Why Product Marketing Must Be the Engine Behind Customer-Centric Innovation

If you asked me how the role of product marketing has changed in the last 2–5 years, I'd say: it's never been more mission-critical. As innovation accelerates, product marketing is evolving fast - stepping up as the strategic bridge between new innovative offerings and real customer outcomes.

In today’s lightspeed AI-driven landscape, releasing products without tight customer feedback loops and real-world validation puts innovation - and growth - at risk. Generative AI has only raised the stakes - understanding, diagnosing, and solving real customer problems before launch is now mission-critical to ensure customer adoption and drive GTM motions designed to optimize profitability 

To explore this further, I recently hosted AI and Digital Transformation expert, Frank Palase on the Real Growth Collective Podcast. We discussed how industry leaders are evaluating AI capabilities for adoption - and what stood out was his emphasis on MVP strategies: start simple, validate value, and scale from there. It’s a playbook that’s proven itself across waves of disruptive tech and is just as vital now, in the Gen-AI economy.

'Think big, start small...making sure that you have a small test case to kind of run this through to make sure that your models and your thinking are correct and making those adjustments along the way.' - Frank Palase (6:10(

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And yet, product marketing continues to be the critical link. While the craft of product marketing has certainly evolved, at its core is serving as the connective tissue between product vision and customer reality.  Helping customers navigate change has always been important to drive adoption - but in an AI-powered world, it’s non-negotiable. Product marketing must lead customers through uncertainty to help them evolve and gain incremental business value through AI-innovation. 

'The first couple of MVPs may not be something that you're going to get value out of right away. They're testing the model and it builds to the solution....your ability to collaborate with the business' on when that value is going to manifest is key.' Frank Palase  Frank Palase (06:45)

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Many of us have seen GTM AI vendors hyping “the ultimate product marketing playbook.” That pitch misses the point. Product marketing isn’t a one-size-fits-all template. It’s a craft. It’s both art and science - and at its core, it’s about connecting innovation to real-world outcomes.

In an agentic AI world, this craft becomes even more essential. Because without product marketing, innovation risks becoming irrelevant. 

We’ve talked about the why behind product marketing’s defining moment in today’s AI-economy. But the real shift is in how product marketing must function now - to successfully capture the hearts and minds of today’s customers and keep pace with lightspeed innovation.

'Bringing business and technologists together to create a plan which gets back to our MVP and agreed upon collaborative plan to generative business value is going to be absolutely necessary.' - Frank Palase (08:10)

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Product marketing can’t operate like it did five years ago - or even last year. In the age of AI-native products and constantly evolving customer expectations, PMM must be reimagined. It's no longer about just supporting launches or enabling sales - it’s about being the connective tissue between product, market, and customer outcomes.

Let’s break it down:

Yesterday’s Product Marketing:

• Launched the product → Then drove adoption
  
  
• Built sales decks → Then enabled the field
  
  
• Defined ICPs → Then brief internal teams
  
  
• Wrote messaging → Then ran the campaign
  
  
• Set packaging & pricing → Then tracked the revenue
  
  

Today’s Product Marketing:

• Obsesses over customers →  knows their needs, in their language to fuel the roadmap with insights.
• Drives internal alignment with market knowledge → evolves away from boxed-in sales plays to educate & enable on the ‘why and why now’ to drive a ‘case for change.’
• Proactively evolves the ICP and builds trust while the product evolves → fosters credibility & customer collaboration while harnessing what matters most to stakeholders.
• Champions of the customer voice → co-creates messaging with customers before the campaign launch.
• Evolves pricing/packaging with real usage, value, and growth-levers → not spreadsheets & over-stretched strategic hypothesis.

As the contrast between yesterday’s and today’s functions makes clear, product marketing must get ahead of customer needs, champion their voice, and embed market insights into the core of business strategy. For example, when I started working in Product Marketing in 2015, our role focused on producing glossy sales presentations and very ‘academic’ sales collateral (fancy industry frameworks, Harvey Ball product comparison guides, basic one slide customer case studies) Fast forward to today, innovation is happening so fast that product marketing must help the company to drive innovation - through VOC focus groups, beta programs, and product adoption/maturity campaigns. 

With SaaS increasingly commoditized and GenAI redefining how work gets done, product marketing can’t afford to be merely supportive - it must be strategic to stay ahead of market needs as the connective tissue between product vision and customer reality. Product marketing must translate business pain into human language. We align cross-functional teams around what truly matters to the market. And if you don’t know what moves the customer, you can’t move the business.’

Tune into the podcast, “Addressing Gen-AI Opportunities & Challenges as a Thought Partner”.