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Insights

Kieron McCann

Marketing teams - if you want to use AI first start doing Internal product management

Updated: Oct 16

Product management has been a discipline that has evolved over decades. For most of that time it’s been a function within product companies that sell their products and services to external consumers, businesses or government. It’s little surprise therefore that when we think about the ‘5 C’s Situational Analysis’ of company, competitors, customers, collaborators and context, traditional product management has tended to focus a little more heavily on the external factors of customer, competitor and context. 


Traditionally, product managers have tended to focus more heavily on the needs of their customers, the actions of their competitors, and on anticipating the developments of their operating context (i.e. the market and economic environment). There has often been a little less attention paid to managing the company and collaborators dimensions. Yes, product managers still need to marshal the resources of their company to optimise product management processes, but often the role of a Product Manager is around influencing their own business to act in the right way, rather than compelling it. As software has become a bigger part of most product offerings, product managers have also needed to look beyond the core capabilities of their own organisations, meaning collaboration has similarly become important to their offer. But overall product managers have generally tended to be outward looking. It’s little surprise then that product management is viewed as an entirely external facing business function.


Technology has brought change

Over recent years however, there has been a lot of change to both product marketing and marketing more broadly. The biggest of which has been the change to digital channels, and with it, the investment in digital technology. While the change to digital has been much discussed, it has brought with it accompanying changes that have been somewhat overlooked. The move to digital has forced marketing functions to become more structured and more integrated as they have adapted to make use of digital channels which mandate a certain way of operating. Marketing functions have evolved to become more systematic, more analytical, and more process oriented. This has meant that both inputs and outputs have become more standardised and interconnected.


The technology has evolved as well. Tools have become more standards based, meaning more interoperability and interchangeability of technology. The result of this is that marketing functions have evolved to focus more on generic capabilities rather than specific technologies. Marketing roles in recent years have often been oriented around specific vendor platforms such as ‘Adobe Experience Manager’ or ‘Shopify’, but as more open architectures such as MACH have grown in popularity, this view is broadening to consider a more generic capability being delivered, and much less about the specific vendor used. Yes, expertise in a vendor platform is still important, but there is far less sense sense of lock-in, and marketing teams are far more able to swap vendors than they used to be.


On top of that, this more generic view of capabilities within the marketing stack has caused marketing organisations to realise that the essential ingredient in an effective marketing capability is not just about having the right technology. There’s also a need to consider other factors, such as people, skills, process, and data and how these can be managed independently of the technology to ensure greater flexibility and better consistency.



different ingredients being added to a mortar and pestle
The right product is a mixture of people, process, data and technology. Health and safety recommends that you don't mash people up in a giant mortar and pestle, but you get the idea.

The idea of internal marketing product management is emerging

As the technology has matured it has appeared that we are starting to take a more mature view of how it fits into our marketing landscape. We are beginning to think of a more generic marketing architecture where we see common capabilities, within which are a range of vendors, but where the capabilities are not defined by vendors. This creates the perfect conditions for product management, where each marketing capability has a product manager, or managers, depending on their size and scope. Their job is to understand the market requirements – i.e. the things that the broader marketing team wants to achieve and ensure their product can fulfil it.


Their product is comprised of different capabilities across technology, people, processes and data. Their job is to manage that capability and to make it available to their marketing organisation in an easy to consume way, with a defined cost, service level and output.  These internal product managers are responsible for the complete lifecycle of their offering, from the introduction of new features that their internal clients demand, continually improving and adapting them until they are phased or replaced when they are no longer relevant or where a better alternative exists.


Marketing teams consume these products to achieve their market outcomes. They needn’t be concerned with becoming experts in the multitude of technologies that underly them, or the selection of vendors, that’s the job of the product manager. Instead, they design their marketing activities and assemble them to order, using different internal products to achieve the desired marketing outcomes. A set of channel activities here, some content there, some e-commerce features on top.


By separating the products and capabilities from the marketing activities, and managing them as internal products, marketing teams can become more specialised, faster to market, and more efficient. Successful products get used, less successful ones improved, replaced or phased out. In larger, particularly multinational firms this can make campaigns quick to assemble, reusing common business capabilities.

 

AI – the spanner in the works

But just as we see things evolving in the right direction, we are seeing one exception: AI. The massive hype around AI has once again triggered what I like to call ‘latest shiny thing’ thinking. Suddenly we’re again looking at vendors and tools, and not thinking about products and capabilities. In our enthusiasm to implement these latest shiny tools, we confuse vendors with capabilities and products. We start talking about ‘Chat GPT’, instead of the marketing requirements it’s meant to fulfil.  We see duplication of tools or competing tools used across our teams. A large language model (LLM) is only a product for the people selling LLMs. To the rest of us they are a raw business capability that needs to be shaped into a product that addresses one or more of our challenges.


When digital technology emerged, we lost 10 years of marketing productivity growth. While we chased the latest shiny thing, and the latest leading vendor, it took us a long time to work out what worked and what didn’t. This time around we need to take a more disciplined approach. AI is not a product; it is a capability which is applied to internal products that enable marketing outcomes. As a new capability, it may spawn new products, but just like the technologies that preceded it, it needs to be managed within context, and accompanied by the right supporting elements of people, process, and data. It also needs to have defined costs, outcomes and standards. The process for achieving this is through is product management, not by throwing an AI vendor into the marketing mix.

 

Internal product management is an essential marketing discipline

The sheer complexity of the marketing landscape has made internal product management essential. Marketers can no longer be experts in every technology, especially at the rate that new technologies are emerging and evolving.  They need to be experts in applying the marketing mix to achieve marketing outcomes. The evolution of marketing into a set of interoperable marketing capabilities necessitates a product management layer which can weave them into a set of internal marketing products and services.  Without a layer of product management, we expose marketers to every vendor and every technical and operational nuance. The emergence of AI will make this issue more acute.  


Similarly, we need internal product managers who expert in the available capabilities and understand how these can be applied to satisfy the needs of their internal marketing customers. This includes taking a disciplined approach to how AI capabilities are applied and released. This is how the marketing organisation of the future needs to evolve.

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