until quarters later.
And here’s what nobody wants to admit: sometimes the strategic intent doesn’t exist. Sometimes product just built something because a founder liked the idea, or a big customer asked, or engineering had spare capacity. In those cases, product marketing’s job becomes inventing a strategy retroactively. Making it sound like there was always a plan.
Which, honestly, might explain why everyone’s so comfortable with the ambiguity. If there’s no real strategy to translate, then the translation can’t be wrong.
I’m not sure this is fixable without changing how companies think about the function. Product marketing sits in this weird gap between product and revenue, touching both but owned by neither.
The question isn’t whether product marketing should know the strategy. Obviously they should. The question is whether organisations actually want them to know, or whether the current arrangement serves everyone’s interests too well to change.
Your launch narrative probably doesn’t match your strategic intent. But maybe that’s the point.