Why PMMs are coders now

Marketing is communication. That is the whole job. It is not really about posting on social, buying ads, or making the logo bigger. The job is to communicate in every direction at once. You listen to what product is building and you carry it to customers. You listen to what the customer success team is hearing and you fold it back into marketing and into the product itself. You talk to customers, you talk to your own company, and you do all of it at the same time. Strip away the tactics and that is what is left.

For thirty years I have asked one question. How do I make the message land? The tools keep changing. The question never does.

In the old days the answer was physical. You sat in an office. You sent an email summary after the meeting. You sent another email to a wider distribution list to get buy-in, then a wider one after that. Once a year you launched and had a blowout launch event. Today the tools are faster and there are more of them. Slack gives you immediacy. You have websites, blogs, YouTube, a dozen ways to say the same thing in a dozen places. But more tools did not make the message land on their own. It still takes saying the same thing many times, to many audiences, before any of it sticks.

Which is where code comes in. Product marketers are coders now. I do not mean full-time engineers who ship the production codebase. Over the years the mediums have changed a lot. Today, the medium is somewhat dependent on your ability to build amazing apps to get your point across.

In the last few months I built three. One to run our internal offsite. One that hands out promo codes for our annual conference. One to manage the organizers who run our community meetups. None of them are pretty, and none of them would survive a real code review. But all three do the one thing the job has always asked of me. They keep people on message and moving in the same direction.

I have written before that product marketers are the ringleaders of the circus. That does not mean you are in charge of everything or even that you're the star of the show. You direct the spotlight on the people who make the show happen. The ringleader does not juggle. The ringleader makes sure the juggler, the trapeze artist, and the lion tamer are all telling the same story to the same crowd at the same moment.

I used to do that with documents, decks, meetings, and a lot of repeating myself. Now I do a chunk of it with software.

The offsite app: communicating the mission

The first app runs our internal offsite. An offsite is the one time a year the whole team is in a room together, and in a remote-first company, it is the most important communication moment a marketing leader gets all year. Waste it and you have lost twelve months of alignment.

The app holds the agenda, the goals, the breakout sessions, and the one thing I care about most: our mission and our key priorities for the year. Every person who opens it sees the same framing. It is reinforced in subtle ways throughout the offsite week. But offsites are about getting on the same page, and the tool is a great vehicle for making that happen.

People underrate this. When you communicate the mission through a deck, it degrades the moment the deck closes. People remember the gist, not the language, and the gist is where alignment falls apart. An app does not forget the language. It serves the exact same sentence to the last person who opens it as it did to the first. That is what consistency at scale actually looks like.

The promo code app: automating myself out of a miserable job

The second app is the one I am proudest of, because of how stupid the problem was.

Last year, in the run-up to our conference, I issued promo codes by hand. Every night. Someone on a team would ask for a code, I would generate one, log it somewhere, and send it back. It took about three hours a night, and it dragged on for weeks. It was tedious, it was exhausting, and it was the kind of work that makes you question every decision that led you to this point in your career.

This year I built a tool in Notion to field promo code requests from sales and other stakeholders, automatically provision promo codes in Luma, my absolute favorite event management tool, and report when the promo codes have been redeemed. It takes three hours a night down to zero. It took me one afternoon to build. And it will be immeasurably useful for our sales team.

The meetup app: structure for a community

The third app manages the organizers who run our community meetups. We have a growing community program, and a community program with no structure is just a pile of well-meaning people doing slightly different things in slightly different cities. Worse, the meetups drift away from our message and our product, with almost no quality control.

The field marketing team came to me to fix the logistics. Let organizers propose events, request swag, that sort of thing. I saw a communication problem wearing a logistics costume. So I built them a tool that does both.

The app gives organizers a playground and a fence. Inside the fence, employees set the themes we care about, the kinds of events we want to see, the structure a good meetup follows, and the budget each organizer has to work with. Inside that frame, organizers build. They propose events, request resources, and run their own rooms with their own local energy. Everyone knows the expectations going in. Everyone knows how the events get tracked and measured against our goals. The field marketing team can layer incentives on top and check in on the organizers who need a hand. A meetup in one city and a meetup in another both ladder up to the same strategy.

Sometimes, when you look at a problem and think "well, this is someone else's job," you're actually foregoing an opportunity to solve a problem that is yours.

Why this is the job now, not a side project

Look at the three apps. One communicates the mission to the team. One coordinates how a campaign reaches the field. One keeps a distributed community on message. Communication, coordination, and consistency. That is product marketing. The apps are the job itself, expressed in a medium that scales better than my voice does.

I am not a real developer, and I want to be clear about that. I build agents and tools on the weekend and I struggle with the parts real engineers find trivial. That used to be a wall. AI tore it down. The thinking still has to come from me, the same way strategy still has to come from you no matter how good the tools get. But the execution, the part where an idea for a tool becomes a working tool, is now within reach for any marketer willing to try. The wall between having the idea and shipping it is mostly gone.

If your job is to keep everyone on message, and a tool is the most reliable way to do that, then learning to build the tool is not optional anymore. It is the same job it always was. The product was never just the feature, and the ringleader's job was never just talking. The medium changed, but the work stayed the same.

Pick one annoying, repetitive coordination problem on your team. The thing you explain over and over. The process you run by hand at 11pm. Build a small app to do it. You will save yourself the hours, and you will give your team something my decks never could: the exact same message, every time, whether or not you are awake.

Happy coding!