Product Manager vs Product Marketing Manager vs Growth PM — What’s the Difference?

Ant Murphy
Product Coalition
Published in
9 min readApr 16, 2021

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A question I get often is the difference between a Product Manager, Product Marketing Manager and a Growth PM.

Product Management can be confusing enough let alone trying to navigate the many different flavours.

However, understanding the nuances can be beneficial for those who might be more suited to these roles.

I’m not going to spend a whole lot of time in this article defining each of the roles (I’ll however have links to articles that dive deep into each role), rather what I want to focus on are the differences.

So where do the boundaries between Product Manager vs Product Marketing Manager vs Growth Product Manager lie?

Product Manager vs Product Marketing Manager

I recently saw this great thread from Lenny Rachitsky on Twitter where he asked the question about the boundaries between a Product Manager and a Product Marketing Manager.

The common theme was that a Product Manager worries about getting the product ‘out the door’, whereas a Product Marketing Manager worries more about getting the product ‘into the customer’s hands’.

Or as Evelyn Hartz put it:

“PMs own getting the cereal ON to the shelf (i.e. ingredients, nutrients, placement in relation to competitors, etc.) PMMs own getting you to take the box OFF the shelf (i.e. packaging, pricing, etc.)”

It’s important however to note that all this is in the context of organisations where they have both roles.

There are many organisations — e.g. early-stage startups — where they may only have Product Managers. In these cases…

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