I'm (not) Gumby Damnit: How SaaS CMOs are destroying the product marketing value proposition
There's a dumpster fire. And the data shows it's spreading.
We recently hosted a roundtable with several Product Marketing savants (Harvard, MIT, and Stanford grads working at enterprise SaaS companies, because of course they are) and heard a collective scream that would make Edvard Munch proud: PMMs are drowning in scope creep while their bosses fundamentally misunderstand what makes them valuable. After watching these brilliant minds describe how they're being turned into corporate Gumbys (stretched in all directions until unrecognizable), we had to know if these were isolated horror stories or signs of an industry-wide dumpster fire.
Spoiler alert: It's the dumpster fire. And it's spreading.
The Perfect Storm: Testing Our Hypothesis
We suspected this phenomenon stemmed from two converging factors:
External forces (primarily diminishing resources, because who isn't trying to do more with less in 2025?)
An undefined value proposition for the PMM role itself (when nobody knows what you do, they assume you do everything)
To validate this hypothesis, we analyzed 30 PMM job descriptions from 2019 to 2025 across companies of varying sizes. The results weren't just alarming; they were a five-alarm "your hair-is-on-fire" emergency for anyone who cares about strategic marketing.
The Expanding Scope: What the Data Reveals
The research provides clear quantitative evidence of PMM scope expansion, particularly in demand generation responsibilities. Brace yourselves for some numbers that'll make you spill your coffee:
Pipeline and Demand Gen Responsibilities Over Time
2019-2021: Only 5-10% of analyzed PMM job descriptions explicitly mentioned pipeline or demand generation responsibilities. As God and common sense intended, these functions were typically owned by separate teams.
2022-2025: Approximately 50% of job descriptions explicitly tie PMMs to pipeline generation and demand generation activities, representing a 5x increase in just a few years. That sound you hear? It's PMMs everywhere, screaming into their pillows.
This shift is most pronounced in mid-sized companies (100-1000 employees), where 65% of recent PMM roles include demand generation responsibilities, compared to just 15% earlier. Mid-sized companies, we need to talk.
Product Lifecycle Ownership Expansion
The research shows a similar pattern in post-launch responsibilities:
2019-2021: 70% of PMM descriptions focused primarily on launch execution and initial messaging
2022-2025: 85% of descriptions now include explicit responsibility for "driving adoption" and "post-launch engagement."
This represents a task expansion and a fundamental shift in ownership - from product launch success to entire product lifecycle performance. It's like hiring someone to build your house and then making them responsible for your family's happiness while living in it.
Cross-functional collaboration Expansion
The data also reveals how PMMs are increasingly expected to work with more teams:
2019-2021: PMMs primarily collaborated with 3 departments (Product, Sales, Marketing)
2022-2025: PMMs now routinely coordinate with 6+ departments (adding Customer Success, Support, Data Analytics, Growth, and Engineering)
This broadening cross-functional reach correlates strongly with increased responsibilities. The analysis found that job descriptions mentioning coordination with 5+ departments were 3x more likely to include demand generation and pipeline accountability. At this point, just make the PMM the CEO and be done with it.
"Many Hats" Phenomenon By Company Size
While startup PMMs have always worn multiple hats (that's startup life, folks), this expectation has expanded upmarket:
Small companies (<100 employees): 85% of job descriptions explicitly mention "wearing many hats" or similar language in both periods. No surprises here.
Mid-sized companies (100-1000): Mentions increased from 30% to 65% between periods. This is alarming but not shocking.
Large companies (1000+): Mentions increased from 10% to 40% between periods. Now we're in "what the actual hell" territory.
This quantitative evidence aligns perfectly with our PMM panelist’s experiences, confirming that their situations reflect an industry-wide transformation rather than isolated cases of managerial malpractice.
The Triangle vs. Square Model: A Value Proposition Under Threat
Our initial conversation revisited a tried and true framework comparing the traditional PMM "triangle" (win rate, deal size, deal velocity) to an emerging "square" model that now includes volume/pipeline responsibilities. Let's dig into why this matters more than most CMOs realize.
The Original Triangle Framework
The triangle framework elegantly positioned PMM at the intersection of three departments: Sales, Marketing, and Product. In this model, PMM's value derives from their ability to impact three critical revenue metrics:
Win Rate: Using market intelligence and win/loss analysis to diagnose conversion challenges and implement improvements to sales tactics, positioning, or feature prioritization
Deal Size: Updating positioning and messaging to move up or down market, developing value-based pricing models, and creating playbooks that help sales teams confidently price to meet the market.
Deal Velocity: Identifying friction points in the sales cycle and developing tools, content, or simplified pricing models that accelerate decision-making
The PMM's unique value in this model was their ability to understand the relationships between these three metrics. For example, they could advise leadership that "positioning our brand upmarket to attract higher ACV deals will likely extend our sales cycle and create increased quarter-to-quarter volatility, though this risk smooths out over annual cycles."
This strategic advisory role made PMMs invaluable - they were the connective tissue between departments, translating product capabilities into market differentiation and sales effectiveness. Most importantly, they functioned as free agents who could move fluidly between departments to optimize the entire go-to-market function.
The Square Model: A Fundamental Distortion
Our research confirms that this triangle has expanded to a square, with volume/pipeline generation becoming the fourth dimension of PMM responsibility. This represents an addition and a fundamental distortion of the PMM value proposition.
By adding pipeline generation to the PMM mandate, organizations are essentially taking their most strategic asset, the free agent optimizing the entire GTM engine, and tying them to a single tactical outcome. This forces PMMs to split their focus between their core strategic function and a high-pressure tactical responsibility traditionally owned by dedicated demand generation teams.
The data shows this distortion is widespread:
2019-2021: Only 5-10% of PMM job descriptions mentioned pipeline or lead volume targets
2022-2025: 50% now explicitly tie PMMs to these metrics
This shift fundamentally undermines the PMM's core value proposition: optimizing GTM efficiency across the entire revenue engine. When PMMs are held accountable for pipeline generation, they inevitably have less bandwidth to perform their critical strategic function of optimizing win rates, deal sizes, and sales velocity.
The square model represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the PMM role's strategic value. When organizations treat PMMs as demand generation resources, they inadvertently sacrifice the unique cross-functional optimization that only PMMs can provide. It's the corporate equivalent of using a Ferrari to haul lumber.
The Value Proposition Crisis
Our research also validated the second part of our hypothesis: PMMs increasingly lack a defined value proposition within their organizations.
Unlike demand gen (measured by leads/pipeline) or product management (measured by features/adoption), PMM success metrics remained inconsistent and sometimes absent from job descriptions through 2019-2021:
"Earlier Listings (2019–2021): Few PMM job descriptions in this period set concrete performance metrics or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for the role. The language around success was usually vague – e.g. 'deliver results,' 'drive usage and adoption,' 'achieve objectives.'"
By 2022-2025, many companies attempted to clarify success criteria without standardization across the industry. Some tied PMMs to pipeline, others to product adoption rates, and still others to win/loss improvements.
The Causes: Why Is This Happening?
Our research highlights several key drivers behind this converging crisis:
External Forces (Diminishing Resources)
Resource Constraints: Companies are trying to do more with less. As one JD states: "We're a small company... and we all wear many hats." This matches Helen's experience where she described being asked to handle messaging, campaigns, and webinars. "Do more with less" has morphed into "do everything with nothing."
Human Capital Gaps: The research noted "Human capital based" factors like layoffs and unfilled positions. Companies "hire a lot of people... and fire a lot of people," as Helen observed. The corporate version of musical chairs, except when the music stops, you get three chairs instead of one.
Platform Complexity: Both our PMMs and the research highlighted the challenge of "platformization" - bundling individual products together. This creates messaging complexity that falls on PMMs to solve, often without additional resources. "Here's 12 products - make them sound like one cohesive thing by Thursday."
Undefined Value Proposition
Contradictory Expectations: Job descriptions reveal a critical tension between "strategic leader" vs. "execution workhorse" expectations. The research noted: "Companies frequently call the PMM role strategic in the opening pitch... Yet, as one reads further, the list of duties often includes a litany of execution tasks." The corporate equivalent of "I need you to be the architect AND pour the concrete."
Inconsistent Success Metrics: The research found "Inconsistency in defining success meant candidates often had to infer priorities (e.g. is success measured by product adoption? lead generation? stakeholder satisfaction?) from context." Nothing says "set up for success" like a game of metric charades.
Lack of Structural Clarity: The PMM's place in the organization varied wildly across companies, with reporting structures spanning from CEO direct reports to three levels down from leadership. The org chart equivalent of "Where's Waldo?"
The Cost of Neglecting PMM's Strategic Role: A Case Study
We recently hosted a SaaS Sales executive dinner in San Francisco aimed at understanding what was most disrupting their pipelines. The number one concern? Wild and unexplained fluctuations in funnel efficiency quarter-over-quarter. One case study stood out above all others:
A CEO of a SaaS company watched her win rate plummet from a marginally acceptable 18% to a catastrophic 6% over just two quarters. Her investigation began predictably:
She approached her head of sales, who blamed marketing, citing AEs "always being late to deals" (classic sales move)
She turned to product management, who blamed sales for "signing non-ICP customers" (the product team's most significant hit)
She returned to sales, who redirected blame to marketing for "targeting non-ICP customers" (the remix)
She confronted marketing, who reminded her that their ICP targeting was "bible and verse," crafted in cooperation with sales (the counterattack)
Finally, she had the wisdom to consult her head of product marketing, who gave her the first honest answer: "I don't know, but I know how to find out." This was a refreshing blast of competence in a hurricane of finger-pointing.
The resolution? The PMM designed and executed a win/loss survey with prospects and combined that research to reveal that a single competitor was offering 50% discounts early in the sales process—directly causing the disappearing pipeline and collapsing win rates.
This case perfectly illustrates the unique value of PMM as a free agent. When departmental boundaries create finger-pointing and blame-shifting, the PMM becomes the only resource to objectively investigate the entire GTM function to identify the source of performance issues.
By constraining this role with pipeline responsibilities, organizations effectively eliminate this crucial diagnostic capacity at the moment market conditions make it most valuable. It's like firing your detective and asking your beat cops to solve the murder in their spare time.
Why This Matters: The Critical Role of PMM in AI Transformation
We're not shaking our fists at the evolution of the PMM role. The journey from PMM 1.0 to 2.0 was logical and valuable: PMM evolved from an extension of product management—splitting into product creation versus market expression—into a strategic function operating at the intersection of product, sales, and marketing.
PMM 1.0 unleashed marketers who were highly domain-aware and deeply knowledgeable about products and customer implementations. However, these former product managers often created feature-centric content, lacking training in classic brand marketing skills like positioning and messaging. "Our product has 47 features and here they all are in excruciating detail. You're welcome."
PMM 2.0 emerged as organizations like the Pragmatic Marketing Institute created frameworks to expand PMM capabilities across product, price, and place—three of the classic four Ps of marketing. The triangle model became the norm, with PMMs serving as strategic connectors between three chronically disconnected departments.
The addition of pipeline responsibilities fundamentally undermines this evolution. It's not merely scope creep—it's a structural threat to the PMM as the ultimate free agent who can operate adroitly between departments to drive GTM efficiency. And it's happening at precisely the wrong moment.
Why? Because PMMs are perfectly positioned to deploy AI throughout the go-to-market function. Their unique triangle position enables them to act as "red blood cells," carrying the oxygen of AI-powered marketing and selling processes to the complex organs of GTM—exactly when these functions are being most disrupted by, ironically, AI itself.
We often praise growth hackers on the Cannonball GTM livestream and substack, and for good reason. They are the California analog to the US (most trends, good and bad, start in California), and we love them for it. But they're ultimately outside actors and hired guns. PMMs are the ultimate inside operators. It is this misunderstood cohort of marketing that will drive the inevitable transition to AI-centered GTM models.
By forcing PMMs to focus on pipeline generation, organizations are unwittingly hobbling their most strategically positioned resource for AI transformation—at the very moment when such transformation is becoming an existential priority. It's like taking your best navigator and making them row the boat instead.