Building a Product Marketing Engine for Apaleo

I joined Apaleo as its founding Product Marketing Manager to build the product marketing function for one of the fastest-growing challengers in hospitality technology. Unlike established property management systems that offered monolithic, all-in-one solutions, Apaleo enabled hotels to build a flexible technology stack around an API-first, composable platform.

The business already had many of the fundamentals in place: a differentiated product, engaged customers, deep domain expertise, and years of institutional knowledge. We weren't starting from zero or reinventing the narrative. The challenge was to transform that existing knowledge into a repeatable product marketing function that could support growth.

The biggest challenge was to consistently explain why Apaleo's offering could help hospitality businesses modernize their tech and the long-term business value it offered.

As the company grew, product knowledge, competitive intelligence, and customer insights had naturally accumulated across Product, Sales, Customer Success, Marketing, and Solutions Engineering. While each team held valuable context, much of that knowledge remained fragmented, undocumented, or tied to individuals rather than shared processes.

This created several downstream challenges:

• Product capabilities weren't consistently linked to customer outcomes.
• Sales messaging did not always reflect the realities of implementation, leaving Customer Success to bridge expectation gaps after contract signing.
• Competitive positioning relied on assumptions/biases rather than structured analysis.
• Messaging often focused on features instead of business impact.
• Strategic product marketing initiatives existed, but lacked clear ownership and prioritisation.

For a company introducing a fundamentally different way for hotels to buy and operate technology, consistency was of utmost importance

Rather than treating positioning, competitive intelligence, and enablement as separate projects, I designed the product marketing function around three continuous pillars.

Enablement

Create a shared understanding of the product by documenting capabilities, value propositions, customer problems, use cases, and proof points. Translate that knowledge into practical assets that helped Sales and Customer Success communicate value more confidently and consistently.

Intelligence

Build a structured view of the competitive landscape by analysing incumbent and modern hospitality platforms, validating customer problems through win-loss analysis, and identifying where Apaleo created differentiated value.

Positioning

Develop a positioning framework that clearly articulated who Apaleo was built for, how it differed from alternative approaches, and why a composable platform produced better business outcomes than traditional all-in-one systems.

structured the product marketing roadmap around three continuous areas: enablement, intelligence, and positioning.

• Enablement: Build deeper knowledge through highly-specific product value propositions, use cases, capabilities, features, and benefits, then turn that knowledge into sales and customer success assets.
• Intelligence: Establish a clearer view of competitor capabilities and clearly define where we win, while validating the customer problems we solve and the outcomes we drive.
• Positioning: Define our position in the market to clearly explain whom we were for (and for whom we were not the right vendor); build a messaging framework with specific examples of how we solve our customer problems, and strengthen our presence on the right channels.

Execution roadmap

First 90 days

• Notion
• Hubspot CRM
• Modjo
• Make.com
• Google Sheets