product management & product marketing
Bruce McCarthy at User>Driven contrasts the roles of product management and product marketing. He writes:
The most successful organizations I've seen have a split between product management and product marketing. They have people who support sales and others who set product direction. Both talk to customers every day, but the conversations are very different. In the end they work together, of course. The work of each feeds into the other. But in the end, the mission of one is to bring the message from the market in, and the mission of the other is to get the message out.
I made the same point in Product Management Job Responsibilities: A PM listens to the market; a PMM talks to the market. It is indeed a different mindset and a different skill set.
When gathering requirements for the product, product managers and product marketers should interview customers together. One is looking for problems to be addressed for product users while the other is seeking to understand how to communicate to product buyers. As Bruce implies, there’s inbound marketing and outbound marketing. Inbound brings requirements in to the building; outbound takes the resulting products out to the market.
(However, I wish that Bruce hadn’t characterized outbound marketing as sales support. While outbound product marketing communicates to the client base through the sales channel, we should be focused on the market full of customers rather than on customers one-at-a-time. Supporting sales people is the role of sales engineering, not product marketing.)
Market requirements and positioning documents are owned by those who best know the market. Product management knows what to build; product marketing knows what to say.



PMs & PMMs
I do think that in practice product marketing folks get pulled in to speak to individual accounts in sales situations. In fact, at many companies this is their full time job. I agree, though, that this unfortunate for their effectiveness as well. I hear good PMMs in my own company complain that they are so much in demand in the field that they have no time to provide input to strategic endeavors.
What ends up happening in practice is that the product manager will do the necessary market listening and then will discuss their findings with product marketing, getting their input and buy in early. This is not as effective as having PMMs drive market direction, but they at least do provide something of a buffer against the demands of the sales cycle.