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  "description": "Product marketing operations is about building a framework that anchors product marketing in real market needs, aligns it with other functions, and allows it to scale as the org grows.",
  "path": "/marketing-operations-in-product-marketing-strategy/",
  "publishedAt": "2025-08-13T09:20:32.000Z",
  "site": "https://www.cmoalliance.com",
  "tags": [
    "__Axel Kirstetter__",
    "_revenue_",
    "_marketing operations_",
    "_challenge_",
    "_have a small team_",
    "_playbook_",
    "AI-powered lead scoring: The secret to winning more dealsUnlock pipeline efficiency and close more deals with AI-powered lead scoring. Discover how it transforms sales qualification and boosts revenue.CMO AllianceSameer Danave",
    "_priorities_",
    "_connecting dots between teams_",
    "_support sales_",
    "_go-to-market_",
    "_framework_",
    "_market research_",
    "_workflow_",
    "_demand generation_",
    "Balancing art and science: When does marketing need intuition?Data and science are reliable and provide results, but there’s more nuance to marketing successfully beyond the hard numbers.CMO AllianceChris Bretschger",
    "_awareness_",
    "_content_",
    "_positioning_",
    "_measurement_",
    "_culture_",
    "_Slack_",
    "_short video_",
    "_data_",
    "_communication_",
    "_leadership_",
    "_strategic goals_",
    "_metric_",
    "_alignment_",
    "_performance_",
    "_growth_"
  ],
  "textContent": "_This article is based on_ __Axel Kirstetter__ _’s talk at our MarOps Summit._\n\nI lead the global product marketing team at Guidewire Software – a $15 billion, publicly listed company with about $1 billion in annual _revenue_. We build SaaS solutions for the insurance industry, focusing on property and casualty, or general insurance.\n\nThat means we’re deeply embedded in a very specific vertical, working with a customer base that’s often complex, highly regulated, and cautious about change.\n\nYou might be wondering why a product marketer like me is talking about _marketing operations_. That’s usually considered a separate discipline, one that handles processes, systems, and automation for campaigns, leads, and data management.\n\nBut in product marketing, particularly at scale, you eventually run into the same _challenge_: without an operating model, you can’t grow effectively.\n\nWhen you _have a small team_, you can get away with ad hoc approaches. But with 25 product marketers spread across different markets, you need systems and processes.\n\nYou need a way to onboard new people without chaos, a way to keep everyone working from the same _playbook_, and a way to scale what works. I’ve spent a lot of time figuring out how to do exactly that, and that’s what I want to share here.\n\nMy goal is to give you a clear view of three things: **first** , what product marketing actually does, because it’s often misunderstood; **second** , how to think about the emerging area of product _marketing operations_; and **third** , some practical ideas you can take away to make your own product marketing function more effective.\n\nAI-powered lead scoring: The secret to winning more dealsUnlock pipeline efficiency and close more deals with AI-powered lead scoring. Discover how it transforms sales qualification and boosts revenue.CMO AllianceSameer Danave\n\n## **Understanding product marketing**\n\nIf you’ve worked with product marketers from different companies, you’ve probably noticed that the role never looks exactly the same twice. Even within the same industry, responsibilities and _priorities_ can vary wildly.\n\nThe only constant is that product marketing sits in the middle of the business, _connecting dots between teams_ that might not otherwise have natural points of contact.\n\nWe’re a hub for four major groups. First is **sales** , where we often own or _support sales_ enablement. This might mean creating battlecards, training decks, objection-handling guides, or even entire playbooks.\n\nThen there’s **customer success** , where we get involved after launch to drive adoption and ensure customers get value.\n\nWe work closely with **marketing** on campaigns and early-funnel activity. And we partner with **product** to plan for future releases, ensuring the roadmap aligns with market needs and competitive realities.\n\nWe also play a role in different _go-to-market_ models. In a product-led growth environment, for instance, the boundaries between product, marketing, and product marketing blur.\n\nWe have to bring everything together into a unified motion that attracts, converts, and retains users directly through the product experience.\n\n## **A framework for the role**\n\nThe Product Marketing Alliance offers a _framework_ I find useful, even though others exist, like McKinsey, Gartner, and Forrester.\n\nThe Alliance framework breaks the role into **five stages**.\n\nThe first, **Discover,** happens before a product exists. This is about identifying problems worth solving. It means conducting _market research_, developing business cases, and running win-loss analysis.\n\nDepending on your company, some of these might be owned by other departments – finance might handle the business case, sales might do the win-loss interviews – but collaboration is essential.\n\nThe second stage is **Strategize**. Now that you understand the problems in the market, you decide how to address them. This involves defining goals, deciding on pricing, and choosing a go-to-market strategy. Will you sell directly? Through partners? Online? What’s the mix?\n\nNext is **Define** , where you crystallize the offering. You work on differentiation, messaging, positioning, use cases, and segmentation.\n\nThen comes **Get Set** , which is the launch readiness phase. This is where training, enablement, and campaign preparation happen.\n\nFinally, **Grow** is all about what happens after launch. Are customers adopting the product? Are they expanding their usage? Are we capturing the full value?\n\nIn my experience, every company interprets these stages differently, but the principles apply universally.\n\n## **Building a product marketing operating system**\n\nWhen I talk about a product marketing operating system, I mean the repeatable _workflow_ that takes an idea from insight to market impact.\n\nAt Guidewire, it starts with gathering market insights. You can’t do anything well unless you understand the problems you’re solving, both for the market at large and for individual customers.\n\nThis involves monitoring research reports, talking to analysts, and digging into competitive intelligence. I make a point of encouraging my team to run win-loss interviews themselves.\n\nTools exist that can automate some of this, but there’s no substitute for hearing directly from the people who chose you (or didn’t). I’ve found that six to eight conversations are often enough to see patterns emerge.\n\nCompetitive intelligence is another essential input. I think of it in two flavors: inbound and outbound.\n\nOutbound is the competitive positioning we give to our sales teams (a.k.a., how to win against specific rivals). Inbound is the market chatter we monitor and respond to, whether that’s a competitor announcing a new feature or analysts shifting their perspective.\n\nThe next step is turning insights into a marketing plan. I always structure these around four areas: awareness generation, _demand generation_, adoption, and enablement. Not every plan needs all four in equal measure.\n\nBalancing art and science: When does marketing need intuition?Data and science are reliable and provide results, but there’s more nuance to marketing successfully beyond the hard numbers.CMO AllianceChris Bretschger\n\nFor a net-new product in a new market, _awareness_ and demand might dominate. For an enhancement to an existing product, adoption and enablement could be the focus.\n\nA plan is more than just a list of activities, as it’s also a schedule. That’s why I insist on a content calendar. Other teams need to know when assets will be available so they can plan campaigns and outreach.\n\nAlongside that, we maintain a bill of materials that includes both the major “hero” assets – a flagship case study, for instance – and all the derivative _content_ that comes from them, such as videos, blog posts, or customer quotes.\n\nPositioning and messaging come next. This is often the most intellectually demanding part of the job. You have to define exactly who the product is for, how it’s different, and why anyone should care, and you have to do it in a way that’s both truthful and compelling.\n\nI develop _positioning_ after the marketing plan is in place, because the plan often shapes the way we tell the story. Once positioning is nailed down, activation begins.\n\nThis is about bringing the strategy to life through tangible assets: sales one-pagers, solution briefs, web updates, even what I call a “money slide”: one visual that captures the entire story.\n\nI’m a big believer in creating structured sales plays, which map assets to stages of the buyer journey so that sales teams know exactly what to use, when, and why.\n\nFinally, we get to reporting and _measurement_. Reporting is descriptive, it tells you what happened. Measurement is evaluative, since it tells you whether what happened was good or bad.\n\nIf you ran a campaign and got ten leads, was that a success? Without a benchmark, you can’t say. That’s why I like to set thresholds in advance: for example, between eight and twelve leads is green, fewer than five is red, anything in between is yellow.\n\n## **How the team works: The four pillars**\n\nProduct _marketing operations_ go beyond process into culture as well. In my team, that _culture_ rests on four pillars: rituals, initiatives, KPIs, and accountabilities.\n\nRituals are the patterns that shape daily life. We have a regular cadence of one-on-ones, team meetings, and cross-functional check-ins. Communication norms are clear: _Slack_ for informal, quick exchanges; email for formal updates.\n\nSometimes I send _short video_ updates instead of long written ones, as it’s faster for me, and often more engaging for the team.\n\nInitiatives are the major projects we’re driving. At any given time, that might include supporting regional events, contributing to product launches, or preparing for our annual customer conference, which draws around 3,000 attendees.\n\nKPIs are the measures we use to track progress. I think about these in two categories: production and consumption.\n\nProduction tells us whether we’re creating enough to feed the business; consumption tells us whether people are actually using what we create. We pull _data_ from enablement platforms like Highspot to see which sales materials are being accessed, and from tools like Google Analytics to see how web content is performing.\n\nAccountability is about clarity. Everyone knows what they own, whether it’s the messaging framework for a product line or the naming convention for new services.\n\nWe keep an org chart that includes not just names and photos, but time zones and areas of ownership. With a distributed team, that’s critical.\n\n## **The one-slide plan and beyond**\n\nI’m a big believer in concise _communication_. My marketing plan template fits on one slide, but it covers everything we need: the strategic goals, the measurable objectives, the programs we’ll run, the tactics we’ll use, and the definition of success.\n\nStrategic goals usually come from sales or product _leadership_, but we translate them into something that’s actionable for product marketing. Objectives are specific: “$500K in pipeline” is much better than “raise awareness.” Programs fit into awareness, pipeline, enablement, and adoption, and tactics are chosen accordingly.\n\nWorking in quarters helps keep focus. A quarterly content calendar lays out the deliverables, the regions they apply to, the products they support, the delivery dates, and the _strategic goals_ they connect to. This makes production predictable and ensures alignment with business priorities.\n\nI’m also moving toward using a balanced scorecard for product marketing. It measures performance across four perspectives: financial, product, customer, and process.\n\nFor example, **financial** might track pipeline creation; **product** might look at launch adoption rates; **customer** could measure satisfaction or advocacy; and **process** might evaluate whether assets are delivered on time and to quality standards.\n\nEach _metric_ is rated against a target, so it’s immediately clear whether we’re on track.\n\n## **Balancing structure and flexibility**\n\nOne of the most common questions I get is how to balance structure with flexibility. My answer is that you need both.\n\nStructure gives you credibility and _alignment_. It ensures that people know what’s happening and when. But flexibility allows you to adapt when circumstances change and they always do.\n\nIf we see partway through a quarter that pipeline coverage is slipping, we might shift resources from awareness campaigns to activities that help close deals in the near term.\n\nPlans are made to be executed, but also to be adjusted. The cultural environment you create as a leader determines how easy it is for your team to pivot without losing momentum.\n\n## **A simple approach to metrics**\n\nAnother question I hear often is which metrics matter most. My philosophy is to keep it simple, especially at the start. Track two things: **content production** and **content consumption**.\n\nProduction shows whether you’re feeding the machine. Consumption shows whether anyone cares. If you have one without the other, you have a problem.\n\nBalance them, and you’ll have a solid foundation for measuring and improving _performance_.\n\n## **Final thoughts**\n\nA product marketing operating system isn’t about creating bureaucracy for its own sake. It’s about building a framework that anchors product marketing in real market needs, aligns it with other functions, and allows it to scale as the organization grows.\n\nWhen you combine market insights, thoughtful planning, disciplined positioning, creative activation, and rigorous measurement, you create a virtuous cycle. The team learns, adapts, and improves over time. Stakeholders know what to expect.\n\nAnd product marketing moves from being a support function to being a driver of _growth_.\n\nIn my experience, the more transparent and repeatable your operating system, the easier it is for others in the company to trust, support, and leverage product marketing to its full potential.",
  "title": "Marketing operations as the missing link  in product marketing strategy",
  "updatedAt": "2026-03-02T09:39:06.375Z"
}