Product Marketing Is Translation
The core job isn't about spin or positioning theater. It's about bridging two languages that don't naturally speak to each other.
I’ve spent the better part of a decade in product marketing, and the simplest way I can describe what the job actually is: translation.
Not in a metaphorical sense. In a literal one.
Two languages that don’t speak to each other
On one side, you have engineers and product managers. They speak in features. We added multi-tenancy support. We shipped SSO. We improved the p99 latency by 40%.
On the other side, you have customers. They speak in problems. We can’t onboard enterprise clients efficiently. Our security team keeps blocking us. The app is slow and people complain.
Product marketing’s job is to find the sentence where these two things meet. Not to make the engineer’s language sound exciting. Not to make the customer’s problem sound technical. To find the actual connection between them.
Why this is hard
The hard part isn’t writing. The hard part is understanding both languages well enough to translate between them fluently.
To understand the product side, you have to be genuinely curious about how things work. You don’t need to be an engineer, but you need to understand what the engineers are proud of, and why. You need to know what’s technically significant versus what’s just expected.
To understand the customer side, you have to get very specific. “Customers want to save time” is not understanding the customer. Understanding the customer is knowing that the Head of IT at a 200-person SaaS company is specifically frustrated that they have to manually deprovision accounts when someone leaves, and that this has caused a security incident at least once.
The translation only works when both sides are specific.
What bad product marketing looks like
Bad product marketing substitutes adjectives for specifics. “Powerful. Seamless. Intuitive.” These words are not translations — they’re sounds. They don’t bridge anything because they don’t say anything.
Bad product marketing is also often inside-out: it starts from what the product does and works toward the customer, rather than starting from what the customer needs and working toward the product. This is a natural trap, because you’re usually working closer to the product than to the customer.
The test
The test I use for any product marketing copy: could a skeptical customer, reading only this, understand why they specifically should care?
Not why someone should care. Why they should care.
If the answer is no — if the copy is written for a generic person with generic needs — it hasn’t done its job as translation. It’s still speaking in product language with nicer words.
I’ve gotten this wrong plenty of times. But I keep coming back to the translation frame because it clarifies what the work actually is. You’re not an advocate for the product. You’re an advocate for the customer’s understanding. That’s a different job.