Product Marketing Across 20 Products

Most product marketing advice assumes a simple model: one PMM, one product.

You own the positioning. You know the roadmap. You’re embedded with the engineering team. You attend the sprint reviews. You can recite the feature list from memory.

Then reality hits.

You’re a product marketer at a growing company, and suddenly you’re responsible for five products. Then ten. Then twenty. The playbook that worked for one product doesn’t scale. And nobody talks about what to do instead.

The multi-product reality

During a recent call, a product marketer described her situation: she’s responsible for approximately 20 significant products at a large enterprise company. Not 20 features. Not 20 SKUs. Twenty distinct products, each with its own engineering team, roadmap, and release cadence.

“I get updates from many teams,” she told me. “Sometimes I need to join the call to actually know what’s going on.”

For each quarterly event, she compiles updates across all 20 products into a document that stretches to 100 pages. The process is, in her words, “terrible.”

She’s not unique. As companies grow, PMM coverage spreads thin. A mid-market SaaS company might have three PMMs covering a dozen products. An enterprise software company might have product portfolios where one person covers an entire category.

The math doesn’t work if you try to apply single-product techniques at multi-product scale.

What breaks at scale

Deep product knowledge becomes impossible. You can’t attend every standup for 20 products. You can’t read every PRD, join every sprint review, absorb every technical decision. The mental overhead alone would consume your entire week.

Relationship maintenance multiplies. Each product has its engineering lead, its PM, its key stakeholders. When you cover one product, maintaining those relationships is natural. When you cover twenty, it becomes a part-time job just to stay connected.

Update collection becomes your full-time work. If gathering updates for one product takes an hour a week, gathering updates for twenty products takes… well, more than twenty hours, because the coordination overhead compounds.

Context-switching destroys depth. You can’t do deep positioning work when you’re constantly switching between products. Every switch has a cognitive cost. By the time you’ve rebuilt context on product #15, you’ve lost the thread on products #1-14.

Event prep becomes a death march. Quarterly business reviews, sales kickoffs, partner summits: each one requires comprehensive updates across your entire portfolio. The weeks before major events turn into pure information gathering, leaving no time for actual marketing work.

The coverage myth

There’s a tempting fantasy that you can cover many products with the same depth as one product if you just work harder or get more organized.

This is a myth.

At some point, you have to make a strategic choice about what kind of coverage is actually possible. You can’t do everything at the same quality. Something has to give.

Most multi-product PMMs end up with implicit tiers:

Tier 1: Products getting active marketing attention. Maybe two or three at any given time.
Tier 2: Products getting maintenance coverage. You update the materials when someone asks.
Tier 3: Products that technically have a PMM but effectively don’t. You know they exist. That’s about it.

This tiering is rational. It’s also often invisible and unacknowledged, which means leadership expects Tier 1 coverage on Tier 3 products and is perpetually disappointed.

The leverage question

When you’re stretched across many products, every workflow question becomes a leverage question: what can I do once that benefits many products?

The single-product PMM can afford bespoke processes. A custom launch checklist. Hand-crafted release notes. Individually written customer emails.

The multi-product PMM needs systems. Repeatable templates. Automated collection. Scalable distribution.

The highest-leverage activities for multi-product PMMs are often not product-specific at all:

Building systems that capture updates across all products automatically
Creating templates that work for any product with minimal customization
Establishing distribution channels that can carry any product’s message
Developing relationships that give you “push” notification when something important ships

The lowest-leverage activities are the ones you repeat twenty times:

Joining each product’s standup to stay informed
Writing bespoke updates for each product from scratch
Manually compiling information that automation could pull
Having the same “what shipped?” conversation with twenty different teams

Automation as survival

For single-product PMMs, automation is a nice-to-have. It saves time, but the work is doable without it.

For multi-product PMMs, automation is survival.

Consider the update collection problem. If you’re covering three products, you can probably keep up manually. Some Slack monitoring, a few meetings, occasional Jira diving. It’s not fun, but it’s manageable.

At twenty products, manual collection is impossible. You physically cannot watch twenty Slack channels, attend twenty standups, and query twenty Jira projects. Something has to do that work for you.

The PMM I mentioned earlier described her aspiration perfectly: she wanted a tool that could give her recurring summaries across all her products, updated automatically, so she could spend her time on positioning and messaging instead of information archaeology.

Different products, different cadences

One complication at multi-product scale: not all products move at the same speed.

Some products ship weekly. Others ship quarterly. Some are in active development. Others are in maintenance mode.

A single-product PMM can match their cadence to the product. A multi-product PMM needs a system that handles variable cadences gracefully.

The approach I’ve seen work best:

Unified visibility, differentiated action. Have a single system that surfaces updates across all products. But don’t treat all updates equally. Some warrant immediate attention. Others can wait for the monthly rollup. The system shows you everything; your judgment decides what to act on.

Event-driven prioritization. Ahead of a major event, temporarily increase your focus on the products you’ll feature. After the event, return to baseline coverage. This is explicitly opportunistic, and that’s okay.

Proactive alerting. Instead of checking twenty products every day, get notified when something significant ships. Let the products that need attention surface themselves.

The role evolution

Something changes in how you approach your job when you’re covering many products.

You stop being the person who knows everything about one product. You become the person who can quickly synthesize information about any product in your portfolio.

You stop being the bottleneck for every piece of product communication. You become the architect of systems that generate communication at scale.

You stop attending every meeting. You become skilled at extracting meeting outcomes asynchronously.

This is a different kind of expertise. The PMM who can effectively cover twenty products has skills that the single-product PMM doesn’t develop: systems thinking, prioritization under constraints, scalable process design.

Getting to sustainable

If you’re drowning in multi-product coverage, here’s a starting point:

Acknowledge the math. You cannot provide single-product depth across twenty products. Stop trying. Explicitly tier your portfolio and make the tiers visible to stakeholders.

Automate collection first. The biggest time sink is gathering information. Solve that problem, and everything downstream gets easier.

Standardize your outputs. Create templates for updates, launch materials, and event documentation that work across products. The time you save on formatting is time you can spend on thinking.

Build push, not pull. Instead of constantly querying teams for updates, create systems where updates come to you. Automated feeds. Slack notifications. API integrations. Make information flow to where you need it.

Protect strategic time. Block calendar time for deep work on your Tier 1 products. The urgent requests from Tier 3 products will always try to consume this time. Protect it ruthlessly.

The hidden opportunity

Here’s what I’ve noticed about the best multi-product PMMs: they develop a cross-portfolio perspective that single-product PMMs lack.

They see patterns across products. They notice when the same customer objection arises in different contexts. They identify messaging that works broadly. They develop an instinct for what matters and what doesn’t.

This perspective is valuable, but only if you have the time to think. If you’re buried in update collection and meeting attendance, you never develop it.

The goal of building systems is creating space for the strategic thinking that only someone with your breadth of coverage can do.

If you’re responsible for product marketing across many products and spending too much time on information gathering, let’s chat about how Changebot can give you automated visibility across your entire portfolio.