After spending a decade supporting products at different stages of growth, I keep returning to the same handful of ideas. These hard-earned lessons are as real today as they were while I was starting out as a product marketer.
This is my attempt to write them down.
1. Start with who has the problem, not with the product
In the first year of my career, I was building a sales deck for a Fortune 500 client that combined five products into a single pitch. Every slide felt disjointed. I kept rearranging the order hoping a narrative would emerge.
The breakthrough came when I stopped and asked: who is sitting across the table, and what are they actually worried about?
This client was worried about being stuck in the past with their digital ecosystem relying on old technology. They could see where they needed to get to, but the gap felt too wide to cross without breaking things that still worked. This could only come from taking small steps instead of big leaps.
Once that was clear, the essence of the story crystallized. Every product was placed on a journey the client could actually see themselves taking. It was a hit among the sales team because they didn’t have to explain the details.
The real lesson for me was what it implies about product messaging. Buyers are not interested in the features or roadmap. They are interested in solving their problems. Shifting from “here’s what we do” to “here’s why you should care” takes messaging from average to great.
2. Good work that nobody cares about is not good work
I gravitated to product marketing because I got to use my strength of creativity on impactful go-to-market activities. I began by building my craft by fixing website messaging, creating decks, and scaling for multiple products. But at some point, craft becomes a bottleneck.
When you’re the only product marketer, teams are waiting on you every month. A feature ships and sales needs a battlecard. A campaign needs a brief. A newsletter goes out in six languages. There’s no time to perfect each one.
So I started asking one question from every new marketing asset: What value is being delivered?
If it’s a demo deck, will the prospect relate with it? If it’s a battlecard, is it concise and current enough that the sales team will trust it in a client call? If it’s a campaign plan, will the team refer to it until the feature gets adopted?
After creating enough shelfware that I thought were great, I have come to realize that: marketing output is only as good as the behavior it drives. If it doesn’t change what someone does, it didn’t work.
3. GTM only works when the product works
This is the most expensive lesson I’ve learned. At the start of Covid, I was part of a team launching a noise-cancellation software for remote workers and contact centers. We had marketing budget, a clear audience, and a category that felt timely. We drove record sign-ups across the US and APAC markets. Accounts were going up to the right in every review meeting.
But it was only half the story. Users weren’t coming back. They signed up, tried it once, and moved on. We couldn’t change it with new onboarding flows or help articles. The product wasn’t becoming a habit. Because there was a flaw that we had swept under the rug. The product was not thoroughly tested, leading to drop offs during calls. In other words, its performance was unreliable.
That experience underscored that GTM efforts only work when the product can hold its own. Ad spend can fill the top of the funnel but it cannot fix what happens after someone signs up.
4. Simplicity is strategic
Traditional marketing fails to build trust with modern buyers. They skip ads. They sign up for free trials before talking to anyone. They look for authentic reviews, not polished case studies written by the company.
In a product-led model, where signing up is free, the messaging needs to act as a good sales rep. That means a guiding the users towards conversion while avoiding drop-offs. No jargons, no vague statements, and no features that only make sense for existing users.
Choosing to say one thing clearly instead of five things completely is a deliberate choice. It means trimming copy down to its basic. With AI-enabled teams shipping features faster than ever, this compounds. More features, more complexity, more reasons for a user to feel lost. The job of making a product approachable is more important than ever.
5. The best marketing is not under your control
Everything in the previous four principles — knowing your buyer, doing useful work, product before marketing, simplifying ruthlessly — sets the condition for what actually compounds: word of mouth.
Word of mouth is a lagging indicator of trust. A customer trusted the product enough to tell it to others. It doesn’t show up in your campaign dashboard or your activation metrics. You can’t manufacture it or shortcut it. You can only create the conditions for it.
You’re planting seeds in every webinar, every newsletter, every support interaction, every piece of content that helps someone do their job better. Most of it feels invisible while it’s happening. It might show up with your “(direct) / (none)” traffic in GA4 steadily going up.
That’s the goal: Marketing that works in the background.
These five principles came from my own raw experiences from the trenches. The common theme is that product marketing exists to lower the friction for a buyer to get value out of the product. Repeatedly and reliably.
That job is getting harder. With AI running wild, the pull is to launch more: more campaigns, more content, more products. But soon all of this start looking the same and becomes slop. But, customers gravitate towards content that is original with flaws that denotes humanness.
Thankfully, I was in the field before AI came into the picture. I built my taste working on products that failed and those that grew exponentially. And combining them with my personal experiences. That means, I am able to use AI tools without handing them the wheel.
After 10 years as a product marketer, my values have stood the test of time. A growth mindset, deeper understanding of the buyer and authenticity, leads to outcomes that compound.