When you have both product management and product marketing management staffed, I am a proponent of the “division of labor” that Pragmatic Marketing promotes as a rule of thumb (with variation by individual teams when it makes sense, given the particular interests and capabilities of the people on the team). If you’re familiar with their framework, that would allocate the rightmost three columns to product marketing and the remaining columns to product management.

The “website as a channel” paradigm supports marketing having ownership of the website. However, the “website as a distinctive competence” approach that I am encouraging would put it in a product management bucket. The waters get muddied for teams where product management reports to marketing, but that only represents about 25% of companies (according to Pragmatic Marketing’s latest survey). What is more important to me is that someone is applying strategic product management decision making to the development of the website, regardless of which organization “owns” the website.

At the company I work for, Marketing leads website design taking into account other stakeholders needs. The product manager helps with the technical content and understanding the buyer, sales helps with knowledge of buying process and objections, etc…

Hilarious. Totally my bad.