Mandy Hornaday: If you've ever felt unsure about where product marketing fits in your org, or how to use it as a strategic growth driver rather than just a launch machine, you're not alone. Product marketing is one of the most critical and misunderstood functions in B2B marketing. It's the engine behind clear messaging, smart segmentation, effective launches, and sales enablement that actually lands. But too often it's under-resourced, brought in too late, or siloed from the rest of the marketing organization.
Mandy Hornaday: That's why I'm so excited for today's conversation with Shirin Shahin, a seasoned product marketing leader turned consultant who has built and scaled product marketing functions for both startups and enterprise tech companies over the past 12 years. In this episode, we talk about what product marketing actually is and where it fits in your broader work. Why CMOs should hire product marketers earlier and what happens when they don't. How product marketing managers drive demand, alignment, and customer clarity across go-to-market teams. And the blurred lines between brand, product, and corporate messaging, and how to fix them. Whether you're running a lean team, leading a brand refresh, or trying to figure out what product marketing really should own, this episode will give you the clarity you need to make product marketing your strategic secret weapon. Let's dive in.
Mandy Hornaday: Hey, Shirin, welcome to Growth Activated. We're so excited to have you here today.
Shirin Shahin: Hey, Mandy. Thank you. I'm excited to speak with you in this capacity. I know we met in a different capacity, so really excited to be here.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, absolutely. I'm so excited for today's conversation. And you're right, we have worked together before. I spent my first 10 years in marketing at a B2B professional services company. We didn't have a product to do product marketing for. It really wasn't until I went to the B2B SaaS startup that we both worked at together where I really started to learn what product marketing was as a function, how hard it is, how talented you have to be. I'm really excited to enlighten our audience today, especially for those who aren't in SaaS and aren't doing product marketing on a day-to-day basis. I think it's a really fun conversation, and it's been such a pleasure working with you.
Shirin Shahin: Thank you for all that. And yes, I was just so excited to hear about your own journey. Product marketing can have so many different definitions and there's just so much that can go into it. It's like an endless list. I think that's actually both the beauty of it and also a challenge for anyone entering product marketing or who's been in it. I've been in it 12 years, almost 13, and it can still be a very necessary but somewhat confusing function in terms of what it entails, when's the right time to bring a product marketer on. All things we're going to speak about today.
Mandy Hornaday: I'd love to start with a little bit about your background. It sounds like you've been in product marketing for 12 to 13 years. Tell us more about your journey.
Shirin Shahin: I pretty much fell into product marketing, which I think a lot of us can say about different parts of our career. After grad school, I started at Constant Contact, a tech company in the Boston area in the email marketing space. I actually started in product, in a market, competitive, and customer research role, which actually has a big place in product marketing, but I didn't know that at the time. We were starting to work on a new product launch, and in doing that I started to interface with the product marketing team. That's how I even learned about it. We're talking 2012. I stayed in tech after that, then went to services for about a year and a half at a recruitment company. I realized pretty quickly how different it was without that tangible tech product. So I went back into tech, and was last at Brightcove in the video tech space, as an individual contributor and then as a director. In 2019, I started my own product marketing consultancy. It'll be six years this summer.
Mandy Hornaday: Out of curiosity, when you look at your product marketing peers, how do people typically get into product marketing? It feels like an elevated role. Is there a junior entry-level path?
Shirin Shahin: There are some more junior-level roles. Product marketing specialist is probably the most junior title I've seen. But every job posted asks for two to three years of experience at least, so there's a catch-22. How do you start if you can't get the experience? I've seen people come in from product, from sales, from customer success, from content. Because we work so cross-functionally, I think you can get into product marketing from many different roles. It's really about how you position yourself and translate those skills.
Mandy Hornaday: How would you describe what product marketing represents at an organization?
Shirin Shahin: Two definitions. The more formal one: clearly communicate a product's value to a specific audience so that it resonates, differentiates, and drives growth. But when I want to make it more digestible, I say product marketing is the who, what, and why of your product. Who is your target audience? What is your product, and we really have to dissect a product to understand it before we can translate it into language and messaging. And why is your product unique, what are the differentiators? How do you stand out? That's my who, what, why.
Mandy Hornaday: One of the things I still have to piece out is what is company-level messaging and branding versus product-level messaging and branding. Do others have that misunderstanding too?
Shirin Shahin: When I work on company-level positioning, I always start with positioning before messaging. I believe that team needs to be very closely integrated with brand or corporate marketing, but there is a Venn diagram. Brand and corporate do not overlap with product marketing in things like mission, vision, brand tone, colors, logos, that's their distinct territory. But as they define the mission and vision, it absolutely impacts the product and should influence the product story and narrative. I think there's a distinction between the two, but they have to connect and be aligned. Often I don't see them completely aligned, sometimes because the product marketing work just hasn't started yet. It can be an afterthought that happens later than it should.
Mandy Hornaday: What would you say are the buckets or responsibilities under the product marketing umbrella?
Shirin Shahin: Voice of customer and market research, competitive intelligence, customer forums, speaking to customers regularly. Positioning and messaging work, how do we talk about our product and position it in the market given that research? Sales enablement, working closely with sales and customer success to make sure they have the right messaging, collateral, and materials. Product launches, a distinct, cross-functional effort with its own skill set. And product adoption, tracking and measurement, which is trickier because product marketing metrics aren't always purely quantitative.
Mandy Hornaday: There's always a debate, should product marketing sit with product or with marketing?
Shirin Shahin: I've typically seen it reporting into marketing, and I personally believe in that direction. Product is a close partner, we feed them market and competitive information and influence the roadmap. But I believe our primary output and bigger impact is on the go-to-market organization side. So I pretty strongly feel product marketing should sit under the marketing team.
Mandy Hornaday: I've seen that debate too. From my experience as a fractional, if there's a desire to move product marketing over to product, it's usually because there are gaps or challenges in the marketing leadership team and product just steps in out of necessity. It's rarely the case that product marketing is functioning really well under a strong CMO and product is fighting to take it over.
Shirin Shahin: Exactly. And when product managers step into that work, they do customer research differently, they're doing feature testing, showing wireframes, getting direct feedback. That's also valuable, but our lens as product marketers is more forward-looking. We're looking at market trends, speaking to customers with a different angle. Both need to happen.
Mandy Hornaday: What are the gaps CMOs are missing that could make the product marketing function stronger?
Shirin Shahin: Hire a product marketer early. That's probably the biggest gap. I do think CMOs are starting to think about it earlier, I'll give a lot of them credit for that. But more often I've seen a CMO experience some sort of trigger, conversion is dropping, close rate is dropping, and they're like, what is going on? And product marketing is a great hire at that point. But had product marketing been in place earlier, I wonder what impact that could have had to avoid the problem. It often comes back to basics: do we understand our personas? When was the last time we spoke to our customers? That is so often forgotten until there's a problem.
Mandy Hornaday: I come from the demand gen side. So often demand generation is expected to perform really well when we haven't addressed messaging, personas, or a clear ICP. It blows my mind that we think demand gen will perform well without those foundations.
Shirin Shahin: Completely. And the pressure is on you to deliver, and you're like, we're jumping from ICP to ICP, being reactive instead of proactive. That happens a lot.
Mandy Hornaday: And when there's not a strong product marketing function in place, marketing becomes supportive and reactive to whatever sales is doing. Sales is thinking about tomorrow, about the last deal they closed, not strategically about which segments to penetrate. So marketing just supports those reactive efforts.
Shirin Shahin: Marketing can become like an agency to sales. And product marketing can too, if it doesn't have clear priorities and doesn't share them with cross-functional leaders. We just become a request queue. That's not what we're here for. Our distinct responsibilities impact pretty much every team in the organization, if we're given the space to actually do the work.
Mandy Hornaday: When you're working with startups, where does product marketing fall in the hiring order?
Shirin Shahin: I don't necessarily believe product marketing is the first hire at a startup, but I do believe they should be your first hire on the marketing team. Once you're starting to build your marketing team and have about 80% of your product developed, just starting to think about go-to-market, very often teams run immediately to campaigns. But before any of that, who has documented the personas? How are we positioning ourselves in this market? How are we messaging? That foundation has to be there first.
Mandy Hornaday: Where does sales fall into that? If you're hiring product marketing first on the marketing side, is there a case where product marketing could even come in before sales?
Shirin Shahin: Both are possible. Sometimes you don't have the luxury of taking six months to build out product marketing before your first salesperson, you have funding targets to hit. You may want to make both hires together. But those two people need to collaborate very closely. There's so much gold in sitting in early sales calls and listening. You always have some assumptions and hypotheses. Product marketing should be in the room with sales at that stage.
Mandy Hornaday: Where do you see the fractional model work really well at different stages?
Shirin Shahin: One is when you've lost a product marketing leader or have a gap on your team. Another is at early-stage growth, when a company is moving from founder-led sales to building their sales and marketing engine. That's actually when we worked together. You don't necessarily need someone full-time to get specific projects, positioning, and sales collateral in place. Those are the two top categories where fractional or a consultant makes the most sense.
Mandy Hornaday: What are the blind spots that product marketing leaders themselves have, and how can CMOs better support them?
Shirin Shahin: Product marketers are often expected to be tied to marketing goals and KPIs, but we don't always get visibility into those metrics. You can't have that expectation without giving us that visibility. Sometimes we're a little bit like the forgotten middle child of the marketing team. The other piece is that product marketing can do a better job of staying closely integrated with brand and corporate marketing work. I had a client situation where we handed off messaging work to an agency that came in to update the website, and in hindsight that handoff was too abrupt. We should have stayed on for a couple more weeks. Product marketing needs to be more intertwined with the broader brand and corporate team.
Mandy Hornaday: I see that too. The functions within marketing end up siloed and not collaborating as much as they could. The other thing I see from the fractional side is the activation challenge, clients often don't know how to activate the playbook that's been built. With product marketing being so critical to demand gen, content, and sales, how do you make sure those teams know what to do with the strategy?
Shirin Shahin: That's a real challenge. I've gone back to check websites for previous clients, have they updated the messaging? Sometimes they haven't. I think it comes down to having a real activation plan as part of the handoff. But there's also a limit to what a consultant can control once they roll off. That's probably the part I don't love about consulting, you feel the impact while you're doing the work, but you don't always see what happens after.
Mandy Hornaday: What trends are impacting product marketing right now? How is AI affecting the function?
Shirin Shahin: Mostly positive. AI is affecting everybody, but for the majority of what we do, I don't see AI replacing product marketing, I think it augments what we do very well. We're already using it to work more effectively and efficiently. That said, in these early stages I think we need to be careful and diligent. I don't have full trust in what AI outputs without reading through and editing it. Where I think AI plays more of a threat is on the content side, and since some product marketers own content, that's worth watching. But overall, I think it's only going to help us work faster and more intelligently.
Mandy Hornaday: I've even played around with using AI for persona development and market research. What used to take months can now take days or hours. That's remarkable.
Shirin Shahin: Exactly. And if that work goes from months to days, what are we doing next? It opens up so much more potential for what we can actually execute. Personas might get documented faster, but then, now what do we do with that time? Test messaging, validate with customers, feed call transcripts back in, update the personas. There's just so much more we can now do that I think is going to make us all better product marketers.
Mandy Hornaday: What is one final word of advice you would give to marketing leaders right now?
Shirin Shahin: Hire us early. Just bring us in early. I don't think you're going to regret it. There's a lot of foundation we can help build that will greatly impact your team and set them on the right direction.
Mandy Hornaday: Well, Shirin, it's been so wonderful having you today. I've so appreciated this conversation. If people want to learn more, LinkedIn is probably the best place?
Shirin Shahin: Yes, LinkedIn is best. And I have my website as well.
Mandy Hornaday: Awesome. Well, thanks, Shirin. We appreciate the conversation.
Shirin Shahin: Thank you so much.
Mandy Hornaday: Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of Growth Activated. I hope this conversation sparked new ideas, challenged your thinking, and gave you practical tools to help elevate your impact as a marketing leader. If it did, I would love for you to pass it along to a friend or colleague in B2B marketing. The more we grow together, the more we raise the bar for what marketing leadership can look like. And as always, in the meantime, keep activating growth for yourself and your company. See you next time.
