In recent years, B2B hyper-growth startups and enterprises have faced intense pressure to attain sky-high growth targets, yet underinvest in the very engine that is key to their success: the product marketing (PMM) team.
As a B2B product marketing leader and CMO, I’ve faced this product marketing problem for most of my career.
In our new AI-everything reality, where marketers are expected to “shut up and grind” and “do more with less,” I don’t expect any significant increase in headcount or budget soon. In fact, most marketing and GTM teams are facing up to 30% budget and resource cuts.
That said, there is hope and a promising path forward for PMMs. In this blog, I’ll explore how we got here and how to save drowning product marketers by changing the playing field in their favor.
Stuck in Time: PMM by the Numbers
Why has this resourcing challenge persisted, and is it so important for B2B vendors to empower their PMM teams now? Answering this question requires a quick history lesson.
In my three decades in B2B marketing, PMM has maintained a 1:3 to 1:6 ratio with its product management counterparts. When you account for the vast universe of fast-growing startups today, an estimated 71% of PMM teams average one or two members — while their product management counterparts often have teams of 6–12.
Unfortunately, PMM has traditionally been seen as a “nice to have” rather than essential. Unlike demand gen (pipeline) or sales (revenue), PMM impact is indirect and difficult to measure. Despite its strategic importance, budget constraints consistently hit PMM first — or the single product marketer at the company finds themselves dumped with 4x the workload following a RIF.
In recent years, the situation has become worse. With the recent explosion of generative AI and digital automation tools, executive management and Board of Directors teams are obsessed with EBITDA metrics and expect marketing teams to do more with less. Conventional wisdom suggests that marketing teams are taking a sizable resource cut, estimated between 20 to 30%.
PMM teams will undoubtedly feel the greatest impact from these cuts.
The Scaling and Bottleneck Challenges in the Age of AI
These realities have now manifested into critical challenges impacting the top and bottom line for B2B vendors:
PMMs are hitting the breaking point: PMM is expected to be the “center spoke” supporting the broader revenue and product management teams spanning sales enablement, demand/ABM, competitive intelligence, sales, and customer success, to name a few.
As a result, PMMs are stretched thin and have become a tactical factory producing PowerPoint decks and one-pagers, reviewing ADR scripts, content, and campaigns, and responding to RFPs.
Everyone is Going Rogue: When PMM can’t deliver fast enough, other teams create their own materials — and new martech and generative AI tools are making the situation worse. In a digital-first marketplace where self-guided buyers make decisions without a sales rep, quality content and messaging become the product.
Today, we see a stream of poor-quality content produced by AI with little oversight from the PMM teams. In fact, 65% of marketing content is never used by sales teams due to misalignment.
I don’t blame sales or other marketing functions for going rogue without the oversight of PMM. In this unfortunate reality, these teams need to get their job done. This conundrum has become a lose-lose proposition for every GTM team, resulting in inconsistent messaging, off-brand content, and confused customers. Worse yet, sales, marketing, and revenue teams operate with different narratives, ultimately damaging brand credibility and pipeline.
Strategic Work Gets Sacrificed: Product marketers deliver the most value when they drive the go-to-market strategy. The reality? PMMs are bogged down with tactical busy work, including decks, one-pagers, ADR scripts, pricing, and responding to RFPs.
This busywork comes at the expense of strategic work and gleaning customer insights. This strategic focus is essential in an AI-first world where vendors must shape future markets rather than reacting to them.
Liberation Day: PMM Regains Control With the Support of AI
How do marketers turn the tide and stop drowning? While Generative AI is exacerbating the legacy challenges facing PMMs, it also provides a once-in-a-lifetime — and perhaps final — solution. For once, PMM will have a powerful tool to deliver scale and impact, and a better way to measure their organization’s impact.
With the help of AI, PMMs need to flip the script. From the 80% of low-value tasks that consume their time, PMM must automate those workflows and reinvent their roles to focus on driving long-term growth. This shift could effectively give PMMs a 4x multiplier in strategic impact.
The transformation is best understood through this visual inversion:
By inverting the pyramid on the right, AI liberates PMMs from the tactical treadmill. What consumed 80% of their time now happens automatically at the bottom, while strategic work — previously squeezed into 20% of their time — becomes the primary focus. This isn’t about replacing PMMs; it’s about amplifying their strategic value and finally solving the “going rogue” problem.
Specifically:
PMM Human Led (Top Tier): PMM drives go-to-market strategy, shapes future markets, and is recognized as a revenue driver. Example: Defining category positioning and market narrative
PMM Human Led with AI Support (Second Tier): AI analyzes customer data at scale, provides real-time competitive intelligence, and validates data-driven positioning. Example: AI surfaces patterns from thousands of customer calls to inform positioning
PMM Human Led with AI Support (Third Tier): AI ensures brand consistency, maintains centralized messaging frameworks, and provides governance at scale. Example: AI-powered brand guidelines that automatically flag off-brand content
AI-Led with PMM Human Support (Bottom Tier): AI manages first drafts and early reviews, automated RFPs, and self-service content generation with human PMM oversight. Example: AI generates initial sales deck drafts based on PMM-approved templates
Where to Start Tomorrow: Quick Wins for PMM Liberation
Before diving deep into transformation, here are three immediate actions PMMs can take:
- Implement AI for RFP first drafts — Save 5+ hours weekly by letting AI handle initial responses based on your approved content library
- Deploy AI-powered competitive monitoring — Move from quarterly reviews to real-time insights with automated competitor tracking
- Create AI-assisted content templates with brand guardrails — Enable teams to self-serve while maintaining message consistency
Your Roadmap to AI-Empowered Product Marketing
To help PMMs navigate this transformation with specific generative AI prompts and implementation strategies, I explore these topics in depth in my new bestselling book, Some Assembly Required. The book provides practical frameworks, proven prompts, and step-by-step guides to help product marketers reclaim their strategic role while solving the “going rogue” problem once and for all.
You can get the book on Amazon today at the following link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FJZDXZCK
The future of product marketing isn’t about doing more with less — it’s about doing what matters most with AI handling the rest. The pyramid has already started to flip. The question is: Will you lead the transformation or be left behind at the bottom?
