Why product managers should not run marketing
Hint: It's why marketers don't run product or engineering either
A few years ago, I had an absolutely horrendous interview experience at a Bangalore startup. Though it was the CEO who reached out to me and it was still very early in the conversation, the entire thing seemed off. So through friends, I reached out to a couple of marketers at the company. The feedback was immediate: One of them had already quit, and the other was waiting for the month to get done to put in his papers.
They were unanimous: "Don’t join. The company thinks anyone can do marketing, and this has infected everyone, especially the product managers, one of whom has taken over marketing, and proceeds to call needless meetings and throws around nonsense like 'zero-budget marketing' after reading a book over the weekend."
Close call.
This is not to single out product managers, though.
At another startup I knew, a marketing leader had just left, and the sales head was handed the leadership reins. He did what he knew: Call the team together every morning, and berate them for not hitting their numbers.
This included the creative team, which had nothing to do with demand, the marketing design guy, who was thoroughly confused, and the social media manager, who the sales head asked for lead numbers everyday.
Within that quarter, all of them left.
Why does this happen so often? Why does marketing constantly get handed over to non-marketing folks, when, for example, I would never be put in charge of a sales team, or God forbid, a front-end engineering team?
I think there are a couple of reasons.
One, the relatively shorter spans of marketing heads. Expectations are always high, and even PMF failures and sales inefficiencies are laid at marketing’s door. We are easy targets. This leads to quick switches between roles for marketers. And when this happens, usually the entire marketing org gets rejigged. The result: Because marketing talent is so scarce, companies just do the lazy thing. They give another senior leader the added responsibility.
The second reason is one I’ve talked about before: Founders, who tend to be engineers, think marketing is an engineering function. It most certainly is not, but you can’t argue with the founder if you are a junior marketer, can you? So you now have a product manager or VP engineering as a boss who asks you stupid questions like 'what is the ROI of this SEO page'?
Whatever the reasons may be, it’s easy to discern what message this sends out to the folks who are left: Your skills are not that important, because anyone can do what you do.
Please note that saying product managers or other senior folks should not run marketing does not amount to saying that they have nothing to contribute. Of course they do. But they should never be the ones taking marketing decisions. Exactly like marketing should never take product or engineering decisions.
A former colleague wrote to me about how when a non-marketing leader stepped in to lead marketing, their long term goals and brand exercises went for a toss. They had been prepping on something for months, which was pushed back. It was not seen as a priority anymore.
As expected, morale dropped, and the results too. When the CEO asked why, the answer was that they had not worked on anything brand or content for a while. It had been simply pushed away by someone who did not understand.
Under a marketer, this would never happen. A good head of marketing knows that not all marketing activities need to generate leads, there are activities which you have to invest in to bring in brand advocates and celebrate loyal customers. You cannot build a brand like Drift or Freshworks or Twilio or Slack by just focusing on lead gen. And a lot of this starts with listening to marketing. But if there’s no senior marketing person at the leadership table, if marketing is represented by a non-specialist who has other fish to fry, marketing will, and does, get the short end of the stick. This will lead, inevitably, to a failed function.
So what then? In situations when leadership is necessary but not immediately available, what should organisations do?
Promote. You already have people. If you can hand the reins over to the sales head, you can certainly give it to someone who actually understands the role. If you aren’t doing that, you are undermining your own marketing team. You are saying that other functions are more important. And once you go down that path, you will never be able to win them back.
Upskill. If product knowledge is the problem among junior marketing folks, then that’s an organisational problem. You can solve this very easily, though. Send them to support for a month, and ask them to answer tickets with the support team. They’ll be back doing marketing with better understanding and first-hand customer experience.
Hire continuously and clearly. A huge mistake I’ve seen made repeatedly is organisations hiring product marketing leaders and placing them in demand gen roles, or hiring branding specialists and asking them to do growth. This is plain ineptitude. Know who you are hiring, what their strengths are, and hire only if that’s the skill you want at that time. You won’t confuse them or yourself, and they will play to their strengths, leading to success.