The Importance of Product Marketing

A recent McKinsey study found that software companies in the top revenue growth quartile consistently formalize the Product Marketing Manager role and maintain a higher ratio of PMMs to Product Managers than their peers.

The research shows the ability to understand, articulate, and align with market needs is what separates products that succeed from those that fail.

It is increasingly important that startups methodically connect their products to real customer needs and outcomes, and that is where product marketing becomes essential.

Here's why PMM as a function is critically important for businesses at all stages.

Building Is Easy. Traction Is Hard.

As Melissa Perri has explained: “It’s a hundred times easier to build something than it is to attract customers.” Eric Ries reinforces this in The Lean Startup product success isn’t about the speed of shipping features, it’s about validating whether those features actually solve a problem customers care about.

The hard truth: ideas are cheap, vibe-coding is fast, but traction is earned.

Product-Market Fit Is Everything (And Measurable)

A recent analysis of startup post-mortems shows that 42% fail because they miss product-market fit. But look deeper, and you’ll notice nearly every reason ties back to the same root cause:

• Insufficient funding (29%) → because the market didn’t flock to the product.

• Can't survive the competition (19%) → often a symptom of chasing the wrong problem in the wrong category.

• Issues with pricing, competition, sales, marketing → all downstream effects of not locking in PMF.

Product-market fit isn’t just a “feeling.” It’s measurable through customer adoption, retention, and resonance with messaging. And without it, nothing else matters.

Measure Messaging Impact From Day One

Most startups wait too long to make their messaging measurable. They measure users, but not the impact of story. From the first landing page, you should be testing whether your words land with your audience.

Product Marketing sits at the intersection of product, customer, and growth - it’s about ensuring your story creates momentum, not confusion.

PMM Owns the Playbook, Recipes, and Flywheel

Every successful scaleup has a repeatable GTM engine, a flywheel that compounds growth. Product Marketing should own this engine:

• The playbook (how you launch, position, and enable sales).

• The recipes (what works in specific markets or with certain personas).

• The flywheel (what channels and stories compound over time).
  

Without this foundation, startups are just pushing random tactics into the void.

"Value" From the Customer’s POV

At its core, Product Marketing is about truth. Not what you think your product does, but what it actually means to your customer. It’s asking:

• What problem does this solve in their life?

• Why would they choose us over anyone else?

• How do they describe the value in their own words?
  

When you align your product’s story with your customer’s truth, growth isn’t forced. It happens naturally.

PMM is critically important, sooner rather than later

Startups don’t fail because they can’t build, they fail because they can’t translate what they’ve built into value the market understands. They also build before understanding what the market needs. Product Marketing bridges that gap.

At Signary, this is our mission: helping startups and scaleups define, measure, and scale the story that drives product-market fit with fractional services.