What is a Technical Product Marketing Manager? And why do they matter?

A deep dive on Technical Product Marketing and its pivotal role in developer focused companies.

Apr 27, 2023

Today I find myself doing a job I never knew existed growing up. I lead a team of world class Technical Product Marketing Managers at Timescale, a unicorn cloud database company.

The question I get most often after introducing my occupation is “What is a Product Marketing Manager?” and “What do you actually do?”

In this article, I’ll be answering those questions for you.

I’ll also cover the 5 Pillars of Technical Product Marketing (PMM) and why the continued rise of products that help software developers makes Technical PMM more important than ever.

Who is this article for?

Mid-career B2B or B2C product marketers considering switching to developer products.
Early career PMMs who want to explore future career paths.
Folks working at developer product companies who want to understand the role of Technical PMM and better work with them.
Computer Science majors interested in tech but who don’t want to be software engineers – technical product marketing could be a great fit for you!
My friends and family who ask me questions about my job (Hi mum!).

Let’s dive in!

🧠What is a Technical Product Marketing Manager?

Technical PMM in one sentence

A technical product marketing manager is the person who can answer the question: “How does our product help customer X with problem Y better than alternatives Z?”.

Technical PMM in one paragraph

A Technical PMM builds expert knowledge about the market, product and the customer. Early career Technical PMMs are responsible for a single feature, problem and customer segment. As they grow in seniority, Technical PMMs are responsible for multiple markets, entire product lines and customer segments with distinct needs. Technical PMMs use their knowledge of the product-market-customer trifecta to write the proverbial script from which all other teams read. They equip others in the company with insights, messaging and collateral to attract and win customers. Technical PMMs help inform Product and Engineering about market requirements. And they help Marketing and Sales speak the customer’s language in order to show how the product can solve your ideal customer’s problems better than alternatives.

What kind of companies do Technical PMMs work at?

Technical Product Marketing Managers are needed at companies with products built to serve a highly technical audience.

You’ll need technical PMMs to help software developers choose the right:

database for their application
API to use in their login or authentication feature
tool for their workflow

Technical audience is a broad term, but often includes roles like software developers, software engineers, data engineers, data scientists, DevOps engineers, data analysts and machine learning engineers, and researchers.

While Product Marketing Managers are generally found at almost every company, whether consumer or B2B, Technical PMMs thrive at B2B companies building technical products.

Who does a Technical PMM work with?

Being a Technical Product Marketer is a highly cross-functional role, collaborating with many different teams and in startups often working with the entire company.

Most commonly, Technical PMMs work closely with product managers in the Product org, growth marketers, content writers, developer advocates and others in the Marketing org, and sales reps, account executives and customer success managers in the Sales org.

🐸Why is Technical Product Marketing Important?

Why are Technical PMMs important to developer focused companies?

Technical Product Marketing is a highly strategic and leveraged role. The decisions and activities conducted by Technical PMMs have downstream impact on the entire Go-To-Market process. When done right, Technical Product Marketing equips the rest of the company with the foundation to run full speed at their goals. When done wrong, even the world class growth marketers and salespeople will struggle to win, because they’re hindered by lack of knowledge about the customer, market and product.

Put another way, Technical PMMs are…

The conductor of the orchestra, harmonizing various musical instruments and sections to create a beautiful symphony.
The quarterback in American football, leading and calling plays on the field, driving the team towards a touchdown and ultimately victory.
The midfielders in a soccer match, controlling the tempo of the game and creating chances for their teammates to score goals and secure a win.
The ringleader of the circus, orchestrating a dazzling spectacle by coordinating acrobats, jugglers, and performers to entertain and amaze the audience.
The master chess player, anticipating opponents' moves and strategically positioning pieces to ensure victory.
The director of a movie, orchestrating actors, set designs, and cinematography to create a unified and impactful story.

In all of these analogies, the Technical PMM plays a similar strategic and pivotal role, ensuring that different teams, processes, and elements of a go-to-market motion come together effectively to achieve the company’s goals.

Why is Technical Product Marketing important as a profession?

Software has eaten the world. And with every company becoming a software company, developers and other technical builders are the new driving forces for a company’s success. As a result, there’s an explosion of technical products which all compete to see who can best help folks like developers, engineers, and data scientists.

The role of Technical Product Marketing is more important than ever. Developers need to be able to answer “Is this product for me?” amidst the sea of tools, new and old. And developer-focused companies need amphibians who are comfortable in both technical complexity and business strategy to help their products delight customers and their companies dominate markets.

🏛️What does a Technical Product Marketing Manager do?

Let’s deep dive into how Technical PMMs conduct the orchestra, and turn ambiguity into GTM symphonies by examining the 5 Pillars of Technical Product Marketing:

Customer Empathy
Market Insight
Positioning and Messaging
Launches
Sales Enablement and Collateral

Unlike the conjoined triangles of success, you won’t find this framework in an MBA textbook. I created the 5 Pillars of Technical PMM from my experience working as an IC and leading a Technical Product Marketing organization. In my pursuit to become a world-class Technical PMM and help others on my team to the same, the 5 Pillars framework helped me encapsulate the most important skills of Technical PMMs in order to diagnose areas of strength and weakness, and help us move toward mastery in the discipline. The 5 Pillars framework also helped me categorize and prioritize the myriad projects PMMs could work on at any moment, so that I could ensure we worked on areas with the highest leverage and impact, both individually and as a team.

Let’s explore each pillar and look at example activities that fall under it.

👂Pillar 1: Customer Empathy

PMMs strive to understand customers’ problems. They develop high-definition pictures of who customers are, their workflows, the jobs-to-be-done and the tools they use to do them, and goals for themselves, their team, and their company. Technical PMMs identify and empathize with a customer’s pain and pinpoint why the status quo isn’t working for them.

Customer Empathy is the most important pillar in Technical Product Marketing, as all the impact Technical PMMs drive in a company comes from being able to see the world through the eyes of their target customers.

This is also what distinguishes the skills of Technical PMM’s from “regular” PMMs. Technical PMMs need to be familiar with the vernacular of folks like software developers and data scientists. They also need to have a base level of technical skills to be able to use the product just like a customer – whether it’s writing Python programs, SQL queries or building a dashboard with a database and visualization tool. Developing technical skills and familiarity with the surrounding context of your customer’s problem helps Technical PMMs build an independent intuition about problems and solutions, enabling them to add value to the product and engineering teams (e.g by informing the product roadmap) rather than only adding value to marketing and sales.

Example Technical PMM activities for Customer Empathy:

Customer research via interviews and surveys.
Attending events and talking to prospective customers.
Building Customer Journey Maps (CJMs).
Building an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) – a high definition picture of who your ideal customer is and how your product suits them.
Win/loss analysis – why are customers choosing to use or not use your product?
Segmentation – how can we group customers depending on their needs and characteristics to better find and win them?
Securing customer evidence from Sales/ Customer Success – this includes getting quotes, case studies, and other references.

🔮Pillar 2: Market Insights

Technical PMMs build a 10,000 foot view of the markets in which a product operates and how their product can win in those markets. They research market trends, analyze competitors’ strategy, products and customers, and recommend new markets for the company to enter and products and features for the company to build.

Example Technical PMM activities for Market Insight:

Competitive Analysis Artifacts – Benchmarks, competitive battlecards, competitor product analysis.
Building Market Requirements Documents (MRD) – a deep dive into a market and why/ how the company should enter it.
Competitor landscape artifacts – by segment or business need, which products does your company compete with?
Market research – market segmentation, sizing, TAM.
Non-customer research – talking to potential and non-users of your product to gain insight into their goals, problems and current tools they use.

🏆Pillar 3: Positioning and Messaging

Technical PMMs take their understanding of customer and market and translate that into strategic positioning against competitive alternatives for a customer’s problems. They translate that position into crisp messaging for specific audience segments (e.g by horizontal, vertical or demography) to help them see your products as the best solution for their problems.

Example Technical PMM activities for Positioning and Messaging:

Develop and tell the story of the product: What is it? Why does it exist? Who is it for?
Positioning frameworks (vs different competitors, for different use cases etc).
Messaging frameworks by customer profile and persona – standardize product and feature descriptions, top use cases, jobs to be done and hero features.
Value and benefit-focused messaging frameworks – these are used to support content, webpages and interactive tools around key value propositions.
Perform tests of positioning and messaging to gauge user resonance.

🚀Pillar 4: Launches

Technical PMMs infuse customer empathy and market knowledge into the product, marketing and sales strategy along each touch point of the customer’s journey – from finding the product, to running in production, and using new features as a happy customer. Technical PMMs drive the launch and promotion of new products and features, and lead the creation of artifacts like blog posts, and own properties like the company website.

Example Technical PMM activities for Launches:

Help the Product team drive releases of new products and features.
Captain launches by creating and executing launch plans with stakeholders.
Messaging and customer insight artifacts for campaigns, product and feature launches.
Messaging frameworks for web pages and landing pages.
Content and artifacts for each stage of the customer journey.

🤝Pillar 5: Enablement and Collateral

Technical PMMs package their understanding of customer problems into artifacts of all kinds that enable folks to better do their jobs in the sales and marketing process to better do their jobs. Most commonly, Technical PMMs own Sales Enablement– they equip salespeople with slide decks, competitive intelligence, playbooks, demos and training to win deals and retain customers. They also create collateral for marketing teams to find and convert new leads, such as audience briefs for events, messaging frameworks for campaigns, and pain point deep dives to inform content strategy.

Example Technical PMM activities for Enablement and Collateral:

Building and running sales training sessions about the product, market and customer.
Creating sales collateral – sales decks, segment playbooks, datasheets, 1 pagers and more!
Crafting messaging for sales reps to test via cold outreach.
Messaging frameworks that outline persona-message-CTA recommendations.
Feature demos

Building customer evidence repositories

Conclusion

That’s it for today’s deep dive on the role of the Technical Product Marketing Manager and why it’s important, both within developer-focused companies and in the tech industry at large.

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Want to hear more about specific pillars of Technical PMM? Have suggestions for other developer marketing topics you want me to talk about, Technical PMM or otherwise? Let me know in the comments or on Twitter!

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