“Loved” Is Not Optional: Why Product Marketing Is the Missing Link in Your Growth Engine
What founders, PMs, and marketers need to learn from Martina Lauchengco’s battle-tested playbook for building market-leading tech products.
I. Introduction: The Case for Strategic Product Marketing
Ask any founder what makes a product succeed and you’ll hear the usual: “great UX,” “tight feedback loops,” “feature velocity,” “PMF.” These aren’t wrong—but they are incomplete. Because the truth is, plenty of well-designed, high-potential products never break through. Not because the product is bad—but because the market doesn’t understand it, care about it, or know where to place it.
That gap between product and perception? That’s the work of product marketing. And it’s been deeply misunderstood.
Martina Lauchengco’s Loved delivers a long-overdue correction. It’s not a book about branding, nor a startup growth hack manual. It’s a strategic, execution-level blueprint for what great product marketing actually is—and why it’s essential from seed stage to scale.
“Product marketing’s purpose is to drive product adoption by shaping market perception through strategic marketing activities that meet business goals.”
In other words: PMM isn’t just the launch checklist team or the deck-polish squad. Done right, product marketing shapes how the market sees you—what category you’re in, why you matter, and who should care now. It aligns product, growth, and brand under one strategic lens.
This book is for anyone trying to cross the chasm with something worth building. If you’re a founder struggling to explain what makes your startup different, a PM frustrated that users aren’t connecting, or a marketer caught between tactical execution and strategic ambiguity—Loved is your field guide.
II. The Four Fundamentals: What Product Marketing Really Does
The heart of Loved is its articulation of four critical roles that effective product marketers must play—especially in tech-forward, product-led companies. Lauchengco calls these the Four Fundamentals, and they serve as both an org design framework and a set of hats PMMs must be able to wear.
1. Ambassador – The Market’s Voice Inside the Company
PMMs must deeply understand customers—not just through surveys or NPS scores, but through ongoing, qualitative immersion. The Ambassador is responsible for surfacing insights about customer needs, language, expectations, and shifting market context.
In practice:
Build a Customer Insight Repository (e.g., in Notion) that includes patterns from sales calls, customer support tickets, win/loss reports, and community feedback.
Run Monthly Market Pulse meetings where PM, Sales, and Marketing align on what’s changing in buyer behavior or competitor narratives.
Translate insights into actionable product implications (“Users aren’t asking for X, but they keep describing Y pain—can we reframe our feature to match that mental model?”)
Example: At Quizlet, PMM-led research uncovered that teachers were using the app for homework, not just study prep. That shifted positioning from “flashcards” to “instructional platform,” enabling deeper school adoption.
2. Strategist – Architect of Go-to-Market
A strategist PMM is not just handed a product to promote; they collaborate from roadmap to launch to make sure the GTM motion is viable, clear, and calibrated to the stage of both product and market.
How to implement:
Build a GTM Canvas per major launch, identifying target personas, value prop, adoption barriers, channels, and positioning.
Define Launch Exit Criteria—e.g., “Sales has new enablement assets,” “CS is trained on feature use cases,” “Churn driver X is addressed.”
Example: Figma didn’t say, “We’re another design tool.” It framed itself around multiplayer design—a wedge that turned collaboration into a category-defining differentiator.
3. Storyteller – Master of Positioning and Narrative
Storytellers don't just write taglines—they shape the mental model the market holds. That includes the problem, the old way, the shift, and the better future your product enables.
How to apply it:
Craft a Positioning Hierarchy: one-liner → key pillars → proof points → detailed narrative.
Test narratives in sales calls and onboarding: do people “get it” quickly? Do they retell it accurately?
Example: Superhuman didn’t compete on feature set. It positioned around speed—“the fastest email experience ever made”—making time saved its core metric and promise. Story beat spec.
4. Evangelist – Catalyst for Internal and External Influence
The Evangelist aligns stakeholders, equips Sales and CS, and sparks external advocates. It’s about multiplying narrative reach.
Tactics:
Identify and nurture Customer Champions: invite them to betas, co-create case studies, offer social visibility.
Train internal teams using narrative-led enablement: not just “what’s new,” but “why it matters to our buyer.”
Example: Salesforce’s “No Software” wasn’t just an ad—it was a movement. It reframed the category, equipped the field, and told a story that evangelists (internal and external) could repeat.
Why This Framework Works
The brilliance of the Four Fundamentals is that they scale:
In a 5-person startup, the founder plays all four roles.
At Series B, a generalist PMM might cover all four, flexing based on priority.
At scale, teams specialize, but the framework remains the org design map.
More importantly, they serve as a diagnostic tool. If adoption is slow, is the Ambassador missing key signals? If Sales can’t tell the story, is the Storyteller role underpowered? If marketing is misaligned with the roadmap, where is the Strategist?
The lesson: Great products become loved products only when these roles are played well and early.
III. Positioning vs. Messaging: Owning the Mind of the Market
Martina Lauchengco makes one thing clear: if you don’t control how the market frames your product, your competitors—or your customers’ own confusion—will do it for you.
That’s why she draws a sharp line between two often conflated concepts: positioning and messaging.
“Positioning is the long game. Messaging is the short game. Don’t confuse them.”
Both are critical. But they play different roles in shaping market perception—and require different strategies to get right.
Positioning: The Mental Real Estate You Claim
Positioning is how your product is understood. It defines your product’s place in the buyer’s brain:
Who it’s for
What category it lives in
What problem it solves
Why it’s better than alternatives
Lauchengco builds on April Dunford’s framework, but adds a product marketing execution layer. Her five components of positioning are:
Customer Segment – who exactly you’re targeting now (not eventually)
Category – what market you want to win, or define
Competitive Alternatives – what your buyers would do if you didn’t exist
Key Differentiators – the features or capabilities that matter
Customer Benefit – how your product improves their world
This isn’t a branding exercise. It’s a strategic blueprint.
Use Case: Positioning a Dev Tool
Let’s say you’re launching DevSync, a CI/CD platform for distributed teams.
That positioning informs everything from pitch decks to onboarding copy to pricing pages.
If you skip this, you’ll end up with generic taglines like “Next-gen DevOps, reimagined”—which mean nothing.
Messaging: Communicating the Positioning
If positioning is how you want to be understood, messaging is how you say it, where, and to whom. It changes based on audience and channel, but should always reinforce your strategic position.
Lauchengco recommends building a Message Map—a tactical output that connects the high-level story to assets like website copy, sales decks, and customer emails.
A typical Message Map includes:
Core Positioning Statement: “The fastest way for distributed teams to deploy together.”
Three Pillars: e.g. “Slack-native,” “GitHub-optimized,” “Infra-lite.”
Proof Points: stats, testimonials, demo videos
Objections: “What if we already use Jenkins?” → “We integrate without disruption.”
Real-World Example: Descript
Descript could’ve pitched itself as a quirky podcast editing app. But its positioning was radically clear:
“Edit audio and video like you edit text.”
That framing reframed the category—and the messaging followed:
Pillar 1: Text-based editing (cut audio by deleting text)
Pillar 2: Overdub (AI voice clone)
Pillar 3: Screen recording + publishing
The result? Descript expanded from a podcast tool into a creator infrastructure platform—with a loyal fanbase and a differentiated GTM.
Applying It in Your Org
To operationalize this distinction:
Tip: Revisit positioning quarterly. Test messaging weekly. They evolve on different clocks.
Common Pitfalls
Mistaking a tagline for positioning: “All-in-one platform” is vague unless it answers who it’s for and why now.
Fragmented messaging: Teams use different value props in different channels, creating confusion and dilution.
Category myopia: If you don’t actively choose your category, the market will mislabel you—and that’s hard to undo.
Summary Takeaway
Product marketing isn’t just telling a good story. It’s winning the strategic battle for mental shelf space. And you can’t do that without clear, differentiated positioning backed by resonant, testable messaging.
As Lauchengco puts it, great PMMs:
“Connect what the market needs with what the product delivers—and frame that connection in a way the market can understand, remember, and act on.”
IV. Strategic Levers: GTM Canvas, Pricing as Messaging, and Brand as Experience
Beyond frameworks and philosophy, Loved delivers what most books on marketing gloss over: tools you can actually use.
In Part III, Martina Lauchengco introduces a set of strategic levers that product marketers must master to align product with adoption. These are the mechanisms that take great positioning and turn it into repeatable, scalable traction.
The Product Go-To-Market (GTM) Canvas
One of the most valuable tools in the book is the GTM Canvas. Inspired by the Lean Canvas and Business Model Canvas, Lauchengco’s version is specifically designed to connect product strategy with launch execution.
It answers one core question: How are we going to take this product (or feature) to market in a way that drives real adoption?
Key Elements of the Canvas:
Target Customer
Core Problem / Trigger
Key Differentiator
Value Proposition
Category / Competitive Context
Pricing & Packaging
Adoption Channels
Success Metrics
Use Case: Applying the GTM Canvas to a New Feature
Scenario: You’re a founder building WeeklyAI, a work summary tool that auto-generates weekly updates based on team activity in tools like Slack, Notion, and Asana.
Your GTM Canvas might look like:
How to use it: Bring this to your product marketing–product–growth sync. Let each team flag gaps: “Do we know the triggers yet?” “Is pricing consistent with perceived value?” “Do we have messaging aligned with the core job to be done?”
Loved emphasizes that GTM is not an event—it’s a continuous process. The canvas isn’t a one-and-done doc; it’s a living blueprint.
Pricing: A Strategic Signal, Not a Spreadsheet
Lauchengco devotes a full chapter to pricing strategy, and it’s one of the book’s hidden gems. Her argument is clear:
“Pricing is more than a number. It’s a message about your product’s value.”
Founders often treat pricing as:
A copycat move (“What’s our closest competitor doing?”)
A finance-led task (“We need to hit this revenue per user”)
A last-minute decision before launch
But in reality, pricing shapes perception. If you underprice a premium product, you create doubt. If you gate too much in freemium, you stunt virality. If your model is mismatched to buyer behavior, churn increases.
Real Case: Expensify
Lauchengco describes how Expensify chose to target individual users, not just the finance team. The product was free for employees and only charged once teams onboarded. This allowed them to win bottom-up, land and expand—and align pricing with usage and perceived value.
Tactical Tip: Treat pricing like positioning.
What story does it tell?
Who does it favor?
What behaviors does it encourage?
In early-stage products, Lauchengco suggests experimentation over perfection. Test usage-based vs. flat-tiered models. Observe where customers drop off. Use pricing feedback as market insight, not just monetization pressure.
Brand: What You Deliver + What People Say
One of the most useful mindset shifts in Loved is how it frames brand. It’s not your logo. It’s not your color palette. It’s not just your copy.
“Brand is the sum of how a company presents itself and what people say about it.”
That means product marketers own brand not just through design—but through:
Onboarding experience
Support documentation
Product reliability
Consistency of narrative across sales, site, and in-app
Application: Brand Experience Audit
Try this as a founder or PMM:
Choose one of your product’s top use cases.
Walk through it as a new user:
Is the onboarding flow consistent with your homepage pitch?
Does the support center reinforce your positioning?
Do emails and feature alerts use your brand tone?
Ask five users to describe your product in one sentence.
Do they echo your intended positioning?
If not, you don’t have a brand problem—you have a product marketing alignment problem.
Key Insight
The GTM Canvas, pricing strategy, and brand experience are not separate tools. They are expressions of the same core truth: your product needs to mean something in the market. And product marketers are the team that ensures it does.
“PMMs give the product a voice, but more importantly—they give it context.”
V. Release Scales & PMM Maturity: How to Launch With Strategic Intent
One of the common traps in product-led organizations is this: treating every release like it deserves a launch, and every launch like it’s going to change the market.
The result? Teams over-invest in minor improvements and under-invest in game-changing updates. Sales teams get burned out from launch fatigue. Users start ignoring “what’s new.” Strategic moments pass with a whisper, while tiny updates are accompanied by fireworks.
Martina Lauchengco saw this first-hand in her time at Microsoft—and it’s why she developed one of the most practical frameworks in the book: the Release Scales model.
The Release Scales Framework
Lauchengco defines five levels of releases. Each is based on impact, not effort. The higher the scale, the more it should shift perception, adoption, or behavior.
How to Use It
Step 1: Evaluate each release’s strategic impact:
Does it unlock new use cases?
Will it shift market perception?
Can it drive expansion or new adoption?
Step 2: Assign a scale. Document it alongside the launch plan.
Step 3: Align GTM investment accordingly:
Scale 3? Focus on existing users and in-product nudges.
Scale 5? Build a full funnel campaign and prep Sales with new narratives.
Example:
Your startup launches a new dashboard builder:
If it’s just a UI upgrade? Scale 2.
If it allows customers to self-serve reporting (removing CS bottlenecks)? Scale 4.
If it enables you to move into a new market (e.g. from SMB to Enterprise)? Scale 5.
Why This Matters
Without this model, companies default to one of two extremes:
The “always launch” syndrome: Every Jira ticket gets a splashy email, creating noise and fatigue.
The “quiet drop” problem: Major shifts (like moving upmarket or launching mobile) get buried in changelogs.
Loved gives teams a shared language for aligning marketing, product, sales, and customer success. And it prevents the classic “Why didn’t anyone know about this?” failure mode.
Building PMM Maturity Across Startup Stages
In the final part of Loved, Lauchengco speaks directly to startup leaders: When should you hire your first PMM? What kind of person do you need at Series A vs. Series C?
Her answer: it depends on stage, strategy, and market readiness—but most teams wait too long or hire the wrong type.
Here’s a practical guide based on her recommendations:
Hiring Mistakes to Avoid
Hiring too junior: You get tactical output (emails, slides) but no strategic insight. This often frustrates product and sales leaders.
Hiring too late: You’ve already botched your positioning or launched into the wrong segment, and now need to backtrack.
Hiring demand-gen instead of PMM: Demand gen drives leads. PMM drives understanding. You need both—but not interchangeably.
PMM as Force Multiplier
The best PMMs do more than “launch features.” They:
Influence roadmap by surfacing customer pain
Align teams around buyer mental models
Prevent sales from improvising narratives that don’t match product truth
Reduce churn by clarifying value before a user ever signs up
As Lauchengco puts it:
“The best product marketers don’t wait for permission. They act in service of product success.”
In early-stage companies, that might mean writing the website copy. In growth companies, it might mean steering the entire GTM strategy. In all cases, PMMs are the connective tissue between the product you build and the market that must love it.
VI. Final Verdict: Loved as a Playbook for Building Market Leadership
If Crossing the Chasm is the gospel of tech product adoption, then Loved is the operations manual for making sure your product actually crosses it — and doesn’t fall into obscurity along the way.
Martina Lauchengco has written what should become required reading for any founder, product leader, or early-stage team looking to build not just a great product, but a beloved one. Not beloved in some fluffy, brand-love sense — but in the sense that users understand it, want it, tell others about it, and can’t imagine switching.
The core message is both simple and powerful:
“Product marketing is how products become loved.”
And it’s not a nice-to-have. It’s how Dropbox became more than file storage. How Figma overtook Adobe. How Slack outpaced HipChat. It’s the difference between solving a problem and being chosen to solve it.
What Makes Loved Stand Out
Strategic clarity: It defines product marketing in a way that connects to company-building, not just marketing execution.
Operator realism: Lauchengco doesn’t romanticize anything. She draws from the trenches—Microsoft, Costanoa, Quizlet, Salesforce—and offers tools that work in real-world teams.
Stage-sensitive advice: Whether you’re at Seed or Series D, there’s guidance for how to scale PMM capabilities without overhiring or underinvesting.
Unification of frameworks: The Four Fundamentals, GTM Canvas, Positioning Map, Release Scales, and more all fit together into a coherent system.
How to Use This Book Practically
Founders: Use it to shape your GTM before hiring marketing. Understand what kind of marketer you need, and what stories you must tell.
PMs: Use it to collaborate more effectively with PMMs—and push for one if your team lacks strategic marketing insight.
Product marketers: Use it as a playbook to elevate your role from asset creator to market shaper.
Executives: Use it to diagnose where messaging, adoption, or revenue plateaus stem from GTM misalignment.
It’s especially relevant in today’s environment:
In AI-native products, where categories shift fast
In PLG businesses, where self-serve onboarding is the brand
In crowded SaaS markets, where clarity is the only sustainable moat
Final Takeaway
No matter how elegantly your product is built or how viral your referral loop is, it won’t scale if users can’t understand what it’s for, why it matters, or how to explain it to others.
That’s the job of product marketing. And Loved finally gives that job the definition, respect, and toolkit it deserves.
“Without love, you don’t get usage. Without usage, you don’t get growth.”
If you’re building something worth using — then this book will help you make it worth choosing.