What exactly is the product?

In my best-selling book, Picks and Shovels: Marketing to Developers During the AI Gold Rush, I call Product Marketing Managers the ringleaders of the circus. We coordinate performers, manage the audience, and make sure the whole show delivers what people paid to see. But it’s important to remember: nobody comes to the circus to watch a single trapeze act or a juggler. They buy the circus.

As PMMs, our job is not to sell features. Our job is to sell the complete experience. Every touchpoint. Every workflow. Every moment of friction. If any piece of the customer journey sucks, the whole product sucks.

Most PMMs forget this. They focus on making individual features shine while ignoring the disaster surrounding those features. They polish the headline act while the tent is on fire.

Let me show you what I mean.

Apple builds for developers, but the experience is terrible

Apple makes some of the most elegant frameworks and tools in the industry. SwiftUI lets you build beautiful interfaces with minimal code. Combine makes reactive programming actually approachable. Core ML gives you machine learning capabilities right in the SDK. These are genuinely excellent pieces of technology.

But if you are a developer trying to build something for Apple platforms, you know the truth. The whole experience is a mess.

Xcode feels like it was designed in 2005 and abandoned. It crashes regularly. The interface is cluttered and slow. Auto-complete is a joke compared to modern IDEs. The debugger randomly loses symbols. What on earth even is “Derived Data”? You spend half your time fighting the tools instead of writing code.

Want to test your app? Download a simulator. Hope you have fast internet and 20GB of free disk space for each iOS version you need to support. Wait an hour for downloads that crawl at dial-up speeds even on gigabit connections. Then watch the simulator consume your entire CPU just to show a basic app.

Ready to ship? The App Store submission process is a special kind of hell. Forms located in different parts of the site with completely different UIs. Certificates flying all over the place. Arbitrary rejections based on guidelines that contradict each other. Review times that swing from 24 hours to two weeks with no explanation. Rejection appeals that go nowhere. You are at the mercy of reviewers who seem to have never built an app themselves.

And then there is the money. Apple still takes 30% of everything you sell through the App Store. If you are a small developer making under $1 million a year, they generously reduce that to 15% through the Small Business Program. A recent US court ruling forced Apple to allow external payment links without taking a cut, but most apps still have to offer in-app purchases alongside those external options. For indie developers trying to make a living, Apple’s fees are a constant weight on every pricing decision.

The entire ecosystem around Apple’s shortcomings is equally bad. Third-party tools try to paper over Xcode’s failures. Crash reporting services exist because Apple’s built-in tools miss half the issues. Deployment platforms charge you to automate submission processes that should not be this complicated in the first place.

I say this as someone who was an Apple fanboy. Their hardware is gorgeous. The industrial design is unmatched. But when I look at the developer experience, I see a company failing its customers. (The same is true of their operating systems and apps, but that's another rant for another day.)

Nobody seems to care

Here is what bothers me most. All of these problems are fixable. Modernizing Xcode is not a technical challenge. Making simulators smaller and faster is not impossible. Streamlining App Store submission is entirely within Apple’s control.

But nobody at Apple seems to care. They ship incremental updates that add features while ignoring fundamental problems. They announce new frameworks while developers struggle with broken tools. They talk about empowering creators while extracting 30% and making the creation process miserable.

This is not unique to Apple. Every BigTech company does this. They suffer from a complete failure of leadership and imagination. Individual teams build excellent components. The organization as a whole delivers a terrible product. And nobody seems to care because execs above a certain level are beyond advocating for users, they’re focused on shareholders. And people below that exec level lack sufficient empowerment to navigate bloated organizations to get anything done.

What this means for Product Marketing

This is where you come in. As a Product Marketing Manager, your job is to represent the customer and advocate for their entire workflow on your product.

Not just the new feature you are launching. Not just the part your engineering team is excited about. The whole thing. End to end.

If users encounter friction at any point, the whole experience is soured. It does not matter that your API is elegant if your documentation is incomplete. It does not matter that your core product is fast if onboarding takes three hours. It does not matter that your pricing is competitive if your signup process is broken.

You need to use the product the way customers use it. Every day. Not the happy path demo flow. The real workflow with all its warts and frustrations.

Build something with your product today. Not a toy project. A real thing that solves a real problem. Experience the friction yourself. Notice where you get stuck. Feel the frustration when documentation is missing. Encounter the bugs that support has been ignoring.

Then fight for your users daily.

When engineering wants to ship the new feature without fixing the broken parts, you push back. When leadership wants to deprioritize developer experience improvements because they are not sexy, you make the case. When product wants to add complexity that makes sense internally but confuses customers, you say no.

This is uncomfortable. You will be the person pointing out problems that everyone else wants to ignore. You will slow down launches to fix foundational issues. You will advocate for boring improvements over flashy features.

But this is your job. You are the ringleader of the circus. Your responsibility is making sure the whole show works, not just individual acts.

This is especially critical if you are marketing to developers. Developers see through polish. They notice when the demo workflow is smooth but the real workflow is broken. They remember the frustrations more than the features.

The Help First principle from developer marketing applies here. Help your customers be successful with your complete product, not just the parts you want to highlight. Be honest about where the experience falls short. Fix those gaps before you ship new features.

The Apple lesson

Look at Apple as an object lesson. They have some of the best individual components in the industry. SwiftUI is genuinely great. Swift as a language is modern and powerful. Their frameworks are well-designed.

But when developers evaluate Apple platforms, they do not think about SwiftUI. They think about the complete experience of building, testing, and shipping apps. And that experience is terrible.

Apple will continue to mint money, and maybe that's all anyone cares about. But it also continues to sell features while ignoring the product, and, to me, that's just offensive. The product is not SwiftUI. The product is not MapKit. The product is not Xcode. The product is the entire developer workflow from designing the app to getting it live in the App Store.

Have you built something with your product today?

This is the test. Have you built something with your product today?

Not read about the roadmap. Not reviewed feature specs. Not planned a launch. Actually built something. Opened the product. Tried to accomplish a real goal. Experienced what your customers experience.

If the answer is no, this is your starting point. Especially so if you are an executive in your organization.

Start today. Pick something real to build. Experience the whole workflow. Notice the friction. Feel the frustration. Then go fight to fix it.

Be the ringleader your product needs.