Product marketing might be one of the most misunderstood functions in a company. Speaking as someone who has worked in eight different cybersecurity startups over the past two decades, usually as a team of one, I have seen firsthand how product marketing and its importance in growing a company are routinely misread.
For some, product marketing is about creating catchy ad campaigns and taglines. For others, the product marketer is a coin-operated content machine — you put in your content order, and it appears. Sadly, others don't see the value in product marketing at all and routinely bypass it, continuing to do what they always did before the product marketer joined.
Don't feel bad for product marketers. We get to do something others don't. We define the message, create compelling ways to distribute it, and often serve as the company's face on podcasts, videos, events, and more. It's a genuinely cool role in any company, but it comes with its own challenges.
In this paper, I'm going to outline what a typical product marketer does in an early-stage tech company, specifically in cybersecurity, the challenges they face, and how advancements in AI, the rise of formal GTM, and the shrinking attention span of buyers are changing how a successful product marketer works day to day.
A day in the life
You start the morning reviewing content you wrote that finally came back from design, giving feedback. You're scanning LinkedIn for a competitor's press release or new blog post, deciding whether you need to draft a response for the sales team. You're watching your inbox and Slack for urgent requests from sales or the exec team. A salesperson might be in a knife fight with a competitor and need bullets or a battlecard immediately.
At the same time, you probably have multiple assets in flight. Maybe you're prepping for a product launch, drafting a new datasheet, and website copy. You might be working with a vendor on a corporate overview video, refining the script, reviewing storyboards, and shortlisting voiceover talent. There's probably a first-call deck that needs yet another revision. A partner webinar that's been on the books for a month needs a final pass on the slides.
The point is, good product marketers cannot be single-threaded. They need to switch contexts quickly, be ready to demo to an industry analyst with almost no notice, and be completely comfortable talking to a reporter on the spot about some incident that just happened. Cybersecurity product marketing is not for the faint of heart, or for anyone who gets frazzled when priorities shift minute to minute.
The honest challenges
Product marketers are usually hired to change something. The product is gaining traction, but the market isn't quite getting the value, and someone decided that's a messaging problem. So the first PMM's job is to formalize what lives in the founding team's heads, stress test it, and make adjustments where needed. That sounds straightforward. It rarely is.
If the founders wrote the original messaging themselves and it helped close a Series A, they have an attachment to it. Telling them something needs to change, even when you have the call transcripts and the data to back it up, requires some navigation. Nobody in that room is doing anything other than trying to make the company win. But the tension is real, and PMMs who aren't prepared for it can get caught off guard.
The other dynamic worth understanding is that product marketing carries a lot of responsibility with relatively little direct authority. We depend on the product to ship what was scoped on the committed timeline. When features slip or get cut, we're the ones rewriting the datasheet the night before a launch. We build tools and decks for the sales team, knowing full well we can't make anyone use them. And when the pipeline is soft, marketing is often the first place people look, even when the real issue is somewhere else entirely.
I've come to think of it like the security teams I've spent my career marketing to. A CISO can deploy the best controls in the world and still have someone click a phishing link. The SOC team provides the training, the tools, and the processes, but they don't manage every employee. When something gets through, they're the ones who have to deal with it. None of this is a reason to avoid the role. It's just an honest look at what the job actually requires: thick skin, a short memory, and a genuine willingness to never be precious about your own work.
AI and content creation
When generative AI tools first hit the market, I was skeptical. How could an LLM produce the kind of content I create, content built on years in the trenches and a deep understanding of the market and the buyers? And early on, I was right. That first wave of AI-generated content was obvious and hollow.
But these tools evolved fast. That said, you should never let an AI tool do your thinking. It can still go off the rails, make up stats, or describe your product in ways that are technically wrong. You have to guide it closely. But the days of a product marketer writing every word on a website, datasheet, or blog post are gone. Today, a good PMM uses AI as a collaborator — a way to stress test raw messaging, get a quick gut check on positioning, and keep content consistent across a growing library of assets.
I recently built a concept company called Pitwall to demonstrate how I think through my process, from problem definition to campaign planning. I used AI to get a real website built and published, with full messaging, positioning, and content, in a matter of days. The AI handled much of the execution. The thinking was entirely mine. That's the right model.
GTM ownership
When I started my product marketing career, formal go-to-market strategies were few and far between. Fast forward to today, and GTM is everywhere. GTM didn't replace product marketing. It absorbed a lot of it. And if you're a PMM at an early-stage cybersecurity company, GTM needs an owner — and more often than not, that owner is you.
Owning GTM starts with getting the foundation right, and most companies skip this part because it feels slow. The ICP comes first. Not a demographic, a real one. The specific type of company most likely to buy, the pain that makes them ready to buy now, the person who feels that pain most acutely, and the trigger that sent them looking for a solution in the first place.
In cybersecurity, the buyer and the user are often different people. The CISO signs. The SOC analyst lives with it. Your messaging has to work for both without losing the thread that connects them.
Positioning is the next piece and the backbone on which everything else is built. Without it, your sales team wings every call, your website says nothing to anyone, and your demand gen campaigns pull in the wrong leads. That story becomes the spine. The first-call deck, the website hero, the one-pager a seller drops in a follow-up email — all of it hangs off the same frame.
One more thing worth saying here. AI and automation have made it incredibly easy to scale GTM execution, generate messaging, build workflows, and trigger outreach at volume. But automation is a force multiplier. It does not improve your system. It amplifies it. If the foundation is wrong, you are just getting faster at the wrong thing.
The micro-attention era
There are upwards of 5,000 cybersecurity vendors in the market today, and the number grows daily. In any given category, you're competing with 30, 50, sometimes 75 or more companies all chasing the same buyer. When a meaningful portion of your competitors' features look similar to yours on paper, the message becomes everything.
Sitting down and figuring out how to message your product from scratch, resisting the urge to default to what the category already says — that is the work that separates good PMMs from great ones. And even when you crack it, be ready to discover you missed something and start over. I have done it more times than I can count.
Given all this noise, short and concise assets rule the day. Forty-second videos. Short blogs. Self-paced demos. Twenty-minute on-demand webinars. We have to tell our story faster and find new ways to do it. Not long ago, I created a graphic novel to educate the market on a product I was marketing. I had never done anything like it. When it was finished, it was a hit, and that company still uses that asset today. Push outside your comfort zone. Try things. If they don't land, try something else.
Closing
I have watched this industry go through more pivots than I can count. The rise of AI/ML in endpoint security. SOAR being the hottest thing at RSAC. XDR showing up and immediately sparking a debate about what it actually meant. Each time, the vendors who adapted survived. The ones who kept doing what they always did didn't. Product marketing is no different right now.
The PMMs who figure out how to work with AI tools without outsourcing their thinking to them, who pick up the GTM flag at their companies and run with it, and who find creative ways to break through in a market where everyone is fighting for a shrinking slice of buyer attention — those are the ones who are going to thrive. The ones still doing what they did in 2018 are going to find themselves on the wrong side of a job search.
I'm not worried about the good ones. The product marketers who got into this work because they love the challenge of taking something complicated and making it land — they'll figure it out. They always do. That's what we do.