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Let’s be honest. We’ve fetishized Product Management. For far too many companies, it has become the organizational center of gravity, particularly in tech. With no offense to the hard-working folks who occupy the title—many of whom are exceptionally talented, and many of whom I consider friends and inspiring leaders—the industry has elevated the PM role to savior status. But much of this elevation happened because of an obsession with process-optimization and productivity.
Sadly, in the pursuit of velocity, we’ve lost focus on the one thing that matters most: The Customer. Not the “user.” Not the behavioral profile tied to an anonymous someone’s mouse clicks. The customer—that stressed-out human being weighing a purchase, managing their budget, and deciding if your beautifully optimized product is actually worth the price of admission. It often isn’t because sprint metrics have replaced market insight and the feature “backlog” has usruped the value proposition as the north star.
The result is what I call The Feature Factory, and the data don’t lie about its cost. Up to 80% of features in enterprise software are rarely or never used. Stop and process that number. Eighty percent of your engineering salaries, server costs, and R&D effort has been flushed down the toilet. This is a systematic, structural failure of product philosophy enabled by the exclusion of the folks who understand consumer behavior best. Marketers.
To be fair, the best PMs I know embrace the marketing discipline because they want their products to sell and they know that you can’t sell without insight about how much to charge, where to market, and how to position. They value anyone who can clear the path between a well-engineered product and a satisfied customer. Don’t blame the player. Blame the game. Our addiction to inanimate SKUs and hyper-efficient cycle times has warped our perspective around the most important focus of any business–finding, keeping, and developing customers.
Marketing doesn’t exist to write blog posts and manage influencers after a management team has invented a shiny new mousetrap. It exists to inform and govern the roadmap for effective offerings from the very start. At a minimum it is the co-equal partner of successful products. At its best it is leading the charge. Marketers reveal that the customer doesn’t want a better mouse trap. They want a pest-free home.
The Dangerous Allure of Data Science
Let me begin with an important self-disclosure. I am a data scientist. Statistics plays an important role in my work as researcher and as a strategist for brands. I teach quantitative methods in marketing research at the graduate level. So do not let the words that follow suggest that I think data or statistical rigor are bad. Quite the contrary. The problem is that data science has become the panacea that we hope will drive superior product performance. We relentlessly test and test again, all in an effort to “optimize” products that often struggle to find buyers or users.
One of the most common misconceptions in product organizations today is that the practice of User Experience (UX) has somehow replaced marketing research. This is like saying that taking someone’s vital signs has replaced the need for understanding pathophysiology.
I have been a proponent of UX for decades. I worked on teams that helped clients develop more intuitive information architecture using UX research. We used it to observe behavior in controlled contexts, asking, “Can the user find the button?” Or, “Where is the friction?” But UX on its own only tells us how people interact with a product.
Marketing research has a bigger goal than optimizing interactions. It ladders up to viability and causality. We ask fundamentally different questions: “Will the business case sustain?” “What are the competitive alternatives?” And most importantly, “What force in the customer’s life caused them to start looking for a solution in the first place?”
A highly usable product for a non-existent market is an expensive hobby.
I see this constantly when data scientists apply clustering algorithms to customer data and call it segmentation. They produce a few crisp segments and one that ends up being a ‘catch-all’ containing a high percentage of customers defined only as ‘medium everything.’ It’s not a segment; it’s a statistical dumping ground that offers no targeting strategy. Data without behavioral understanding is just noise.
That’s why I insist that every student in my graduate research classes get firsthand experience interviewing real customers. They are required to share an insight about that customer that isn’t quantified. They must suggest why the customer said what they said. They must explore the four horsemen of marketing: memory, perception, motivation and that tricky war horse that trumps rational data again and again: emotion.
UX is essential to many successful products, but it is not a replacement for marketing insight. Much of what UX research celebrates today as innovation—ethnographic observation, contextual inquiry, understanding the symbolic meaning of consumption—was pioneered decades ago by marketing scholars like Russell Belk, Elizabeth Hirschman, Grant McCracken, Susan Fournier, Sidney Levy, and Dennis Rook. UX inherited their methods but narrowed the aperture, focusing on interaction friction rather than why people make choices, what alternatives they’re considering, and what progress they’re trying to achieve in their lives. That narrower lens leaves critical strategic insights on the table about market structure, competitive positioning, and customer causality. Products optimized for usability but blind to market dynamics don’t die from natural causes. They get picked off by competitive snipers who understand the customer’s world, not just their clicks.
Strategic Differentiation Requires Causality
To escape The Feature Factory, organizations must shift their focus from descriptive segments (who is the user?) to causal segments (what is the customer trying to accomplish, and in what circumstance?).
This is the central insight of the Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) framework pioneered by Clayton Christensen. People don’t buy products. They “hire” them to make progress in their lives. So much of the UX research I’ve reviewed results in anodyne personas that attribute a purchase to a demographic profile or a slice of life characterization built more on imagination than functional reality. It’s fan fiction. JTBD methodology digs deeper, revealing the underlying circumstances that govern decisions, behaviors, and preferences.
This shift from correlation-based segmentation (demographics) to causality-based segmentation (circumstance) is marketing’s core competency. It’s the only way to effectively align innovation with truly unmet needs, offering a defensible strategic roadmap against competitors focused only on easily copied features.
Understanding causality means you can answer the most important question–what caused someone to pull your product into their life? If you cannot explain why the customer would fire their current solution to hire yours, your product is a commodity, and your margin will become a competitor’s breakfast.
The Market Is Demanding Relationship Moats
The venture capital community has figured this out. Firms that once celebrated “move fast and break things” are now demanding defensive strategy. Leading investors like Andreessen Horowitz have become explicit about the creation of “moats”–many of which are clearly linked to marketing advantages. As seed funding rounds get preversely larger and larger, product management process efficiency isn’t enough. Brand equity can be a moat that prevents commoditization and gives companies the leverage to exploit a first-mover advantage, or alternately to pounce on a first-moving competitor by skimming the best customers and owning the margin war.
Proprietary research by Deloitte Digital found that mature product-centric organizations that successfully integrate product and marketing functions across the digital lifecycle realize a significant advantage—outperforming the S&P 500 by up to 50% in market capitalization growth.
That 50% premium tells you everything you need to know. Investors recognize that integrated firms are fundamentally superior at mitigating the high risks inherent in product development. Quick reminder: approximately 80% of tech products fail. Why? Because that highly optimized product can’t find or keep a buyer.
A seismic shift is underway. Smart companies are moving from product-centric approaches to customer-centric ones. The products are the means to the end. The end is the customer. Work by innovative academic colleagues like Peter Fader has proven that we can equate the value of a company by aggregating the customer lifetime value of all of its customers. The market rewards the companies that have the most enviable customer portfolios.
McKinsey research confirms this pattern. High-performing organizations are increasingly “customer-led” rather than being purely “product-led.” For example, one recent study found that “CEOs with marketing experience are associated with more significant breakthrough inventions in new areas unknown to the firm.” Why? Because “CEOs with prior marketing experience encourage more innovation through increased customer interactions.”
The Tyranny of the Urgent and the Ethics Deficit
Nowhere is the ‘move fast and break things’ mentality more evident than in Agile methodologies. While beneficial for execution discipline, these approaches often inadvertently optimize product pipelines for the wrong outcome. They have created what Christensen described as the ‘tyranny of the urgent.’ It’s awfully hard to cull deep customer insights or validate a market opportunity in a two-week sprint.
Even Martin Fowler, one of the original authors of the Agile Manifesto has lamented the “Agile Industrial Complex imposing methods on people” calling it a “travesty”. Harvard Business Review critiqued Agile because “speed isn’t everything, especially when it comes to breakthrough products.”
It is not uncommon for an Agile product team to exclude marketing from critical product decisions. This leads to significant deficits in product-market fit. It also invites dangerous lapses in consumer ethics. Marketing professionals, particularly those grounded in consumer psychology and behavioral economics, are trained in second-order thinking. They anticipate the hidden, long-term consequences of product decisions.
When you build without that discipline, you optimize for logic (does it work?) and engagement (how long can we keep them here?), while sacrificing empathy (do we understand their lived experience and the long-term impact on their wellbeing?).
The result is quantifiable harm. We have the receipts.
Facebook’s own internal research found that for a sizable percentage of users, the company was actively making things worse. 32% of teenage girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse. The researchers warned that comparison on the platform changed how young women viewed themselves, and that teens consistently blamed Instagram for increases in anxiety and depression.
That insight—that their product was inflicting psychological damage on vulnerable populations—didn’t derail the roadmap. The organization was focused on optimizing for usage and growth among young users, even when the product was demonstrably harmful.
Trust is the only moat your competitor can’t instantly clone. Trust is built over time. Trust is the bond that builds the brand. When product teams prioritize short-term engagement over long-term human wellbeing, they erode that trust. In some cases that erosion has consequences beyond the impact to their company. It casts a shadow on the entire category (see: Character.AI and the recent teen suicide case which is casting doubt for many parents on whether any AI companion product can be trusted to prioritize vulnerable users' wellbeing over engagement metrics).
Marketing can serve as the organization’s custodian of market legitimacy, ensuring that the value proposition is authentic, the risks are understood, and the firm is building products that create sustainable value.
What This Means in Practice
The solution requires integration from day one. Marketing brings market structure analysis, JTBD research, and competitive strategy to feasibility discussions. It ensures experiences deliver on value propositions during design. It tracks adoption, retention, and willingness to pay alongside delivery metrics.
You can continue optimizing your product development process for velocity and celebrate your sprint metrics. Or you can ask whether what you’re building actually matters to the people you claim to serve and whether it’s creating value they’re willing to pay a premium for.
That integration takes effort. It requires marketers who develop genuine product fluency and work effectively in a world where speed and constraints are real. It requires acknowledging that execution excellence without market understanding is just expensive busyness.
Organizations that make this shift build products that customers trust, adopt, pay a premium for, remain loyal to, and advocate to others. They create sustainable competitive advantage because they’re built on something competitors can’t easily copy.
The question is how long you can afford to build products without understanding the customers you’re building them for. Probably not as long as you think.