Marketing Lead
The Marketing Lead Role
The Marketing Lead is responsible for how the product is positioned, messaged and discovered. They own the go-to-market narrative across all Stream Teams, ensuring that the story the market hears matches the product the teams are building. To achieve this the Marketing Lead recruits, manages and coaches marketing and growth specialists in the Stream Teams and defines the marketing principles to guide their work.
In addition, the Marketing Lead assists the product strategy by providing insights and perspectives from market perception, competitive positioning and acquisition patterns.
Scaling the role
On smaller products with one or two Stream Teams, the Product Manager typically covers marketing responsibilities directly. As the product scales and the gap between what gets built and what customers hear about becomes harder to manage, a dedicated Marketing Lead becomes essential. The test is whether positioning, go-to-market and distribution are getting consistent strategic attention or are being squeezed out by other priorities.
Key Responsibilities
- Defining Marketing Principles: Defining the marketing principles that guide how the product is positioned and communicated to the market.
- Contributing to the Stream Team Structures: Assisting with the value stream definition, Stream Team allocations and ongoing management of the structures.
- Contributing to the Product Strategic Direction: Shaping the go-to-market strategy, growth strategy and competitive positioning. Ensuring the product strategy includes a positioning layer that translates product decisions into market-facing narrative.
- Tracking Product Performance: Monitoring go-to-market metrics including acquisition, channel efficiency, awareness reach and message-to-action conversion alongside product performance metrics.
- Recruiting: Recruiting marketing and growth specialists for the Stream Teams and ensuring effective onboarding to get them up to speed quickly.
- Coaching: Setting clear expectations for marketing and growth specialists in the Stream Teams and providing regular feedback and support to help them improve.
- Managing Performance: Looking after the performance of marketing and growth specialists in the Stream Teams including conducting performance reviews and managing any performance issues.
- Collaboratively Designing the Culture: Working with the other Product Team members to define, design and implement the culture of the Stream Teams.
Key Artifacts Produced
- Marketing Principles: A document outlining the marketing principles that guide how the product is positioned and communicated to the market.
- Go-to-Market Strategy: A document outlining how the product will be positioned, distributed and promoted to achieve market penetration and revenue goals.
- Growth Strategy: A plan of action that outlines how the product intends to expand its user base or revenue.
- Market Insights: A document outlining the current state, competitive landscape and trends in the market.
- Product Strategy: A document outlining the current diagnosis of the market, the areas of focus and the actions required to achieve the product vision.
- Skills Gaps Analysis Report: A document outlining the skills gaps in the Stream Teams and the actions required to close them.
- Candidate Pipeline: A continuously updated list of potential candidates for the Stream Teams.
- Marketing Capability Assessments: Assessments of the marketing capabilities of individuals to guide the coaching and development of marketing and growth specialists in the Stream Teams.
- Individual Career Development Plans: A document outlining the career aspirations of marketing and growth specialists in the Stream Teams and the actions required to achieve them.
Should the Marketing Lead be a Marketer?
Going from a marketer to a marketing lead is a career change. You are no longer responsible for the marketing work but for the people who do the marketing work and for the strategic positioning of the product. In essence, you are a people manager and a strategic contributor. Therefore, while helpful, it is not necessary for the Marketing Lead to be a marketer themselves.
A deep understanding of positioning, messaging and go-to-market practices will help the Marketing Lead to more effectively recruit and manage marketing specialists, but these skills can be learned. As people grow through the ranks of people management, they will increasingly need to manage areas where they do not have any expertise and will need to learn the necessary skills to do so.
Some companies insist on the player-coach model where the Marketing Lead is also a practitioner. This can work but the needs of the two jobs are very different and it can be difficult to balance the two. The intent behind this is that you need someone who knows the craft to lead and grow the performance of the team. ZeroBlockers achieves this goal with a separation between Marketing Leads in Product Teams and experienced marketing practitioners in Enabling Teams.
Enabling Teams are functionally aligned teams staffed with the most senior and experienced individual contributors in the company. They are responsible for defining the functional standards and best practices for the Stream Teams and training people to improve the quality of the craft.
On top of allowing people to focus more and be more effective in their respective areas, this separation delivers a secondary benefit: it provides an alternative career path for marketers in the company. You can choose to move into people management and look more into the strategy of the product or you can choose to stay in the craft and become an expert in your field. Both options provide an opportunity for people to leverage their skills and experience.