Hypergrowth doesn’t always knock on your door. It often barges in without warning, disrupting quarterly plans, launches, and hiring strategies.
As the roadmap expands and sales push into new markets, your org suddenly demands sharper narratives, faster enablement, and measurable impact.
Where is product marketing, you wonder? Right in the middle. Calm on the outside, breathing into a paper bag on the inside.
Hypergrowth looks great in boardrooms. In reality, it feels like running at full speed while the terrain keeps shifting beneath you. Priorities change every week.
Decisions that once took a quick Slack now need agreement from seven teams. Product marketers are handling more, influencing more, and juggling more information than ever. Everyone sees the work, and pressure is the only constant.
This is what hypergrowth really looks like. And it raises a harder question: what actually changes for product marketing teams when growth accelerates beyond anything they’ve seen before?
I’ve worked on leadership teams where the company grew fivefold in a year or two, sometimes during mergers and acquisitions, often outpacing roles, processes, and org charts. In those moments, product marketing wasn’t just supporting growth. It was absorbing the chaos so everyone else could keep moving.
The State of Product Marketing 2025 shows that almost half of product marketers now work in mid-growth or scale-up environments. Hypergrowth may look different across companies, but it has become a familiar reality for many PMM teams.
Hypergrowth doesn’t reward leaders who pile on more work. It rewards those who bring clarity, protect focus, and build trust early enough for teams to move without permission.
This blog post is about that kind of leadership.
Hypergrowth changes the PMM job overnight
In stable companies, product marketing already does a lot. In hypergrowth, the workload can feel overwhelming.
The 2025 PMA report shows that 91% of PMMs own positioning and messaging, but responsibilities like sales enablement jumped from 64% to nearly 79% in just one year. Onboarding responsibilities nearly doubled. Competitive intelligence and revenue-facing work surged.
PMMs are no longer “launch people.” They are expected to:
- Shape go-to-market strategy
- Enable increasingly complex sales motions
- Own narratives across expanding portfolios
- Influence stakeholders and revenue without authority
But the biggest challenge during hypergrowth isn’t just more tasks. It’s dealing with uncertainty.
Uncertainty pushes teams to grow quickly or risk falling apart.
I’ve learned the hard way that my role as a leader isn’t to be the best PMM in the room. It’s to create enough clarity and trust so the team can make good decisions without waiting on me every time things shift.
These are some of the practices that helped me along the way.
1. Speed demands clarity, not control
When everything accelerates, the instinct is to tighten the reins. More check-ins. More approvals. More decks reviewed line by line.
This slows teams down and shows you don’t trust them.
Early on, I made the mistake of trying to stay too close to everything. I reviewed every PMM output, joined every meeting, and solved every problem myself. It felt like the responsible thing to do, but it quietly became a bottleneck.
The better alternative isn’t more oversight. It’s clearer outcomes. When teams know what success looks like, they don’t need constant supervision.
And yet, despite PMM’s growing strategic role, 12.7% of product marketers still report having no clear KPIs. In hypergrowth, that lack of clarity doesn’t disappear. It compounds.
Clarity looks like:
- Explicit ownership, even in gray areas
- Clear prioritization frameworks, not reactive queues
- Decision principles PMMs can apply without escalation
When expectations are clear, PMMs work faster because they aren’t worried about being questioned later.
2. Your org chart will lag. Your decisions can’t
In hypergrowth, you almost never get the team structure you want right when you need it.
PMA data shows that 44% of PMM teams still consist of just one or two people, even as product portfolios and stakeholder demands expand. At the same time, PMM-to-PM ratios are stretching, with more PMMs working with four or five product managers.
I’ve been reading the PMA State of Product Marketing report for years, with the dedication I reserve for airport thrillers. I still remember when, five years ago, we talked seriously about an ideal 1:1 PM-to-PMM ratio.
Hypergrowth or not, that ideal state feels increasingly out of reach. We can see in the data that the 1:1 ratio has declined, suggesting that companies are asking PMMs to cover more ground.
In this context, waiting for the perfect team setup is a losing battle.
Instead, focus on decision velocity:
- Who owns messaging trade-offs
- Who can say no to last-minute scope creep
- Who protects narrative consistency across products
When teams know who makes decisions, they stop sending everything up the chain. This alone can save hours of mental effort each week.
You can fix structure later when things become more stable.
3. Hypergrowth exposes skill gaps. Address them early
Rapid growth doesn’t cause problems. It just makes them visible.
The sharp rise in senior PMM roles, from 17% in 2024 to nearly 29% in 2025, signals a clear shift: organizations need experienced PMMs who can operate under complexity, not just execute tasks.
Some PMMs start to struggle when:
- Stakeholder expectations multiply
- Exec communication becomes non-negotiable
- Data replaces instinct
- Influence matters more than output
Overlooking skill gaps during hypergrowth is costly. And treating everyone the same way is just as risky.
Leadership maturity means matching expectations with the right support, fast. That might mean targeted coaching and mentoring, exposure to strategic work, or investing in structured learning that builds the capabilities hypergrowth demands.
This is where dedicated product marketing training can make a real difference, whether it’s deepening skills in AI for product marketing, pricing, stakeholder management, or measurement.
4. Guard your team’s focus as carefully as you protect revenue
In hypergrowth, distraction is framed as an opportunity. New markets. New segments. New “quick asks” that quietly become permanent.
PMA data highlights a persistent challenge product marketers cite year after year: prioritization under pressure, often compounded by flat or nonexistent budgets. One-third of PMMs still operate without dedicated $$$.
If you don’t protect your team’s focus, it will get eaten up by whoever is closest or loudest.
Saying no or saying it depends isn’t blocking progress. It’s part of good leadership.
When product marketing loses focus, it doesn’t fail loudly. It dilutes. Messaging becomes generic (“everyone” is an ICP). Enablement turns reactive. Launches blur.
Your team might seem busy, but their real impact slowly fades.
5. Hypergrowth breaks functions before it breaks plans
The need for PMMs grows faster than the team can handle, but resources are often expected to just stretch further.
The strongest PMM leaders pause before scaling. They model capacity. They factor in complexity, not just volume. They account for regional nuance, product maturity, and stakeholder load. And they shift the conversation with leadership from “we’re overloaded” to “here’s the gap, here’s the risk, and here’s the investment required to sustain growth.”
That’s when product marketing shifts from just delivering work to becoming a true partner in driving growth.
6. When the PMM team itself starts to grow
Hypergrowth doesn’t just expand what product marketing does. It also challenges how leaders work with their expanding team when it’s time to grow.
A recent Harvard Business Review article on managing sudden team expansion makes a simple but uncomfortable point: when teams double or triple, leaders often keep operating as if nothing fundamental has changed. The problem isn’t headcount growth. It’s leading the team you used to have, not the one you have now.
This becomes apparent quickly in product marketing.
While many PMM teams remain small, the number of teams with 10+ PMMs is also growing, alongside wider ownership spans and more senior roles. What worked when you managed two or three PMMs quickly breaks at ten. Direct involvement turns into bottlenecks. Informal communication stops scaling. Decision-making slows.
At this point, leaders need to move from doing and fixing things themselves to building systems. React less, enable more.
Be less hands-on. Make sure your clarity and guidance reach the team even when you’re not in the room.
7. Don’t mix up resilience with just pushing through
Hypergrowth often celebrates resilience. 996-style grinding. Context switching. Always-on availability.
But simply enduring isn’t a real strategy.
Career aspiration data shows a growing number of PMMs exploring role or employer changes, often driven by burnout and unclear paths.
As a leader in hypergrowth, your role is to normalize:
· imperfect launches
· pushback on timelines
· explicit trade-offs
Your team will copy what you reward. If you value sacrifice more than sustainability, it will cost you in the long run.
8. Keep PMM teams close to strategy, not just execution
Product marketing’s strategic relevance is rising. Revenue generation, win-rate influence, and leadership collaboration are now core PMM KPIs.
More product marketers are now invited to leadership meetings, a positive signal that PMM’s strategic value is being recognized. But access alone doesn’t equal influence.
Product marketing’s value compounds when product marketing leaders:
· share context early, not just outcomes
· explain trade-offs, not just decisions
· normalize uncertainty instead of hiding it
So share your strategy early, even if it’s still a work in progress. That’s how PMMs move from just making slides look pretty to becoming true strategic partners.
That’s a wrap
Looking back, the teams I saw scale best weren’t the ones that moved fastest. They were the ones where I learned to step back early enough to let my team move without permission.
Leading product marketing through hypergrowth means pursuing direction, not just speed under pressure. You won’t get every decision right. Sometimes you’ll have to act without all the facts.
But if you lead with clarity, trust, and focus, you give your PMM team something rare in hypergrowth: the ability to move fast without losing their way.
That’s how product marketing truly scales. Not just in size, but in real impact.
