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Chapter 26Leading and Transforming Product Marketing

When Mala Sharma arrived in Silicon Valley in 1996 to start her career in high tech product marketing, she was shocked. No one knew daily or weekly sales figures. There was no accountability between a market action and its business impact. The metric for success for product marketing (or marketing for that matter) seemed to be: if product collateral was getting done, everything was good enough.

Earlier in her career, Mala worked as a brand manager for consumer-packaged goods with Unilever in India, where she was trained to act as a virtual general manager. She knew her product's weekly sales figures, the costs for everything going into them, and the key drivers that made them work as a business.

In Silicon Valley, however, she realized no one around her had any idea of the strategic opportunities product marketing could unlock simply by better understanding customer sentiment, competitors, and markets. In her first product marketing role, she immediately kicked off both quantitative and qualitative customer research and found a gamer niche that changed the packaging, pricing, and go-to-market strategy. The product's success changed how her company thought about the role.

It strengthened her conviction to shift the perception of the job wherever she worked. When she arrived at Adobe as the Director of Product Marketing for Photoshop, the product managers figured out the features, then handed those plans over to product marketing ...