PMM and PM. What's the difference?

For those of you who don't know, I carry the title of a product marketing manager at work and I often ask the question about the difference between a product marketing manger and a product manager, especially in the enterprise world. Here's a version of my self response.

Our job as product marketing managers is more about geting a product out that is sellable. A product that we will be excited to sell to a customer if we were sales people. And that's primarily what we care about. Just making it sellable. Our focus is to do all the stuff it takes to sell it for a month, a quarter, a year and so on.

Product managers on the other side should focus on geting a product out that is usable. A product that they will be excited to use if they were the end users. And sometimes there might be conflicts. We need to collectively think through the details to get something out that has the right mix. The worst thing we can do is to get a product out that's neither sellable nor usable and there are hundres of examples for such failures in the market.

You might ask why sellability (when is this going to be an official word!) and usability are different things. It kind of defies commonsense. If a product is exceptionally good at what it does and is a pleasure to use, wouldn't more people buy it? Unfortunately the answer is no because it's an enterprise product and not a consumer one. The key difference is that in the consumer world the buyer and the user are the same person or has the same persona. You buy a music player to use it yourself. But in the enterprise world the buyer and the user are completely different people. They have different goals, different day jobs, different priorities, etc.. It's the reality of the market.

And guess what's happening these days? Enterprise IT is getting consumerized, which I think is really a good thing. So, we all better change.