Building The Product Marketing Function From The Ground Up

This case study was created from an episode of the Product Marketing Adventures Podcast. It has been adapted into Dusted's case study format to preserve and showcase the guest's real-world experience. Written to preserve the voice of the author, Matt Agnew*.*

I joined an established enterprise SaaS company with almost 100 product managers and only one product marketing manager, supported by an intern. The company had a long-tenured workforce—around 75% of the people I met had been there for more than 13 years—and product marketing was largely underserved.

Product marketing work was happening across the organization, but it was not formally owned by a product marketing function. Teams were creating sales decks, planning webcasts, developing messaging, and supporting launches independently. There was good work happening, but it was reactive and distributed across nine different teams.

The challenge was not a lack of effort or expertise. People wanted to do a good job, but they did not know there was a more coordinated way to do it. Different teams were effectively taking different routes to the same destination, which created inconsistent messaging, duplicated effort, and late involvement for product marketing.

I also had to establish credibility without immediately becoming an order taker. If I jumped straight into fixing individual decks and projects, I would reinforce the reactive model I had been hired to change. I needed to understand what the company actually needed, build stakeholder trust, prioritize the largest gaps, and make the case for growing the team.

I started by meeting with people across the organization, going both high and low in the org chart. I spoke with individual contributors, VPs, and C-level leaders, listened carefully, and took detailed notes. Rather than immediately prescribing solutions, I identified recurring themes and used those patterns to recommend where we should focus first.

In those conversations, I explained what product marketing was already doing well and where there were gaps. I showed stakeholders how positioning, messaging, research, client interviews, and technical validation could be owned proactively by product marketing instead of being improvised by sales, product, alliances, or other teams.

I used the organizational chart and structured stakeholder conversations to map relationships, identify allies, and surface recurring problems. I kept a running notebook of potential ideas while I learned how the organization worked and how leaders made decisions.

For execution and capacity planning, I consolidated information from multiple project-tracking tools into a dashboard showing team workload, recent projects, capacity, and the expected contribution to leads, sales, or organizational clarity.

I also introduced proactive AI-based checks into creative and production workflows. These checks acted like an IT- or product-minded review layer, helping teams identify whether videos, images, and other assets would work before production was complete.

The product marketing function became involved earlier and more strategically instead of being treated as a last-minute quality check. One senior leader began bringing me into projects proactively, explicitly stating that I should lead because involving product marketing earlier would improve the outcome.

In one example, an alliances team wanted to train sales on a new concept. Sales enablement estimated that training would begin in about a month and reach sales in roughly three months. I created a concise presentation focused on three questions: how to get salespeople excited, how to get prospects excited, and what to do next. I also reduced the explanation of the concept from approximately 10 minutes to 30 seconds. After reviewing the work, sales enablement said they could begin the following month—putting the training in sales’ hands about two months sooner than planned.

The proactive AI reviews also reduced avoidable rework. Designers had a better understanding of which assets to create before production, helping prevent situations where an unusable video or image caused a two-week deadline delay and wasted production or stock-media costs.