From Marketing to Product: The Growth Lens

The Marketing Foundation

Marketing taught me to think about users before we had products. At Dr. Booch Kombucha, I wasn't just promoting a product — I was building a category. People didn't know they wanted fermented tea. The job was creating desire before satisfying it.

This translates directly to product work. The best products don't just solve existing problems — they reveal problems people didn't know they had.

Growth Hacking as Product Training

My time as a Growth Hacker at Infollion was essentially product management without the title. We ran experiments constantly:

The FinTech Context

At North Loop and OmniPay, marketing met compliance. You can't growth-hack a banking product the way you'd hack a consumer app. Regulations matter. Trust matters. One wrong move damages credibility you can't buy back.

This constraint made me a better product thinker. When you can't rely on aggressive tactics, you're forced to build things people genuinely want and trust.

What Marketers Bring to Product

Marketers entering product have underrated advantages:

Customer obsession. Good marketers live in customer research. This translates directly.

Messaging clarity. Knowing how to explain value helps you build valuable things.

Channel awareness. Understanding how products reach users influences what you build.

Metrics fluency. Marketing runs on metrics. So does modern product management.

What We Need to Learn

The gaps are real too. Technical depth takes time. Roadmap prioritization is different from campaign planning. Working with engineering requires a different collaboration style than working with creative agencies.

But these can be learned. The customer-first mindset is harder to teach, and marketers already have it.

The Integrated View

Today at Datman, I don't think of marketing and product as separate functions. They're two lenses on the same question: how do we create and deliver value?

The marketing lens asks: how do we reach people and communicate value?

The product lens asks: how do we build value and retain people?

The best outcomes happen when both lenses focus on the same point.