What one product launch taught me about Product Marketing standards

When people talk about raising the quality of a Product Marketing team, the conversation often turns to introducing new frameworks.

I've always found frameworks incredibly useful. Every recurring Product Marketing activity—from positioning and messaging to product launches and sales enablement—benefits from having a repeatable way of working.

But over the years I've realised that frameworks alone don't create great Product Marketing.

Frameworks make work repeatable. Standards make it consistently good.

I've seen the consequences of missing Product Marketing standards a few times throughout my career, but one experience has always stayed with me.

A launch I'll never forget

A few years ago, I joined a contact centre software company as Product Marketing. My second week in the role happened to coincide with a product launch. Two weeks isn't enough time to redesign how a company launches products, so I focused on helping wherever I could.

It didn't take long to realise that the biggest challenge wasn't the launch itself.

It was that every team had a different understanding of what was actually being launched.

Product was explaining the new capability from a technical perspective and preparing demos for customers.

Marketing was busy building campaigns, but the messaging was so broad it could have described almost any competitor.

Sales kept asking perfectly reasonable questions: What exactly are we launching? Who is it for? How should we position it? How much does it cost?

The answers weren't always clear. Like any good salesperson, some didn't wait for them. They spoke to Product, filled in the gaps themselves and started presenting the new capability in the way they believed would resonate most with customers.

Product was having its own conversations. Marketing had already committed budget to campaigns. Everyone was trying to move the launch forward.

The real problem wasn't the launch

Nobody was doing anything wrong.

The problem was that there wasn't a common standard for how Product, Marketing and Sales should prepare for a launch. Everyone was following their own instincts, so customers ended up hearing different versions of the same story.

Looking back, I don't think what we were missing was simply a launch framework.

Frameworks and standards aren't the same thing

A framework helps answer what needs to happen. It gives people a repeatable way of working.

A standard answers a different question: what does good look like? It sets the quality bar and creates a shared understanding of what needs to be true before the next step can happen.

That experience reinforced something I've carried into every Product Marketing leadership role since.

What changed

For the next launch, we introduced a common operating standard that the whole GTM organisation agreed to follow. We worked backwards from the launch date, clarified the important commercial decisions much earlier and agreed which assets Product Marketing and Sales would create together before anyone spoke to customers.

The process itself wasn't revolutionary. What changed was that everyone started from the same understanding of the product before trying to explain it to the market.

Product Marketing standards go far beyond product launches

Since then, I've applied the same thinking well beyond product launches.

Positioning benefits from clear standards. So does messaging, customer research and sales enablement. The framework tells the team how to approach the work. The standard defines when the work is good enough to move forward.

That's why I don't think the difference between average and exceptional Product Marketing teams is having more frameworks.

It's combining good frameworks with clear Product Marketing standards that everyone understands and follows.

Final thoughts

Products change. Markets change. AI changes how fast we ship.

But if Product, Marketing and Sales don't start from the same understanding, the outcome is usually the same: customers hear different stories instead of one.

If you haven't read my previous article, "The Product Marketing Metrics That Actually Matter," you'll find it here: https://www.oceanwavegrowth.com/post/the-product-marketing-metrics-that-actually-matter

It explains why the metrics worth paying attention to are often the ones shared across Product, Marketing and Sales. Shared metrics and shared standards go hand in hand—they're both essential for creating the alignment that allows Product Marketing to have a real commercial impact.