Part II: Narrative Drift
If you’ve ever watched Formula 1, you know drifting isn’t the fastest way around a corner. It’s dramatic, but it costs speed, precision, and control. It overheats the tires. Drivers avoid it.
Organizations that rely on a consistent message have their own version of drift. It isn’t as obvious, and it’s rarely intentional, but the result is the same loss of efficiency and control. It looks subtle at first. Over time, it costs you the race.
“We’re aligned.”
It’s one of the most reassuring phrases you’ll hear in a product organization. It usually comes at the end of a roadmap review, a launch meeting, or a strategy session. Decisions have been made, priorities have been debated, everyone has nodded along, and the meeting ends with a collective sense that we’re all moving in the same direction.
Then everyone goes back to work.
A few weeks later, Product has described the new capability one way. Sales has found a simpler way to explain it in customer conversations. Customer Success has adjusted the language based on implementation experience. Marketing has refined the campaign positioning. Leadership has woven it into a presentation for the board. Nobody is contradicting anyone else. In fact, everyone is trying to be helpful. Yet somehow, the organization is no longer telling the same story.
I’ve been thinking about this ever since writing about messaging debt. In that essay, I argued that organizations accumulate debt when product innovation outpaces their ability to explain it consistently. The more I sit with that idea, the more I think messaging debt isn’t the root problem. It’s the evidence that something else has been happening all along.
There’s no way to pinpoint the exact moment it happens, but the story starts to drift because every team has to translate the product into language that helps them do their job. Engineering thinks in architecture and implementation. Product thinks in capabilities and priorities. Sales thinks in customer outcomes. Customer Success thinks in adoption. Marketing thinks in differentiation and clarity.
Each translation is reasonable. Together, they reshape the original meaning.
Imagine a company launching a new AI-powered research capability. Engineering is understandably proud of the retrieval architecture and talks about semantic search, ranking models, and contextual retrieval. Product reframes it as a capability that helps professionals find information faster across multiple sources. By the time it reaches Product Marketing, the conversation shifts again, because customers don’t buy retrieval systems. They buy confidence and time. The messaging becomes “Find trusted answers in seconds.”
Sales hears that and starts describing it as “an expert by your side” in every customer conversation. Customer Success teaches users to think of it as “a research assistant” that helps them work more efficiently. Support documentation calls it “intelligent search,” because that’s the terminology customers use when they’re looking for help.
None of those explanations are wrong. In fact, each one is probably better suited to its audience than the last. But a year later, if you asked six people across the organization what that capability actually is, you’d hear six different answers. Somewhere along the way, the organization stopped translating the product and quietly started redefining it.
What’s interesting is how we usually respond when this happens. We assume we have a communication problem. We schedule another meeting, update the messaging document, refresh the sales deck, or hold another enablement session. Those things are often necessary, but I’ve started wondering if they’re treating the symptom rather than the cause.
Communication is something we do. Shared understanding is something we maintain.
The moment a decision leaves the room where it was made, misinterpretation begins. Every demo, customer conversation, analyst briefing, onboarding session, and conference presentation introduces another opportunity for the story to evolve. Alignment isn’t something we achieve once and then preserve indefinitely. Left alone, it decays.
That realization has changed how I think about product marketing.
For years, we’ve described PMM as the bridge between Product and Go-to-Market. It’s a useful metaphor, but I don’t think it captures what the function actually does. Bridges connect two sides. Product marketing touches almost every team that shapes how a product is understood, inside and outside the company. We don’t just move information from one group to another. We help preserve its meaning as it moves.
That’s why I think messaging is often wildly misunderstood.
Messaging isn’t writing. It isn’t a positioning document sitting in a shared drive, waiting for someone to download it before a launch. Good messaging is durable. It survives repeated retelling. It gives Sales enough flexibility to connect with customers without having to invent a new story every quarter. It gives Customer Success a framework for teaching adoption without drifting from the original customer problem. It gives executives consistent language they can use with analysts, investors, and employees alike.
In other words, product marketing isn’t simply creating the story. It’s helping the story survive.
One hallmark of companies that avoid narrative drift is that customers describe them in the company’s own language.
Amazon Prime shows what that looks like in practice. Over the years, Amazon has added far more than free two-day shipping. Prime now includes streaming video, music, photo storage, gaming benefits, e-books, grocery discounts, and pharmacy savings, a list of services that could easily have become separate brands with separate stories.
Most companies would have introduced each addition as a new value proposition. Amazon instead reinforces a single, familiar narrative: Prime makes your membership more valuable. Every new benefit feels like another reason to belong, not another product customers have to learn. The portfolio has grown dramatically. The mental model hasn’t moved.
That’s what preventing narrative drift looks like. The products evolve, but the story customers tell themselves about why they subscribe doesn’t have to. Amazon isn’t just adding features. It’s reinforcing the same promise, no matter how many new capabilities it introduces.
When customers repeat your framing instead of inventing their own, you’ve done more than write good messaging. You’ve built a narrative that survives translation.
The problem is getting harder. Products evolve faster than they used to. Features ship continuously. Teams are more distributed. Customers expect immediate answers, and every interaction is another chance for the product to be interpreted, summarized, and explained. The faster organizations move, the more opportunities there are for meaning to drift.
That’s why I increasingly think one of product marketing’s most valuable responsibilities isn’t launching products. It’s maintaining organizational memory.
Engineering has version control. Finance has ledgers. Legal has contracts. Product has roadmaps. Every discipline has a system for preserving important decisions over time.
But who remembers why a capability was positioned the way it was? Who notices when Customer Success, Sales, and Marketing begin solving different versions of the same customer problem? Who recognizes that the language customers hear today is no longer the language the product team intended six months ago?
I suspect that’s what product marketing has always been doing, even if we haven’t described it that way. Maybe alignment was never the goal. Maybe alignment is the starting point. Maybe the real work begins after everyone leaves the room, when the product starts its journey through the organization and into the market.
Our job isn’t to stop the translation. It shouldn’t be. Every audience deserves language that makes sense to them. Our job is to make sure that after dozens of conversations, presentations, demos, and customer interactions, the story still resembles the one we set out to tell.
Because once the market learns a story different from the one you intended, you’re no longer managing messaging. You’re paying interest on it.