The Most Expensive Meeting That Never Happens in B2B Companies

There is a conversation that almost never happens in B2B companies, and the absence of it costs more than most leadership teams realise. It is the conversation between the head of product and the head of marketing about what they are both actually trying to do.

Product strategy and marketing strategy, when they are working properly, are two perspectives on the same question: which customers should we be serving, with what value, and how do we make that as clear and compelling as possible? The product team builds the answer. The marketing team articulates it and takes it to market. When they are aligned, the result is a company that can move with conviction. When they are not, you end up with a product that the market does not understand and a marketing team that cannot explain something it has not been part of building.

I have worked at the intersection of these two functions more deliberately than most. At Farfetch, my role as Senior Head of Product Strategy and Planning put me explicitly in the space between product investment decisions and commercial outcomes. I was responsible for the capital allocation framework that determined which product bets the company made, and also for the narrative that explained those bets to the Board, the investors, and the commercial team. You cannot do that job well without understanding both sides.

Where the misalignment shows up

The symptoms of product-marketing misalignment are recognisable. 

• Marketing is always slightly behind, building messaging for a product that has already evolved, or positioning for a customer segment that product has moved away from. 

• Product is always slightly frustrated, shipping things that do not land commercially, or hearing from customers that they do not understand the product's value. 

• Sales is caught in the middle, improvising.

At WordLift, when I joined as Fractional CMO, the platform had capabilities that the enterprise market was actively looking for, AI-powered Discovery designed for the age of generative search. But the product was being marketed as an SEO tool. The commercial narrative had not kept pace with the technical reality. The result was that the company's most valuable customers, large luxury brands and enterprise ecommerce platforms, could not see themselves in the product's story.

The repositioning was not a marketing project. It was a commercial alignment project, one that required product, marketing, and sales to look at the same customers through the same lens and build a shared narrative from there. The marketing team could not do this without the product team's input on what the platform actually did. The product team could not do it without marketing's understanding of how enterprise buyers evaluated and selected AI infrastructure. The insight only existed in the space between the two functions.

The North Star as a shared object

The most practical mechanism I have found for creating alignment between product and marketing is the North Star framework, not as a motivational slogan, but as a genuine shared measure of what success looks like for the customer.

At Farfetch, the North Star work aligned a 400-person product organisation around four specific metrics: GMV, order contribution, gross profit, and conversion rate. These were not marketing metrics. They were not product metrics. They were customer and commercial outcomes that both functions could contribute to and both functions could be measured against. Once that framework existed, the conversation between product and marketing changed. Instead of negotiating about which features to promote and how, both teams were working backwards from the same question: what does the customer need to do, and how do we make that as easy and valuable as possible?

Building that shared object takes time and requires someone who can sit credibly in both conversations. But the return, in commercial clarity, in reduced internal friction, and in the quality of the investor and board narrative, is significant.

A practical starting point

If you are leading a company where product and marketing are operating as separate functions, there are a few places to start. 

1. The first is a shared ICP document, not a general target market description, but a specific, named profile of the customer who generates the most commercial value, with a clear articulation of what triggers their buying decision and what makes them stay. 

2. The second is a shared definition of what a successful launch looks like, not a list of activities, but a set of commercial outcomes that both teams are accountable for. 

3. The third is a regular forum where both functions review customer signal together, not to report on their own metrics, but to interpret what the market is telling the company.

These are small structural changes. The impact on commercial coherence is disproportionate.

The companies that scale most effectively are usually the ones where product and marketing have found a shared language for the customer. That language does not emerge naturally. It has to be designed, and it is worth designing deliberately.

When did your head of product and head of marketing last sit together to review customer signal, not to report on their own work, but to ask together what the market is telling you? 

That conversation is worth scheduling.