Here’s the thing nobody tells you about product marketing: your biggest competitive advantage isn’t a fancy framework or the latest MarTech tool. It’s the engineer sitting three desks away who actually built what you’re trying to sell.
Yet most of us treat our product teams like vending machines. We walk over, ask “What’s new?” get a feature dump, and wonder why our messaging sounds like everyone else’s technical documentation.
I’ve been there. Early in my career, I’d sit in product demos taking frantic notes about “enhanced API capabilities” and “improved data visualization,” then spend hours trying to translate engineer-speak into something that sounded remotely human.
The breakthrough came when I stopped asking what the product does and started asking why it exists.
The Product Intelligence Framework: 7 Questions That Change Everything
Forget the generic “What problem does this solve?” question. Your product team gets that one fifty times a week. These questions dig deeper and unlock the insights that actually differentiate your messaging.
Question 1: “What kept you up at night before you built this?”
This isn’t about features—it’s about obsession. The best product people lose sleep over specific, painful problems. When your head of product tells you she couldn’t sleep knowing customer support was getting buried in password reset tickets, that becomes your security messaging foundation: “Stop drowning your support team.”
Question 2: “What would happen if this didn’t exist tomorrow?”
Force them to paint the disaster scenario. Not just “customers would be unhappy,” but the specific cascade of pain. When your payments team says merchants will lose $30K per day in failed transactions, you have your urgency hook.
Question 3: “What stupid workaround are people using right now?”
Every product replaces something ridiculous. Your project management tool replaces “Sarah’s Sacred Spreadsheet”—a 47-tab Excel file that three people are afraid to touch. That becomes your positioning: “Because your business shouldn’t depend on one person’s spreadsheet skills.”
Question 4: “What makes you irrationally proud about this?”
Product people light up when they talk about elegant solutions to hard problems. That pride points to differentiation. When your AI team gets excited about processing unstructured data in real-time, you know you have something competitors can’t match.
Question 5: “What do customers do with this that surprises you?”
The best use cases often aren’t the intended ones. Your customer data platform was built for marketing teams, but IT departments started using it for security compliance. That kind of insight opens an entirely new market segment.
Question 6: “What part of this do competitors consistently get wrong?”
Product teams obsess over competitive gaps. They know exactly where everyone else falls short. When your DevOps lead say other tools force them to choose between speed and security, you have your positioning: “Finally, you don’t have to pick.”
Question 7: “If you could only build one more thing, what would it be?”
This reveals roadmap priorities and unfulfilled customer needs. It also shows you what problems are still unsolved—perfect ammunition for content marketing and thought leadership.
How to Actually Have These Conversations
Don’t schedule a formal “Product Marketing Alignment Meeting.” That’s how you get corporate speak and sanitized answers.
Try this instead:
- Grab coffee during their code break
- Ask one question per conversation
- Listen for emotion and frustration
- Follow up with “Can you give me a specific example?”
- Record (with permission) or take detailed notes immediately after
Red flags that you’re getting surface-level answers:
- They use the same words as your current marketing copy
- Everything sounds like a press release
- No specific customer names or stories emerge
- They can’t explain it to their mom
The Goldmine Moment
You’ll know you’ve struck gold when your product person starts talking faster, uses their hands, and says things like “Oh, and another thing…” That’s when the real insights come out.
If your backend engineer mentions, almost as an afterthought, that your system processes data “even when it’s messy and incomplete.” That throwaway comment can become your entire campaign around “real-world data”—because let’s face it, nobody’s data is actually clean.
What Happens Next
Once you have these insights, resist the urge to immediately turn them into messaging. You’re not ready yet. These are raw materials, not finished goods.
In the next post, we’ll talk about how to take this product intelligence and build a positioning framework that doesn’t sound like it came from a marketing textbook.
Your homework: Pick one product person and ask them question #1 this week. Just one question. See what happens.
Because the best marketing strategies aren’t built in conference rooms—they’re discovered in conversations with people who actually solve problems for a living.
Marissa Homere 