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Product marketing and product growth are related but different. Conflating them leads to unclear ownership, missed opportunities, and teams that are neither doing marketing well nor growing the product effectively 🎯

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Product marketing

Product marketing is about positioning, messaging, and the go-to-market motion. It answers: who is this for, what problem does it solve, why should they choose us, and how do we reach them? The work includes: developing the positioning and value proposition, writing the messaging that runs across the website and sales materials, enabling the sales team with talk tracks and competitive intelligence, and orchestrating product launches. Martina Lauchengco’s Loved is the definitive read here - she makes a clear case that product marketing is a strategic function, not a content production line. The best PMMs are deeply embedded in product development, not waiting at the end to write a press release 💡

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Product growth

Product growth (or growth product management) is about using the product itself as the primary lever for acquisition, activation, retention, and expansion. It’s data-heavy, experiment-driven, and focused on the mechanics of the user journey. The work includes: improving activation flows, reducing friction in onboarding, building referral and sharing loops, running A/B tests on conversion points, and identifying where users drop off and why. Forget The Funnel reframes growth work around the customer experience rather than the acquisition funnel - a perspective that closes the gap between growth and product thinking 🙌

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Where they overlap

Both functions care about the customer and the product. Both inform each other. Good positioning should come from the same customer understanding that drives product decisions. Growth experiments surface insights that sharpen messaging. The cleanest way to think about it: product marketing owns the story and the go-to-market motion. Product growth owns the conversion and retention mechanics inside the product. Lesson learned: the companies that blur these roles without thinking about it tend to end up with a team that’s too tactical for strategy and too strategic for execution. Clarity on which job you’re doing - even if one person does both - makes a real difference.