What’s the Difference Between Product Management and Product Marketing?

There’s an on-going discussion in virtually every company about titles and responsibilities in product management. What is product management? And how is it different from product marketing?

This graph from our 2005 survey shows that, in practice, these titles have much overlap. Both roles spend substantial time supporting sales people: creating sales tools, creating presentations and demos, and going on sales calls. However product management is more inclined to work closely with development and engineering while product marketing tends to work more closely with marketing communications. Read more in About titles and responsibilities and Where do product managers spend their time? online at pragmaticmarketing.com.

Each year Pragmatic Institute conducts a survey of product managers and marketing professionals. Our objective is to provide Pragmatic Institute clients with industry information about compensation as well as the most common responsibilities for product managers and other marketing professionals.

Get your two cents in! We’ll be running the survey again in November so watch for an announcement on our web site and in our newsletter.