When I joined Capital One in 2018, the product marketing function was essentially non-existent. We had talented people scattered across the organization doing product marketing work, but there was no unified vision, no consistent approach, and certainly no recognition of product marketing as a distinct discipline.
Today, we have over 200 product marketers across the company, working in every major business line from credit cards to banking to our B2B software offerings.
We’ve built a function that’s recognized as a strategic partner to product management, a driver of business outcomes, and a career destination for top marketing talent.
The journey from zero to 200 wasn’t always smooth. Along the way, we made plenty of mistakes, learned hard lessons, and discovered what actually works when building a product marketing function from scratch in a large, complex organization.
This is the story of how we did it, and more importantly, the practical lessons you can apply whether you’re building your first product marketing team or scaling an existing one.
Tim Mitchell
Starting with the fundamentals: What product marketing actually does
One of our biggest early challenges was simply explaining what product marketing is and why it matters. Even today, if you ask ten different people to define product marketing, you’ll likely get ten different answers. At Capital One, we needed a clear, consistent definition that would resonate across our diverse business lines.
We landed on this: Product marketing is the function that deeply understands our customers and markets, and uses those insights to drive product strategy, go-to-market execution, and business growth. It’s the connective tissue between product, sales, marketing, and customers.
But definitions only get you so far. What really mattered was demonstrating the tangible value product marketing could deliver. We focused on three core areas where product marketing could make an immediate, measurable impact:
First, customer insights and market intelligence. Our product marketers became the voice of the customer within product teams, bringing qualitative and quantitative insights that shaped product roadmaps and feature prioritization.
Second, go-to-market strategy and execution. We owned the process of taking products from concept to market, ensuring we had the right positioning, messaging, and launch strategies to drive adoption.
Third, sales enablement and partner marketing. Especially in our B2B businesses, product marketers became the critical link between product teams and the field, ensuring our sales teams and partners had the tools, training, and content they needed to succeed.
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The power of starting small and proving value
When you’re building a function from scratch in a large organization, the temptation is to go big immediately. Draft the comprehensive strategy document. Request the massive budget. Hire dozens of people. We resisted that temptation, and it made all the difference.
Instead, we started with a small tiger team of four experienced product marketers. Our mandate was simple: pick a few high-visibility projects where we could demonstrate clear, measurable impact within 90 days. We weren’t trying to boil the ocean. We were trying to create proof points.
One of our first projects was supporting the launch of a new small business credit card. The product team had built what they believed was a compelling offering, but initial market testing was lukewarm. Our product marketing team dove deep into customer research, competitive analysis, and market dynamics.
What we discovered transformed the entire go-to-market approach. The product team had been focusing on rewards and points, assuming that’s what small business owners cared about most.
But our research revealed that what really mattered to this segment was cash flow management and the ability to separate business and personal expenses easily.
We repositioned the entire product around these insights, developed new messaging that spoke directly to these pain points, and created a targeted campaign that reached small business owners where they actually were, not where we assumed they’d be.
Success stories like this became our calling card. Each win gave us more credibility, more resources, and more requests for product marketing support from other parts of the business. Within six months, we’d grown from four people to twelve. Within a year, we had dedicated product marketing teams in each major business line.
