To keep growth aligned with product, foster a shared culture where everyone loves the product and customer. This isn't about formal meetings, but a baseline agreement that makes collaboration inherent. When this culture exists, the product team actively seeks marketing's input, creating a unified engine.

For a product to be inherently "talkable," marketing input is crucial during design. Marketers are often brought in post-launch to sell a finished product. Instead, they should be involved early to help design features that encourage sharing and create organic growth loops, making their job exponentially easier.

Instead of waiting for top-down alignment, salespeople should take the initiative to bridge the gap with marketing. The most effective way to do this is by bringing marketing team members onto actual sales calls. This direct exposure to customer interactions is the fastest way to ensure marketing creates relevant and effective support materials.

Instead of ad-hoc campaigns, Qualified's marketing team organizes its rhythm around monthly and quarterly product launches. This cadence aligns the entire company, creates a constant "why now" for sales, and ensures the corporate narrative continually evolves.

To build trust and deliver value, product managers cannot be 'tourists' who drop in on other departments transactionally. They must become 'locals'—deeply integrated, trusted partners who are regulars in cross-functional conversations and are seen as being 'in the battle' together with sales, marketing, and other teams.

Instead of debating whether Product Management or Product Marketing "owns" positioning, teams should treat it as a critical point of shared alignment. It's a collaborative space where the entire team agrees on the product's value and market strategy.

To achieve true alignment with sales, product, and finance, marketing leaders should avoid marketing jargon and subjective opinions. Instead, they should ground conversations in objective data about performance, customer experience gaps, or internal capabilities to create a shared, fact-based understanding of challenges.

The first step in aligning brand and ABX is not tactical planning but narrative alignment. Bring sales, marketing, and brand leaders together and ask: 'If a buying group engages with us, will they hear one story or three?' Only when the answer is 'one story' are you ready to integrate efforts.

Frame the product manager not as a feature owner, but as the central communication hub. Their primary function is to connect business, stakeholders, engineering, and design, navigating complex relationships and translating needs across disparate groups.