Product Marketing Team Structures: Who You Need, When To Hire & How To Grow

It’s time to talk about product marketing teams and how to structure them. Of course, there is no one-size-fits-all solution, we won’t wait until the end of the article to reveal that. However, we see common solutions emerging, depending on the type of company culture, team size, and growth goals that you have at your SaaS org.

This article will outline a few ideal product marketing team structures to give you a better idea of how to structure your own. We’ll also look at: 

👩‍💻 What a product marketing team does: their roles and responsibilities

🏗 Structuring your team: building startup / agile teams

🪴 How to build and grow a cross-functional team

You'll walk away from this article with a solid idea of a product marketing team structure that perfectly aligns with your mission, vision, and product growth goals. And to give you insider tips, we tapped the minds of Product Marketing experts and have peppered their input throughout. A huge thank you to Andrea Saez, Fiona Finn, and Jason Oakley for your time!

To help you understand better, here's a nifty little diagram to summarize what product marketing is:

Read up more on the role in our guide: What is Product Marketing? A Data-Backed Definition.

Product marketing teams are responsible for product sales success and the overall product marketing strategy. This means an agile, cross-functional team can be responsible for: 

• Product launch marketing: Product marketers are essential for product launches. They build hype around a product during pre-product launch, build pre-sales launch mailing lists, take care of website updates, and ensure product understanding among ICPs. Then post-launch they maintain traction around a product, retain users (user retention), and uphold PR initiatives.  

• Go-to-market strategy: strategizing and enabling your marketing campaigns to ensure they get to your target market effectively and cost-efficiently.

• Sales enablement materials: product marketing teams are also responsible for aiding the flow beyond lead generation efforts. This means they enable sales teams with sales collateral, knowing what content leads have already consumed and helping to close deals even quicker.

• Content marketing: like most marketing teams a product marketing team is often responsible for the content marketing of your SaaS. They ensure the content you create stays on key topics, keywords, and hits queries or terms that are more likely to be sought out by your ICP. Product marketing teams tend to bring a customer focus to your content creation built from real user data, they eliminate gut feelings and build content from product data. 

• Target audience research: crucial in ensuring you find product-market-fit, relevant marketing avenues, and run effective marketing campaigns (demand gen and demand capture) 

• Content partnerships: highly effective strategies for reaching new audiences, or re-engaging with your current audience. The research found that 71% of consumers enjoy co-branding partnerships. We’re starting to see larger co-marketing initiatives—little and large—spread throughout the B2B and B2C world. From Balenciaga and Gucci’s: The Hacker Project to SaaS co-hosted webinars, like the one we recently held with Maze 👇

The list doesn’t stop there. A few more areas a product marketing team is often responsible for, depending on the company size, include:  

• Market research 

• User research 

• Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) & User / Buyer Personas

• Brand awareness initiatives

• Marketing analytics & reporting

• Lead generation 

• Demand generation 

• Implementing growth tactics

• Community management

We can certainly agree that product marketing teams have a lot of roles and responsibilities within a thriving SaaS. So, how on earth can you start to narrow down all of these responsibilities to people and keep an agile team structure? Read on. 

So, let's pop the hood and take a look at what a successful product marketing team looks like.

First up, let's cover the typical roles you'll find within a product marketing team and what responsibilities each of these roles has. 

• Product Marketing Manager: leads the team and communicates the why, what, and when of the product to their team and their customers. Creates and helps to execute the PM strategy.

• Content Manager: heads up all content initiatives and strategies. This includes blogs, videos, podcasts, social media, email marketing, website content, and more. 

• Partnerships Manager: maintains strategic partnerships with brands and influencers. Responsible for the audience reach of launch campaigns, brand awareness, and brand alignment campaigns. 

• Growth Lead: analyzes and identifies growth opportunities at every stage in the customer journey map. This includes optimizing micro-conversions, customer onboarding completion rates, and more. 

• Researcher/Data Analysts: supports all PM initiatives ensuring they’re delivered with actionable data. Often responsible for market intelligence, product data, customer interviews, case studies /customer success story research, and more. 

• Marketing Strategist: supports GTM strategies, initiates campaigns, reports on success, and more. 

Of course, a SaaS product marketing team is going to look very different depending on a few things. The size and culture of your product marketing organization will depend on: 

• Whether your SaaS is Sales-led or product-led 

• Your marketing budget 

• Your marketing strategy 

• Your product learning curve 

• Your product development stage 

• Your product niche

Tomasz Tunguz, venture capitalist and entrepreneur, conducted research on this topic and found that SaaS company’s marketing team size often looks something like the following: 

• 0-1M ARR: 1 person

• 1-5M ARR: 3 people

• 5-20M ARR: 6 people 

• 50-100M ARR: 12 people 

Tiny teams, right? Especially when you compare it to the growth of some of the other teams Tomasz looked at, marketing was by far the smallest. This begs the question, were these marketing teams, or product marketing teams?

The clue is in the sales teams’ size compared to the marketing teams. Take a look: 

• 1 Marketing person = 2 Salespeople 

• 3 Marketing people = 6 Salespeople 

• 6 Marketing people = 16 Salespeople 

• 12 Marketing people = 41 Salespeople 

Having a sales team that dwarfs the marketing team is a sign that you're relying on sales-led growth. Which then leads to the question of: how realistic is growth if you’re still relying on people-power to sell your product? If your product can sell your product, and you’re able to automate your marketing and sales flows, then why wouldn’t you? Your profit margins will be higher, your reach and possibilities for growth will also be much wider. This is why so many SaaS businesses are now focusing on product-led growth. It builds more scalable methods of revenue generation and retention. 

We spoke with Andrea Saez, Senior Product Marketing Manager at airfocus, to understand how her product marketing team is structured and who product marketing report to:

In other words, one answer to the question of size is that for you to add dedicated product marketing capacity to your teams, it would be better to add one or two product marketing managers to your existing product teams and expand from there.

On the subject of nuance in how product marketing fits within an organizational structure, let's dig into that a bit more.

Fiona Finn, Director of Product Marketing at Unbounce, noted how PMMs don’t need to belong to Product or Marketing teams:

We also spoke with Jason Oakley, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Klue. Jason shared how their product marketing team is structured.

There are a few marketing roles here that we hadn’t mentioned in our previous list. These roles are more niche to the product and team structure. They’re definitely something to consider when building a marketing team.

Hopefully, now you have a fuller picture of the type of team you need to bring your product to success. However, where do you start? 

👀 For more product marketing manager tips, take a look at this article 

First things first, you’ll need to assess where you’re at right now. If you don’t have any product marketing hires, then you’ve got a fresh slate. That starts with figuring out some questions first.

1. What’s your expected/needed SaaS growth rate?

2. What’s your SaaS company’s product maturity stage?

3. Do you have a go-to-market strategy already?

4. Do you have a product launch you’re gearing up for?

5. What are your immediate & long-term goals? 

Depending on how you answer these questions, you should get a clearer idea of the roles you need on-side now and those that can be pushed back or deprioritized. 

Andrea from airfocus shared her thoughts on building a marketing team from scratch:

Jason, at Klue, shared his experience of building a product marketing team from scratch as well. He said:

Fiona from Unbounce added that when building the product marketing team it’s essential to align internal stakeholders on the value-add of the role as soon as possible:

1. Prioritize your hires depending on where your business is at and where it’s going 

2. Place your product marketing team within your product department 

3. Don’t rule out internal hires from other departments if you need to hire fast 

Fantastic, so you’ve got an idea of who you need to hire right now. Besides your product marketing manager, a few roles will emerge that are an absolute must-have. 

Next, you can start looking at hires that can help those lower priority, non-business-critical goals. Although, these hires will still help your product and business thrive. Consider more generic marketing roles and aids like: 

• Growth managers

• Social media managers 

• PPC specialists 

• Affiliate/partnership roles 

• Copywriters 

• Graphic designers

• Community managers  

What’s good to keep in mind for these roles is a lot of them can be hired on a freelance basis in the beginning. As long as you’ve got a foundation team in-house to manage strategy and uphold product culture, then the actual implementation of your plans can be outsourced.

It might also be of help to use some sort of resource management software to help you plan for a wider team and manage resources at your disposal.

We’ll close out with some final advice from our two contributors for this article.

We asked; what would the ideal product marketing team structure look like for a B2B SaaS company? Andrea said: 

Jason Oakley also added his input: 

And Fiona Finn stressed the importance of research to gain a deep understanding of the customer experience:

Let's hear how product leaders view product marketing within the overall product team structure.

Like we said at the beginning, there's no one-size-fits-all solution for building a product marketing team. Sorry, we had to say it. However, you should now have a much clearer goal of potential marketing roles, team size, and types of hires your SaaS needs right now and in the future.