Playbook #9: How to Create a Product Marketing Charter

Introduction

Why Every Product Marketer Needs a Charter

Hey founding PMM — have you met a terrible fate?

Where you spend all your time fielding varied requests from across the company, many of which you shouldn’t be responsible for?

Or are you a PDF factory just churning out product material that sits in the company Google Drive collecting dust?

Or my personal favorite — the glorified project manager. Simply moving a bunch of stuff along without making any decisions or strategic impact.

Product marketing is barely consistent within our own ranks, and much less understood across departments in software. The varied responsibilities and confusion often leads to these fates and frustrated product marketers.

Our best tool to nip this in the bud is expectation setting, typically in the form of charters, which is a fancy way to say documentation that explains what the heck we do.

Meet The Author:

Hey, I’m Alex! I run product marketing at UserEvidence. Before that I marketed product at Lessonly (acquired by Seismic) and Help Scout. I dig the little nuances of PMM work, and am always happy to chat with fellow PMMs if I can help.

Where to find Alex:

What is a Product Marketing Charter?

A charter is a foundational document that outlines the purpose, goals, scope, and responsibilities of (in our case) a specific department or team.

Check out the Productive PMM Product Marketing Charter Template here 👇🏻

Product Marketing Charter Template Product Marketing Charter Template

Charters are an important tool whenever you are starting a new gig or have an opportunity to reset, could be beginning of a quarter or year as an example. They give us the power to dictate our responsibilities and clarify our value.

That’s why we recommend creating a Product Marketing Charter first thing when joining a new org. It’s not just a document; it’s a survival guide and a statement of purpose. It outlines what we do, why we matter, and—critically—what people can expect from us.

But hey, don’t feel like you have to take it from us. Here’s what UserEvidence co-founder, Ray, had to say about my charter:

"Most companies waste their PMM's potential by treating them as a support function. A clear charter changes that dynamic entirely - it transformed how our PMM operates from day one, turning the role from a service desk into a strategic driver of growth." - Ray Rhodes

A charter is critical in building product marketing from scratch, so today we’re going to share everything about it with you with the goal of helping you create your own. We’ll go through:

Building a charter that positions product marketing in a strong and accurate way
What to do before you start
How to structure your charter—What to include and why
Alex’s actual charter deck he presented to his team, with a full slide-by-slide breakdown so you can steal all the best ideas and improve on the worst
What happened when he re-visited the charter six months into the gig
How else you can use your charter in an ongoing way

Here’s my charter you can use as a reference as you keep reading, and hopefully some inspiration as your create your own!

Product Marketing @ UserEvidence (Shared)

Building a PMM charter that positions you well

Think of your charter as a pre-read for working with you and your team. Everything should be done in service to your goals which are not just to clarify what your role is, but to dictate what you are responsible for and what your cross-functional partners can expect from you.

If you’re starting at a new company you should’ve covered role focus and needs during the interview process. The charter will build off of that and make it tangible for the rest of the company. The initial problems I tackled at UserEvidence and projects listed in my deck were all discussed during my hiring.

If you’re in an existing role and trying to reset expectations, you should first create your charter as a presentation for leadership to sell them on why product marketing needs to change in your company.

Get your pitching hat on and be prepared to come ready for tough conversations about what isn’t working, your proposed changes, and the numbers to back it all up.

UserEvidence CEO, after seeing my charter, agreed.

"A charter is a great first opportunity for leadership to get alignment and give feedback on a direction for PMM. Once you have alignment on a charter, everything else flows from there. Don't assume leadership understands PMM - a charter is your opportunity to set the course, and set it towards becoming a much more strategic and valuable function." - Evan Huck

After getting leadership buy-in you can take out portions from the leadership conversation that aren’t necessary for the rest of the company and use the core structure below as-is.

What to do before you start (SPOILER: go on a listening tour)

In Playbook #5: Your First 30, 60, 90 Days as a Founding PMM we talked about how to go about doing a listening tour during your first 30 days.

But what if you’re not just starting a new role? Same idea applies — going on an internal listening tour to understand things like:

How do people feel about collaborating with product marketing?
How can product marketing help them the most?
What is the #1 goal of product marketing in their opinion?
What are their goals for this year/quarter and how do they see product marketing being involved?

This list of questions could go on and on… the point is that taking a listening tour by setting up 1:1s with 5 key colleagues, asking open-ended questions about their work, and listening to their insights about product marketing can greatly inform you in your charter creation process.

As part of your listening tour, you’ll want to assess the current state of some key product marketing areas and identify where you can have the most immediate impact. One of the best ways to do this is by using this simple but effective PMM Assessment Scorecard.

Get your copy: PMM Assessment Scorecard

The scorecard can be a great input to your charter, and you can even include it if you want to increase visibility into how you are thinking about the function.

Three key areas your charter should cover

My charter covered four key areas:

What is product marketing? A baseline vision & definition. (Slides 1-9)

Including a full definition of product marketing right off the bat addresses the elephant in the room. What can product marketing do? What does good product marketing look like? This is your opportunity to create a vision for your role and sets the stage for when you whittle it down to actual responsibilities.

What is product marketing at UserEvidence? (Slides 10-15) Here you’ll get specific for your role. Start with the core business problems you’ll be tackling and areas of focus, then get tactical with a list of initial projects. This part of the presentation will look very different depending on the company. I’ll call out those possible differences when I walk through it below.
When to come to PMM and when not to (Slide 16)

I created a checklist for the team to show what I can help with and which questions I want them to come to me for. While I didn’t include a don’t list in mine, it’s a good idea for larger, more specialized teams or if you’re resetting expectations in an existing role.

OPTIONAL: A view into the world of product marketing (Slides 17-22)

I included extra depth on product marketing to help our team understand our buyer. I won’t walk through this section in-depth here but you can see it in the deck. Not necessary for your charter, unless you also sell into PMM (like we do).

Every product marketing charter should include the first three areas. The fourth isn’t always necessary. I included it in mine because product marketing is one of our core users and buyers, so I basically folded some persona training into this presentation since there was a dual benefit for the team. That extra level of depth isn’t necessary otherwise.

Remember: This is internal selling. You are the expert, and your charter is you sharing your point of view. Always, always, always, explain any buzzwords and jargon. AKA–don’t throw out the terms ‘storytelling’ and ‘strategy’ and ‘go-to-market’ without defining what that means. Your team should leave the call understanding what you will do, understanding how they’ll work with you, and fired up about it.

All right, let’s walk through my charter slide by slide.

A slide-by-slide breakdown of my product marketing charter

What is product marketing? A baseline vision & definition. (Slides 1-9)

You may not need this section in its entirety. If the company has a good understanding of PMM, an understanding you approve of, then you should focus all your time on the next section (PMM for your company specifically). But I will say, in my experience folks don’t get it even if they say they do. If you’re in an established role you’re likely reading this because you’re unhappy with current expectations, so it’s time to force a fresh start.

For solo PMMs, usually you’re in a younger company where folks may not have worked with PMM before, so its a good time to educate.

My approach to defining product marketing started with what good and bad looks like. I began by visualizing product marketing in a way my team could immediately understand on slide three. Using the classic PMM venn diagram from PMA, I showed product marketing’s cross-functional role and discussed how we serve each function.

I didn’t shy away from showcasing both the highs and lows of the role and how that affects the cross-functional relationship. At its best, product marketing is a strategic powerhouse driving decisions across teams. At its worst, it’s a glorified task manager, stuck coordinating projects without wielding any real influence.

To dig deeper into the role I talked about storytelling, using Paul Bettany’s brilliant performance as Geoffrey Chaucer in A Knight’s Tale as an example of great storytelling. He brought the right message to the crowd to build Sir Ulrich von Lichtenstein’s reputation up from nothing. He built the intrigue and demand. We are storytellers—crafting the narratives that define how our product is positioned, understood, and sold. I like bringing in non-B2B references and metaphors whenever possible to lighten things up and spark interest.

Oh, and I made sure to ~~joke about~~ speak against the fact that most of his stories were lies… can’t be perpetuating the all marketers are liars thing right?

I summarized this duality with “product marketing is strategy + story.” Strategy is the theory and story is the practice.

One disclaimer: A part of this was sharing my annoyance with the word ‘storytelling’ in B2B. People call themselves storytellers who aren’t, people throw the word around like it automatically makes them some sort of artist. There are very few good storytellers in B2B. It’s a worthy pursuit, but it’s important to tell your team exactly what being a storyteller means. I used the next section to drill down into what it means in our case. Always give specific examples for stuff like this. Otherwise it’s just jargon when the whole goal of this is understanding.

I ended this section with the PMA visual of different product marketing areas of impact.

This visual does a great job of showing the scope of what PMM can support whether you’re market-focused or product-focused. Depending on your team size this gives you a place to narrow down from, or a window into new areas you’d like to expand into. For solo PMMs this is way too much for one person to do, so use it to show the tradeoffs you need to make. Larger teams can split up responsibilities as we often see in the enterprise where enablement, launch, or competitive focuses are common.

For expanding your role, if you’ve been pipeline focused but are trying to turn more towards the product side, you can show this is an understood function in product marketing and an extension of your skillset. You’re backed up by an established framework from an established professional organization vs. it being simply your opinion or desires.

Tip: Oftentimes we’re too stuck on us being the one to convince people our approach is correct. This is a heuristic. Bring in outside help wherever you can to help prove your points, whether its successful companies, understood frameworks, or an opinion from someone you know your leadership respects.

What is product marketing at UserEvidence? How to specify PMM at your company (Slides 10-16)

Now that the easy, fun, high level part is over and your team understands what PMM can be, it’s time to get real. Time to show what product marketing WILL be at your company. This is the selling part, and for most readers this is where you should spend the majority of your time.

Slides 11-12 in my charter are an acknowledgement that product marketing doesn’t exist in a vacuum. At UserEvidence, our sales-led motion heavily influences my priorities.

Example: I emphasized sales enablement over product adoption, given the importance of arming our sales team to close deals. I also noted that as a smaller organization, my role would cover a broader scope than it might in a larger, more specialized team.

I included more detail about our GTM motion to provide more context as to why I would be more focused on market-side activities. Different motions in a software company require different efforts (self-service vs a high touch sales process is a great example), so matching my role to our GTM motion is easy proof.

For your charter: What company or market conditions back you up? These are things the company has agreed are proof points for your approach and show you know the environment you’re operating in. This could be GTM motion, team/department makeup, and annual initiatives handed down from leadership.

After all the context I defined what I see as my three core responsibilities.

Bring products to market
Create demand for our product
Help sell our products effectively.

These three together I called ‘go-to-market strategy’; another term people throw around a lot that I wanted to define for our team.

Now you’ll see in action how the first parts of the presentation set me up for clarity at the end. I’ve talked about product marketing from a high level theoretical view, I’ve shared context and a wide range of possible responsibilities, and now I use the same reference points to say exactly what I’ll do.

Slide 14 brings back the PMM role map. I’ve circled my core focuses to start with the colors coded to match the 3 responsibility areas from the previous slide.

This is what I’ll do. But I took it one step further and identified 5 specific short-term projects I started with that fit into these buckets.

These projects were already green lit by leadership since we’d discussed everything during my interview and onboarding process. I could proceed with confidence and they backed me up with their confirmation of priorities and how these projects help move us forward. Leadership’s approval does a lot of legwork for you here. It carries more weight.

Aligning with leadership first, as I talked about in the structure section above, makes this whole process legitimate. Getting specific, shows the team exactly how you’ll jump in to help them right away and how it aligns with broader company objectives. This slide feels more real than ‘storytelling’ and ‘go-to-market strategy’ by themselves.

Note: for the broader terms on this slide I talked through specifics. For example, V2 messaging + positioning included renaming our platform to customer evidence platform, re-doing our website homepage and core product page, and training the team on an updated messaging document. Can you tell I avoid leaving generalities on their own as much as possible? Tell them exactly what you mean! If you can’t break it down then you have a different problem on your hands.

I wrapped up with the classic ‘when to come to product marketing’ list. Building off of everything I’d shared, I wanted to anchor some areas of operation where I want them to think of product marketing. I don’t think any of these will be surprising to you, but since it was at the end I made sure to talk through why I’m qualified to help with these areas and how they fit into the work I’ll be doing.

Guiding principles to remember

There are a lot of ideas and moving parts that go into an effective charter. So to wrap the deck walkthrough I want to restate some core truths to remember as you work through your own:

This is internal selling — First get leadership on board, then the company can follow. You have to earn the right to dictate what product marketing does.
Context always — Product marketing can’t operate in a vacuum. It’s best to get ahead of and call out the conditions that affect your role, whether it’s the reason for a change or to stay the same.
Refuse generalities — Any high level idea or jargon must be explained. You saw how I started broad and got very specific to back everything up.
Bring back up — Just because you’re selling doesn’t mean it has to all come from you. You saw the outside resources I used in my charter, use whatever resources, research, or even respected internal opinions help back up your points. Get rid of the ego in service of the outcome.

How to share your charter

Once your charter is done it’s time to hit the road again. You should meet with leaders and teams within your company to walk them through it.

This is when your charter really becomes valuable.

It’s simple - just schedule 30 min or so with each functional leader, department head, or team that you interact with on a regular basis (or maybe even those who you don’t!) and walk them through your deck.

Give them a chance to provide feedback, ask questions, and use it as a way to start a conversation.

In addition to educating your colleagues, presenting your charter live to other teams does a few things:

It gives you a chance get immediate feedback. Once you get it in front of others it may become clear where you need to add some context, what you need to clarify or adjust, or what needs cut completely.
You can refine your charter and make it better. After implementing feedback from your cross functional conversations you’ll notice how much more solid your charter is.

Watch this video for some more thinking about how to best share your charter once it’s finished.

Pro tip:

When I (Jason) joined Klue, a charter was one of the first things I worked on.

When I originally started presenting our charter to different teams we were framing our wheelhouse as:

🟢 “here’s the things we do”

🛑 “here’s the things we don’t do.”

Early feedback showed that this was the wrong approach 👎 Other teams were off-put by me coming in and saying "here's everything we don't do"

In hindsight, an aggressive move when trying to build relationships with other departments as a new PMM.

But this feedback helped us iterate on the document and position things more as:

🟢 “here’s what we own”

🟡 “here’s what we don't own but can help support”

Which felt like a more realistic representation of our relationship across departments.

When to revisit your charter

Great, you presented your charter. Job done. It will join the documentation graveyard of work completed and never referenced, right alongside your messaging framework (sorry, this one hit close to home).

I’ve failed many times in my career to follow up on something I called a ‘living document’ or ‘source of truth’. We get busy, it’s hard. I get it.

Luckily with a charter there are some built in points you can use to naturally resurface and use it outside of making a new one as your role changes.

My favorite is new hires. Someone joins the sales team, or our marketing team, or there’s a new leadership hire. I hop on to meet them and present the charter to get them up to speed on what I do and how I can help. It’s a great way to help onboard someone and become a known quantity as your team shifts and grows.

You could also force it on a bi-annual or quarterly basis as a part of planning. Either say we’re continuing the charter path, or we’re changing the charter and here’s what's changing based on priorities.

3 practical ways to regularly use your charter to make your life easier

1. Onboard new hires

About six months into my tenure, we brought on a few new team members. Going into those onboarding calls, I felt a mix of curiosity and slight apprehension—how much of the charter would still be useful? Would it feel dated or disconnected from how we were actually operating?

Almost everything still held up. The definitions of product marketing, the key focus areas, and the expectations we had set with the broader team were still spot-on. The only parts that felt outdated were the initial projects, and that was just because we had completed most of them.

That turned into a great storytelling moment. I could walk them through not just where we started, but what we’d accomplished since. Instead of rewriting the charter, I added a few quick notes about what had been completed and what had evolved, which also helped them see the team's trajectory and momentum right away.

2. Document and track your quarterly goals

While I didn’t initially build the charter as a tracking tool, it became one naturally. Revisiting it after a couple of quarters offered a clear view of what we had prioritized and what we’d actually shipped. It let me reflect on what had gone to plan, what had changed, and where we’d made the most progress.

We might have our OKRs for the quarter, key projects we’re working on, who is responsible for what, all documented in the charter. It also creates a lightweight paper trail of how our focus evolves over time.

This keeps us coming back to the charter, keeping it updated, and reminding ourselves what our main focus is (and what it should be).

Example: One of our early projects was to clarify our buyer’s pain points. At the time, it felt like a foundational research task. Six months later, I could point to real outputs from that work—like updated messaging, new sales slides, and stronger alignment with the demand gen team. That kind of tangible progress was easy to overlook in the day-to-day, but the charter made it visible.

3. Advocate for initiatives, budgets, or headcount

When it comes time to make a case for more support—whether that’s budget, tools, or headcount—the charter gives you a head start.

Most of the time, those conversations require you to zoom out: to remind leaders what product marketing is responsible for, what you’re currently focused on, and what’s missing. The charter lets you do that quickly and credibly, without having to scramble to build a new deck from scratch.

You’re not just saying “we need more help”—you’re showing the scope of your role, the impact of the work to date, and what’s left on the table due to limited capacity. If you're thoughtful about how you update it, the charter becomes a running narrative of the tradeoffs you're making and the opportunities you're not yet resourced to tackle.

Pro tip: If you have a quarterly planning process, it’s worth syncing your charter with those conversations. You can show how your goals ladder up to company priorities and highlight gaps where you could do more with additional support.

The respect earned by executing against your charter is where your reputation lives.

Final Thoughts

Creating a product marketing charter might seem like a “nice-to-have,” but in a role as misunderstood as ours, it’s necessary. We’re constantly searching for a foothold in strategy, the ear of leadership, and buy-in from our peers. A charter helps you get all three of these.

Plus, it might just save you from spending all day making PDFs.

Better charters make for happier product marketers, and I just want you to be happy. 💜