Vol. 01 — Spring 2026

The state of a discipline still being named.

An index of current thinking on technical marketing — the work that sits between engineering, product, and the people who buy and operate the technology being built.

12
Pieces indexed
5
Taxonomic sections
Q3
Next update
Editor's Note

Technical marketing sits between engineering, product, and the people actually buying and operating the technology being built.

Different companies call it different things. At Amazon Web Services and Snowflake, parts of the function often sit within product marketing. At ServiceNow and Salesforce, it shows up more directly as technical product marketing. At Databricks and smaller infrastructure vendors, it often blends into developer relations, solutions engineering, enablement, and field strategy.

The titles vary, but the core discipline is recognizable across all of them.

"The work clearly exists, but the industry still lacks a shared language and framework for defining it."

That's the reason this index exists.

The phrase "technical marketing" is used in two distinct ways. Some practitioners use it to describe the technical implementation side of digital marketing — tag management, analytics architecture, and the work sometimes called marketing engineering. The Technical Marketing Handbook by Simmer is the strongest free resource in that space. This index covers a different discipline: the technical marketing function inside enterprise software companies, where the work sits between engineering, product, and the people buying complex technical products.

Right now, the thinking around technical marketing is scattered across vendor blogs, career guides, analyst commentary, conference talks, and a relatively small number of practitioner essays. Some of it is excellent. Some of it captures only part of the role. Very little of it reflects the full shape of the work or why it has become increasingly important in modern enterprise software.

Volume 01 is an attempt to start organizing that thinking.

The entries included here are not meant to be exhaustive. They were selected because each one captures something true about how the discipline is practiced, understood, or evolving today. Editorial notes are included alongside each piece to highlight what it gets right, where it falls short, and how it connects to the broader conversation.

This index is intentionally curated, not comprehensive. Pieces are included based on the strength of the ideas and specificity of the perspective, not the size of the brand or the popularity of the author.

The empty spaces are intentional too. There are still major gaps in the published thinking around this field, and part of the goal is to help surface and fill them over time.

New volumes will publish quarterly. Submissions, recommendations, and thoughtful disagreement are always welcome.

Foundations

Pieces attempting to define the discipline.

What Is Technical Marketing?

The cleanest entry-level definition available. Strong on the explanatory dimension. Undersells the architectural component that practitioners spend most of their time on.

Aligning Technical Marketing and Go-to-Market

The largest PMM professional org weighs in on the technical marketing function and its relationship to go-to-market motion. Strong on cross-functional positioning. Less specific than the practitioner accounts on what the day-to-day work looks like, but useful for understanding how the field's largest professional org defines it.

Career and Hiring

How the role is recruited for and structured.

What Is Technical Marketing? Skills and Tips

Worth reading for what hiring managers think the job description should say. Notable for what it omits: demo architecture, analyst relations, competitive intelligence.

Product Marketing Program

The course materials are a working snapshot of what venture-backed software companies are screening for in product marketing hires — including the technical-adjacent dimensions of the role. Worth reading as a barometer of where the discipline's hiring expectations are pointed.

One slot open for inclusion

Looking for the strongest practitioner-written take on career paths and how senior technical marketers describe what they actually screen for in candidates.

Frameworks and Methodologies

Structured approaches to the work itself.

The Demo Coherence Index, v1.1

The first published framework for scoring demo coherence across nine validated formats. Required reading whether or not the methodology converges with the rest of the field.

Obviously Awesome

The canonical positioning text in B2B software. Required reading regardless of whether the function is called product marketing, technical marketing, or technical product marketing. The frameworks here shape how the discipline thinks about category, customer, and the work of differentiation.

Great Demo!

Still the only validated demo methodology in print. Twenty years old and most of it holds. Required reading for anyone making demo architecture claims.

Industry Perspectives

Practitioners writing from inside the work.

What is a Technical Marketing Manager?

A practicing technical marketing manager describes the role from inside Red Hat. Strong on the day-to-day texture of the work and on the position's location between product management, product marketing, and engineering. Light on the strategic-influence dimension that senior TMMs at larger vendors operate at, but the most credible named-practitioner account of the work currently in public circulation.

Two slots open for inclusion

Reaching out to practitioners at AWS, Snowflake, Salesforce, and Databricks for original pieces on how the function is structured at their organizations. This section sits underweight deliberately. The absence of published thinking from named senior practitioners is one of the field's most telling gaps.

Emerging Tensions

What's unresolved. What's about to change.

The Horseless Carriage Problem

Names the tension: AI demos that mimic existing demo patterns instead of inventing new ones. The argument applies beyond demos to the discipline itself.

The Carriage and the Engine

The follow-up. Workflow-layer governance fails open by design. Implications for any technical marketing function that builds demos around current platform abstractions.