Beyond the Pitch Deck: The Real Power of Product Marketing
Last week I had the good fortune to spend a couple of hours with Rhys Williams of Domestique. If you’re ever looking for thoughtful, considered advice, I can’t recommend Rhys highly enough. He and Alex have built Domestique into a unique and impactful RevOps agency that can truly transform your go-to-market effectiveness.
Our conversation reminded me of a challenge I’ve seen play out again and again: the way companies undervalue product marketing. Too often, this critical function gets boxed into making slides and flyers, when in reality it has the potential to be one of the most strategic growth engines in the business.
A Personal Story
Several years ago, I worked with a phenomenal product marketer. She was sharp, strategic, and deeply insightful. Yet, we didn’t fully recognize the true value she could bring.
Instead, she became known as the Pitch Deck Queen, cranking out slide after slide, one-pagers, and custom collateral for every high-value prospect. She barely had time to catch her breath, let alone dig into research or market insights. Eventually, exhausted and unfulfilled, she left.
Sound familiar?
Sadly, this isn’t an isolated story. It’s a pattern I’ve seen in many organizations: product marketers relegated to sales support, stuck in feature-messaging hell. Tactical collateral makers, not strategic value creators.
But here’s the truth: the most impactful product marketers aren’t slide builders. They’re strategic architects and change agents, blending external market data with internal intelligence to shape the high-value business decisions that drive growth.
Traits of High-Impact Product Marketers
So what should you look for when hiring your first (or indeed any) product marketer. From my experience, the best product marketers share three traits. They are:
Intensely Curious
They dig beneath the surface to uncover real pain, not just what customers say they want, but what truly slows them down, frustrates them, or costs them. They learn the customer’s language, their aspirations, and the impact they want to have. They map the competitive landscape with precision, understanding competitors strengths and weaknesses, but where you can be different.
Strategic Dot-Connectors
They bring together threads from every corner: company mission, long-term goals, product strategy, customer voice, competitor positioning, and whitespace. They extract patterns and translate them into actionable insights: where to play, how to win, and what value you’re uniquely positioned to deliver. They shape these into a clear, differentiated point of view.
Exceptional Communicators
They activate the organization with what they’ve learned. They inform product management with novel, targeted insights that shape the roadmap. They build messaging frameworks that resonate with buyers and rally employees. And they ensure that the story is told consistently and authentically at events, in collateral, in enablement, and throughout every customer touchpoint.
From Tacticians to Value Creators
When product marketing is practiced this way, it stops being a reactive, tactical function and becomes a strategic driver of growth.
It informs product direction, ensuring solutions align with real market pain.
It strengthens messaging and positioning, giving buyers a reason to engage… today.
It powers revenue by aligning the entire company around authentic, market-driven insight.
And yes, when the time comes, it equips sales with collateral that actually resonates. Not because it’s flashy, but because it’s built on your customers’ truth: the lived reality of their daily lives.
That’s the difference between a pitch deck and a narrative that wins.
