#33 Why product marketing is the new growth engine

When I joined Vibe.co as a PMM, I quickly realized: product marketing is the beating heart of a startup. Here are a few things I’ve learned about the role and its impact:

1/ Product marketing is the new marketing

Everything we do ties back to product deliverables and outcomes.
Example: we set up a simple recording studio in the office and started producing product demos like this one. That one initiative gave us a pool of content we could reuse everywhere.

2/ Get close to Growth

The growth team lives in the data. They know what’s working and what’s not.
As marketers, our job is to build a content strategy and roadmap that feeds their funnel—not to work in isolation.

3/ Pitch to Sales (not the other way around)

In most startups, the PMM:SDR ratio is ~1:20. If you let Sales build their own decks and pitches, chaos follows. Your job: create the right collateral, teach them how to use it, and contain the chaos before it eats you alive.

4/ Market with Marketing

Use your own data to write reports and trends that position your brand as a thought leader. If you’re sitting on primary data, you’re sitting on unique truth. Publish it.

5/ Know what moves the needle

There’s always one initiative driving the bulk of results—whether that’s product updates, content, tutorials, enablement, events, or website optimization.
Find your North Star metric (MAUs, branded search, or traffic, etc.) and focus relentlessly on what drives it. The rest is noise.

I’ll be sharing more tips soon, along with cheat sheets on what works and what doesn’t (like how to put together a startup-ready marketing strategy).

In the meantime, if you’re looking to break into PMM, check out these open roles.