The more I learn about product marketing, the less I trust my first answer. And strangely enough, I think that is one of the most useful things I’ve learned so far.
When I first started getting serious about product marketing, I assumed that becoming better at it would mean becoming better at finding answers. I wanted to understand the frameworks, learn how experienced PMMs think, and eventually be able to look at a product and confidently work out the positioning, the customer, the differentiation and the go-to-market strategy.
The more I’ve learned, the more I’ve realised that the difficult part isn’t necessarily coming up with an answer. It’s knowing whether the answer deserves to be trusted.
That’s a much less satisfying skill to learn.
It’s very easy to look at a product and form an opinion. You can try the product, look at its competitors, read a few customer reviews and start noticing patterns. Maybe you see a particular feature that competitors don’t have. Maybe you notice that one customer segment seems especially well suited to the product. Maybe you find a problem that the product appears to solve particularly well. Very quickly, you can turn those observations into a positioning statement that sounds perfectly reasonable.
And that’s where I think it’s easy to fool yourself.
I’ve been thinking about this particularly while learning about positioning. One of the most tempting conclusions to make is, “I think this is our differentiator.” It feels like you’ve reached the strategic part of the exercise. You’ve identified something unique and connected it to a customer benefit, so surely you’re getting somewhere.
But being different isn’t automatically the same thing as being meaningfully different.
A product can have a feature that no competitor has and still have customers who couldn’t care less about it. A product can offer a workflow that is objectively more convenient, while customers continue using an existing alternative because changing isn’t worth the effort. And sometimes something that looks like a compelling differentiator from inside the company is simply a basic expectation from the customer’s perspective.
That distinction has made me much more suspicious of the word unique.
If I’m looking at a competitor and thinking, “We do this differently,” my next thought now has to be, “Okay, but does anyone care?”
That sounds obvious, but it’s actually a pretty significant shift in how I think about product marketing. The product itself can tell you what is different. It can’t necessarily tell you what is valuable.
That’s where the customer comes in.
If I believe a product is particularly well suited to a certain type of customer, I need to understand what makes that customer care. If I believe a certain capability is the reason people choose the product, I need to understand whether that capability actually influences their decision. If I think we’ve found a meaningful competitive advantage, I need to understand what customers are doing instead and why they would change.
In other words, I’m learning to treat my first answer as a hypothesis rather than a conclusion.
That doesn’t mean every decision needs six months of research before anyone is allowed to do anything. Quite the opposite. Sometimes you have to make decisions with incomplete information. But there’s a difference between making a decision because you have enough evidence to move forward and making a decision because the explanation sounds good.
That difference matters.
Customer conversations are one source of evidence. Sales teams are another, because they hear the comparisons, objections and questions that come up when someone is actually considering a purchase. Competitive research gives you another perspective, particularly when you understand not just what competitors offer but what customers are choosing between. Product data can tell you whether the behaviour you’re expecting actually happens once people start using the product.
None of these sources is perfect on its own. But together, they can start turning an assumption into something you can have more confidence in.
And I think that’s where product marketing starts to feel less like creating a story and more like investigating a problem.
You start noticing how often the first explanation isn’t necessarily the best one.
A customer might say they want a feature, but what they actually need is a faster way to complete a job. A company might think its biggest competitor is another software product, while customers are actually comparing it against a spreadsheet and an internal process. A team might believe a product is winning because of one particular capability, while customers are choosing it because the entire workflow is easier.
The more you look, the more complicated the original answer becomes.
Oddly, I’m starting to enjoy that part.
Because it changes the role of the PMM from someone who needs to walk into a room with the perfect answer to someone who needs to help the company get closer to the right answer.
That also changes what I think good questions are for.
I used to think a good question was one that demonstrated that I knew something. Now I’m much more interested in questions that reveal something I don’t know.
What are customers actually doing today? What makes them consider changing? Which part of the problem is painful enough to matter? Is this something customers are asking for, or something we think they should want? Is this difference genuinely influencing their decision, or is it simply interesting to us?
And perhaps the most useful question of all is: what evidence would make me change my mind?
Because that’s the part I’m still learning to get comfortable with.
It’s easy to collect information that confirms what you already believe. It’s much harder to actively look for evidence that could prove you wrong. But if positioning is a hypothesis, then being wrong is actually useful. It tells you something about the customer, the market or the product that you didn’t understand before.
Maybe the customer segment you thought was ideal isn’t the one that cares most. Maybe the differentiator you were excited about is table stakes. Maybe the competitor you were analysing isn’t actually the alternative customers are considering. Maybe the problem you thought was urgent turns out to be something people are perfectly willing to live with.
Those aren’t failures of positioning. They’re things you needed to discover before committing to it.
And I think that’s probably the biggest change in how I’m approaching product marketing now. I’m becoming less interested in having a clever answer and more interested in understanding how much confidence I should have in it.
The goal isn’t to never be wrong. That would be impossible, especially when you’re working with incomplete information and constantly changing markets.
The goal is to know why you believe something, what evidence supports it, what assumptions you’re making, and what could change your mind.
So yes, the more I learn about product marketing, the less I trust my first answer.
Not because I think my first answer is always wrong. Sometimes it will be right.
But now I know that the first answer is only the beginning.
And perhaps that’s the real skill I’m learning: not how to always have the answer, but how to know whether the answer is worth trusting.