The above excerpt is from the book, “Build”, by Tony Fadell. Why is he saying that product management has to own the messaging?

Most PMs learn this the hard way or never: If you don’t write the story of your product, someone else will. And you probably won’t like their version.

The story of the product is not corporate messaging, not the hero copy, not a tag line, not a marketing campaign asset.

It is an honest explanation of why your product matters in simple plain language.

Think about what happens every day:

  • PMs jump straight into specs, or nowadays, into vibe-coding
  • Devs jump into building
  • Marketing gets a loose description of what got built
  • Sales teams improvise
  • Customers are confused

And then teams wonder why they don’t see adoption. This isn’t Marketing or Sales failure. It is PM failure.

The root cause: The story of the product was not written in the first place.

Writing the story is about answering the key questions before anything gets built.

  • What is the customer struggling to do?
  • What are they actually trying to do?
  • What are we giving them that will help?
  • Why is it better than how they do it today?

If you can’t answer those in clear, everyday language, you are responsible for the downstream confusion.

If you are early in your PM career, take this seriously:

Owning the story of your product is not optional. It is not Marketing’s or Sales’ job. It is your job.

Because you’re the only one close enough to the customer’s problem and the product that can address it.

Here’s one thing you can do today:

Write the story of your product, without jargon, without buzzwords, without fluff.

I’d be happy to review, feel free to reply back.

My Dear PM: What you do matters. Make it matter more by increasing your GTM fluency.