You're a product marketer at a growing company. Your CEO wants positioning. Sales needs battlecards. Product wants user research. Customer success wants case studies. Marketing wants launch plans. Everyone wants something different, and nobody can agree on what product marketing should prioritize.
You need a framework that defines what product marketing actually does and how it connects to broader product and go-to-market success.
The Pragmatic Marketing Framework, created by Pragmatic Institute, is one of the most comprehensive models for product management and product marketing. It provides a structured view of all the activities required to bring products to market successfully, organized into logical layers that show how strategic work flows into tactical execution.
What Is the Pragmatic Marketing Framework?
The Pragmatic Framework is a grid with 37 boxes representing different activities organized into rows and columns.
The rows represent different organizational layers:
- Market: Understanding customers and markets
- Focus: Strategic planning and prioritization
- Business: Business models and partnerships
- Go-to-Market: Launch and marketing execution
- Sales: Sales enablement and support
The columns represent progression from strategic to tactical:
- Strategy: High-level direction and positioning
- Product: Product planning and definition
- Programs: Marketing and sales programs
- Sales Enablement: Tools and training for sales
- Support: Customer support and success
Each box contains a specific deliverable or activity. For example, "Win/Loss Analysis," "Positioning," "Launch Plan," "Sales Training," etc.
The framework's power is in showing how activities connect. You can't create effective sales training without positioning. You can't prioritize features without understanding market problems. Everything builds on everything else.
The Strategic Foundation: Market and Focus
The top two rows—Market and Focus—establish strategic direction. These drive everything below.
Market activities ensure you understand customers and competitive landscape. Key boxes include:
Market Research: Understand market size, growth, trends, and dynamics. This isn't one-time work—continuous market monitoring informs strategy.
Win/Loss Analysis: Systematically analyze why you win and lose deals. This reveals true competitive position and where your value proposition resonates or fails.
Competitive Analysis: Track competitor capabilities, positioning, pricing, and go-to-market strategies. Build ongoing competitive intelligence, not point-in-time assessments.
Customer Interviews: Regular conversations with customers and prospects about their problems, workflows, and needs. This qualitative insight reveals opportunities quantitative data misses.
Focus activities translate market understanding into strategic direction:
Market Segmentation: Define segments based on needs, not just demographics. Different segments need different solutions and messaging.
Personas: Detailed profiles of buyer types, including goals, challenges, decision criteria, and information sources. Personas make abstract segments concrete.
Positioning: Articulate your unique value for specific segments. What do you do better than alternatives for these customers?
Product Roadmap: Prioritized plan for product evolution based on market needs and strategic goals.
Without solid market and focus work, everything downstream becomes guesswork. You're launching features nobody needs, creating messaging that doesn't resonate, and enabling sales to pitch the wrong value.
Business Model and Partnerships
The Business row addresses how you make money and who helps you succeed.
Pricing: Determine pricing model, price points, and packaging based on value delivery and market positioning. Pricing is strategy, not just numbers on a page.
Business Case: Build financial models showing expected costs, revenue, and ROI for major initiatives. This gets organizational buy-in and resources.
Partner Programs: Define partner ecosystem, identify strategic partners, and create programs that extend your reach without expanding your direct sales force.
Strategic Alliances: Form relationships with complementary vendors, system integrators, or technology partners that enhance your solution or accelerate market access.
Product marketers often skip business model work, assuming it's finance's job. But PMMs should inform pricing strategy with market insights, validate business cases with customer data, and identify partnership opportunities that address market needs.
Go-to-Market Execution
The Go-to-Market row covers launching and promoting products.
Launch Plan: Coordinated plan for product launches including timeline, activities, responsibilities, and success metrics. Transforms product releases from technical milestones to market events.
Marketing Plan: Integrated strategy for generating awareness, interest, and demand. Includes campaigns, content, events, and channel strategies.
Thought Leadership: Building market authority through original research, innovative thinking, and industry leadership. Establishes your company as the expert in solving specific problems.
Demand Generation: Programs that create interest and capture leads. This connects to the broader demand engine managed by demand gen teams.
Product marketers own or heavily influence these activities. You're translating product capabilities and market positioning into compelling programs that drive awareness and demand.
Sales Enablement and Support
The bottom rows ensure sales teams and customers can succeed.
Sales Training: Educate sales on product capabilities, competitive positioning, target customers, and selling strategies. Not just product features—how to sell.
Sales Tools: Battlecards, pitch decks, demo scripts, ROI calculators, and other materials sales needs to close deals effectively.
Implementation: Customer onboarding and deployment support that ensures successful product adoption after purchase.
Customer Success: Programs that drive adoption, expansion, and retention among existing customers.
Strong sales enablement is what separates companies that generate leads from companies that close deals. Product marketing must equip sales to have effective conversations, handle objections, and demonstrate value.
How Product Marketers Use This Framework
The Pragmatic Framework helps product marketers in several ways:
Role clarity: When stakeholders ask "what does product marketing do?", point to relevant boxes. You own some boxes completely (positioning, launch plans, sales training). You contribute to others (roadmap, pricing, customer success).
Prioritization: When overwhelmed with requests, use the framework to sequence work. Strategic activities (top rows) come before tactical activities (bottom rows). You can't create sales tools before defining positioning.
Gap identification: Map your current activities to the framework. Which boxes are empty? Those are capability gaps that might explain why things aren't working.
Communication with stakeholders: Use the framework in planning sessions. Show how customer interviews inform personas, which drive positioning, which enables sales training. The connections make your work's value clear.
Team planning: If you're building a PMM team, use the framework to distribute responsibilities. One person owns competitive intelligence and win/loss analysis. Another owns launches and marketing programs. The framework prevents gaps and duplication.
Common Mistakes Using the Framework
Treating it as a checklist: The framework isn't a to-do list where you complete each box sequentially. It's a system where activities reinforce each other. Iterate and refine continuously.
Ignoring the strategic foundation: Teams jump to tactical execution (sales training, launch plans) without establishing strategy (positioning, segmentation). This creates busy work that doesn't drive results.
One-person-does-everything: In small companies, one PMM can't execute all 37 boxes well. Prioritize ruthlessly and accept that some boxes will remain incomplete until you can hire.
Perfect before ship: Don't wait for perfect positioning or complete market research before enabling sales. Ship good enough, gather feedback, and iterate.
Framework rigidity: Pragmatic provides structure, not law. Adapt it to your context. Add boxes for activities unique to your business. Remove boxes that aren't relevant.
Adapting the Framework for Modern Product Marketing
The Pragmatic Framework was created before product-led growth, AI-powered tools, and modern digital channels. Some companies adapt it:
Add Product-Led Growth boxes: User onboarding, in-app messaging, usage analytics, and product-qualified lead scoring.
Add Community boxes: Developer communities, user groups, online forums, and peer-to-peer support.
Add Digital-first boxes: SEO strategy, content marketing, social selling, and digital product experiences.
Split Sales Enablement: Separate boxes for inside sales, field sales, channel partners, and customer success sellers.
The framework's structure accommodates evolution. The core insight—that strategic work must precede tactical execution—remains valid.
When to Use the Pragmatic Framework
Use this framework when:
- You're defining the product marketing function
- Stakeholders have conflicting expectations of PMM
- You need to build a PMM team and allocate responsibilities
- You're explaining product marketing's value to executives
- You're overwhelmed and need to prioritize
Don't use it when:
- You need quick tactical guidance for a specific project
- You're in rapid experimentation mode pre-product-market fit
- Your organization is too small to specialize roles
The Pragmatic Framework is most valuable for established companies with defined products, customer bases, and go-to-market motions. Early-stage startups need flexibility more than comprehensive frameworks.
Getting Started with Pragmatic
Download the framework from Pragmatic Institute's website. Print it large enough to read all 37 boxes.
Map your current activities onto the framework. Which boxes are you actively working on? Which are gaps?
Identify your top 7-8 priority boxes based on business stage and competitive needs. These become your focus areas.
Share the framework with cross-functional partners. Use it to align on what product marketing owns vs. contributes to vs. doesn't do.
Revisit quarterly. As your product and market evolve, your priority boxes will shift.
The Pragmatic Marketing Framework won't make strategic decisions for you. But it will ensure you consider all the activities required for product and market success, prioritize them appropriately, and execute in the right order.
That structure turns chaotic, reactive product marketing into systematic, strategic work that drives revenue growth.