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This article is based on Axel Kirstetter’s talk at our MarOps Summit.
I lead the global product marketing team at Guidewire Software – a $15 billion, publicly listed company with about $1 billion in annual revenue. We build SaaS solutions for the insurance industry, focusing on property and casualty, or general insurance.
That means we’re deeply embedded in a very specific vertical, working with a customer base that’s often complex, highly regulated, and cautious about change.
You might be wondering why a product marketer like me is talking about marketing operations. That’s usually considered a separate discipline, one that handles processes, systems, and automation for campaigns, leads, and data management.
But in product marketing, particularly at scale, you eventually run into the same challenge: without an operating model, you can’t grow effectively.
When you have a small team, you can get away with ad hoc approaches. But with 25 product marketers spread across different markets, you need systems and processes.
You need a way to onboard new people without chaos, a way to keep everyone working from the same playbook, and a way to scale what works. I’ve spent a lot of time figuring out how to do exactly that, and that’s what I want to share here.
My goal is to give you a clear view of three things: first, what product marketing actually does, because it’s often misunderstood; second, how to think about the emerging area of product marketing operations; and third, some practical ideas you can take away to make your own product marketing function more effective.
Sameer Danave
Understanding product marketing
If you’ve worked with product marketers from different companies, you’ve probably noticed that the role never looks exactly the same twice. Even within the same industry, responsibilities and priorities can vary wildly.
The only constant is that product marketing sits in the middle of the business, connecting dots between teams that might not otherwise have natural points of contact.
We’re a hub for four major groups. First is sales, where we often own or support sales enablement. This might mean creating battlecards, training decks, objection-handling guides, or even entire playbooks.
Then there’s customer success, where we get involved after launch to drive adoption and ensure customers get value.
We work closely with marketing on campaigns and early-funnel activity. And we partner with product to plan for future releases, ensuring the roadmap aligns with market needs and competitive realities.
We also play a role in different go-to-market models. In a product-led growth environment, for instance, the boundaries between product, marketing, and product marketing blur.
We have to bring everything together into a unified motion that attracts, converts, and retains users directly through the product experience.
A framework for the role
The Product Marketing Alliance offers a framework I find useful, even though others exist, like McKinsey, Gartner, and Forrester.
The Alliance framework breaks the role into five stages.
The first, Discover, happens before a product exists. This is about identifying problems worth solving. It means conducting market research, developing business cases, and running win-loss analysis.
Depending on your company, some of these might be owned by other departments – finance might handle the business case, sales might do the win-loss interviews – but collaboration is essential.
The second stage is Strategize. Now that you understand the problems in the market, you decide how to address them. This involves defining goals, deciding on pricing, and choosing a go-to-market strategy. Will you sell directly? Through partners? Online? What’s the mix?
Next is Define, where you crystallize the offering. You work on differentiation, messaging, positioning, use cases, and segmentation.
Then comes Get Set, which is the launch readiness phase. This is where training, enablement, and campaign preparation happen.
Finally, Grow is all about what happens after launch. Are customers adopting the product? Are they expanding their usage? Are we capturing the full value?
In my experience, every company interprets these stages differently, but the principles apply universally.
Building a product marketing operating system
When I talk about a product marketing operating system, I mean the repeatable workflow that takes an idea from insight to market impact.
At Guidewire, it starts with gathering market insights. You can’t do anything well unless you understand the problems you’re solving, both for the market at large and for individual customers.
This involves monitoring research reports, talking to analysts, and digging into competitive intelligence. I make a point of encouraging my team to run win-loss interviews themselves.
Tools exist that can automate some of this, but there’s no substitute for hearing directly from the people who chose you (or didn’t). I’ve found that six to eight conversations are often enough to see patterns emerge.
Competitive intelligence is another essential input. I think of it in two flavors: inbound and outbound.
Outbound is the competitive positioning we give to our sales teams (a.k.a., how to win against specific rivals). Inbound is the market chatter we monitor and respond to, whether that’s a competitor announcing a new feature or analysts shifting their perspective.
The next step is turning insights into a marketing plan. I always structure these around four areas: awareness generation, demand generation, adoption, and enablement. Not every plan needs all four in equal measure.
Chris Bretschger
For a net-new product in a new market, awareness and demand might dominate. For an enhancement to an existing product, adoption and enablement could be the focus.
A plan is more than just a list of activities, as it’s also a schedule. That’s why I insist on a content calendar. Other teams need to know when assets will be available so they can plan campaigns and outreach.
Alongside that, we maintain a bill of materials that includes both the major “hero” assets – a flagship case study, for instance – and all the derivative content that comes from them, such as videos, blog posts, or customer quotes.
Positioning and messaging come next. This is often the most intellectually demanding part of the job. You have to define exactly who the product is for, how it’s different, and why anyone should care, and you have to do it in a way that’s both truthful and compelling.
I develop positioning after the marketing plan is in place, because the plan often shapes the way we tell the story. Once positioning is nailed down, activation begins.
This is about bringing the strategy to life through tangible assets: sales one-pagers, solution briefs, web updates, even what I call a “money slide”: one visual that captures the entire story.
I’m a big believer in creating structured sales plays, which map assets to stages of the buyer journey so that sales teams know exactly what to use, when, and why.
Finally, we get to reporting and measurement. Reporting is descriptive, it tells you what happened. Measurement is evaluative, since it tells you whether what happened was good or bad.
If you ran a campaign and got ten leads, was that a success? Without a benchmark, you can’t say. That’s why I like to set thresholds in advance: for example, between eight and twelve leads is green, fewer than five is red, anything in between is yellow.
How the team works: The four pillars
Product marketing operations go beyond process into culture as well. In my team, that culture rests on four pillars: rituals, initiatives, KPIs, and accountabilities.
Rituals are the patterns that shape daily life. We have a regular cadence of one-on-ones, team meetings, and cross-functional check-ins. Communication norms are clear: Slack for informal, quick exchanges; email for formal updates.
Sometimes I send short video updates instead of long written ones, as it’s faster for me, and often more engaging for the team.
Initiatives are the major projects we’re driving. At any given time, that might include supporting regional events, contributing to product launches, or preparing for our annual customer conference, which draws around 3,000 attendees.
KPIs are the measures we use to track progress. I think about these in two categories: production and consumption.
Production tells us whether we’re creating enough to feed the business; consumption tells us whether people are actually using what we create. We pull data from enablement platforms like Highspot to see which sales materials are being accessed, and from tools like Google Analytics to see how web content is performing.
Accountability is about clarity. Everyone knows what they own, whether it’s the messaging framework for a product line or the naming convention for new services.
We keep an org chart that includes not just names and photos, but time zones and areas of ownership. With a distributed team, that’s critical.
The one-slide plan and beyond
I’m a big believer in concise communication. My marketing plan template fits on one slide, but it covers everything we need: the strategic goals, the measurable objectives, the programs we’ll run, the tactics we’ll use, and the definition of success.
Strategic goals usually come from sales or product leadership, but we translate them into something that’s actionable for product marketing. Objectives are specific: “$500K in pipeline” is much better than “raise awareness.” Programs fit into awareness, pipeline, enablement, and adoption, and tactics are chosen accordingly.
Working in quarters helps keep focus. A quarterly content calendar lays out the deliverables, the regions they apply to, the products they support, the delivery dates, and the strategic goals they connect to. This makes production predictable and ensures alignment with business priorities.
I’m also moving toward using a balanced scorecard for product marketing. It measures performance across four perspectives: financial, product, customer, and process.
For example, financial might track pipeline creation; product might look at launch adoption rates; customer could measure satisfaction or advocacy; and process might evaluate whether assets are delivered on time and to quality standards.
Each metric is rated against a target, so it’s immediately clear whether we’re on track.
Balancing structure and flexibility
One of the most common questions I get is how to balance structure with flexibility. My answer is that you need both.
Structure gives you credibility and alignment. It ensures that people know what’s happening and when. But flexibility allows you to adapt when circumstances change and they always do.
If we see partway through a quarter that pipeline coverage is slipping, we might shift resources from awareness campaigns to activities that help close deals in the near term.
Plans are made to be executed, but also to be adjusted. The cultural environment you create as a leader determines how easy it is for your team to pivot without losing momentum.
A simple approach to metrics
Another question I hear often is which metrics matter most. My philosophy is to keep it simple, especially at the start. Track two things: content production and content consumption.
Production shows whether you’re feeding the machine. Consumption shows whether anyone cares. If you have one without the other, you have a problem.
Balance them, and you’ll have a solid foundation for measuring and improving performance.
Final thoughts
A product marketing operating system isn’t about creating bureaucracy for its own sake. It’s about building a framework that anchors product marketing in real market needs, aligns it with other functions, and allows it to scale as the organization grows.
When you combine market insights, thoughtful planning, disciplined positioning, creative activation, and rigorous measurement, you create a virtuous cycle. The team learns, adapts, and improves over time. Stakeholders know what to expect.
And product marketing moves from being a support function to being a driver of growth.
In my experience, the more transparent and repeatable your operating system, the easier it is for others in the company to trust, support, and leverage product marketing to its full potential.
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