I learned something about flounder last week. To defend against predators, they use chromatophores (tiny sacs of pigment in their skin) to match the color of what they’re lying on. In fact, it’s not just the color, but the texture too.
After going down a rabbit hole on how many plants and animals do something like this, how it works, and what its evolutionary history was, I started to think about what would happen if the ocean itself changed color permanently. Would you notice what happened to the flounder? You couldn’t point at the fish and say “look, it’s different now,” because adapting seamlessly to different environments is already the whole job. The change would be real. It would just be impossible to see.
Everyone is writing about how AI is disrupting product management. Roadmaps, prioritization, spec-writing, even coding itself: there’s a think piece a day. Nobody is writing about how AI is disrupting product marketing. Not because it isn’t. But because PMM has never been one fixed job that a headline writer could point at and say, “that’s what changed.”
Ask ten people what demand gen or PR is responsible for, at ten different companies, and you’ll get ten recognizably similar responses. Ask ten people what a product marketer does, and you’ll get ten different jobs. At one company, messaging. At another, messaging plus competitive intel plus pricing plus half of sales enablement. At a third, positioning, or campaign strategy. I’ve done this job at different-sized companies, in differently mature markets, at different levels of seniority, and I’ve never done the same job twice.
Part of the reason for this is nascency. Modern product marketing traces back to the tech boom of the mid-1980s, which makes it less than 50 years old. Brand marketing, by contrast, has been a defined discipline since the P&G memo in 1931, twice PMM’s age. It’s hard to identify disruption in a discipline that’s still defining itself.
When I started, product marketing was mostly translation: take the technology, explain the value, build the feature/benefit matrix (although I always hated those and one day I killed ours.) There was always pressure to “launch” new products and capabilities, and a friendly friction with product around what deserved a launch and why. Then it became about also understanding buyers: personas, buying committees, understanding that a “customer” was actually a room full of different people with different pains and goals. And the position, meaning how did we define the market we were in and what differentiated role we were playing in it. Then it became about the campaigns around the message itself: what are we putting into market, who’s delivering it, who’s receiving it, how do we know it worked. Each era added responsibilities to PMM teams, stretching the role across functions with increasing tautness.
This AI era that we’re in is not only adding complexity. It’s compressing time and multiplying scale in ways the earlier shifts didn’t. Personas that used to take months now take hours, as long as you have rich source material (like transcripts and engagement data) that can be continually farmed for buyer preferences and behaviors. We can generate hundreds of tailored message variants, for hundreds of accounts, with one push of a button. And perhaps most disruptively, we’re not only messaging to humans anymore. Value and capability now need to be digestable by agents. (Hi, Claude.)
Meanwhile, product is shipping value-rich releases daily, which means the quarter-long, carefully sequenced messaging campaigns I used to plan are becoming as dated as rotary phones. You know, the kind plugged into the wall without buttons? You don’t know?
PMM is being just as disrupted by AI as everyone else. It’s a quieter disruption because of our ability to adjust to our surroundings. The Sheryl who started working in Product Marketing in the ’00’s would hardly recognize what we do today. And I doubt I would recognize where we will be as soon as a year from now.