The limits of horizontal PMM playbooks in vertical markets

There’s a specific kind of frustration that nobody talks about openly in PMM circles. 

It’s not the frustration of a bad brief. Not a difficult stakeholder, or a launch that got deprioritized at the last minute. It’s something more uncomfortable than that. 

It’s when you do everything right, and it still doesn’t work. 

If you work on vertical software, inside a company that has multiple cross- and horizontal solutions alongside vertical ones, each carved out by industry or segment, you’ve probably run into situations like this. The campaign followed the process, the persona was there, the messaging had been reviewed, but the engagement just didn’t come. Or worse: it came, but from the wrong people. 

The first instinct is to look at execution. Send time, frequency, creative – anything that explains the result without questioning the starting point. 

That’s exactly what I did. I was working on a campaign for an HR solution aimed at the supermarket industry. The product team came to a meeting with ideas that had already been validated, campaigns that had worked, messages that had resonated, and a playbook with a real track record behind it. 

The problem was that track record came from a completely different context, not ours. 

The first communications went out. Engagement was abysmal – completely silent. That kind of silence that tells you something’s wrong before you have any data to prove it. 

It took a while to admit it, even to myself. I kept tweaking send times, testing subject lines, swapping out images. Anything that wasn’t questioning the premise. 

But the numbers didn’t improve, so the questions changed. It wasn’t “how do we optimize this?” anymore. It was “why isn’t this landing at all?” 

The answer wasn’t in the creative. It wasn’t in the channel. It was in what the campaign was saying, and to whom. 

The messaging talked about AI, modernization, operational efficiency. Meanwhile, the food retail buyers on the other side of the screen were dealing with a serious hiring and retention crisis: high turnover, and difficulty finding and keeping staff. This was eating up their time, their margin, and their patience every single day. 

Nobody stops to read about the future of HR when they can’t fill the weekend shifts. 

When we reframed the campaign around that real, active pain, including choosing webinar topics based on what actually kept those buyers up at night, everything changed. Engagement came back, conversations started, and results followed. 

The playbook wasn’t wrong. It was just built for a different market.

Same gap, different vertical

This isn’t a problem unique to food retail. 

Think about a school management solution launched with messaging centered on “student experience” and “integrated learning journeys.” It’s a good product, and the messaging topics seem relevant. 

But the CFO of a private school on the other side of the screen is dealing with rising delinquency rates, dropping enrollment, and pressure to cut costs. They’re not thinking about student experience. They’re thinking about how to close out the month. 

A campaign about educational transformation doesn’t reach someone who’s just trying to keep the school running. 

Generic messaging on a relevant topic is still generic messaging. That’s the first limit horizontal playbooks rarely acknowledge, and that every vertical SaaS PMM learns, sooner or later, the hard way. 

What frameworks assume and don’t say 

Before going further, it’s worth being clear about what I mean by horizontal playbook. It’s not a specific document. It’s not a named framework. It’s an operating logic: launching a product the same way across all verticals, with the same process, the same message, the same strategy, without accounting for the specifics of each market. 

That makes sense when you need scale. It starts showing its limits when the buyer thinks inside their own sector, not inside your product category. 

The frameworks that support this logic – ideal customer profiles (ICPs), jobs to be done, go-to-market, positioning – all have value. I’m not saying they’re bad. I’m saying they carry a premise that rarely gets questioned: that you can map the buyer with enough depth from a corporate level. 

In horizontal markets, that premise holds. In vertical SaaS, it cracks. 

The reason is simple. It’s not a question of competence. It’s a question of scale. 

The PMM of a horizontal solution that serves multiple verticals operates at the level they can cover. They map the company ICP, define the main personas, identify the broadest pains. That’s reasonable – it would be impossible to go deep on every vertical at the same time. 

But that missing depth creates a real gap when it reaches the vertical. 

Where the ICP stops going deep enough

In my case, I work with enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions for supermarkets. The horizontal PMM knows the general profile of a technology buyer in food retail. However, the personas that actually matter when it comes to converting an opportunity are different: the HR manager at a regional chain dealing with turnover, the operations director at a wholesale distributor squeezed by margin, the IT buyer at a 20-store network who needs to justify the investment to a family board. 

Different pains. Different language. Completely different decision criteria. None of them fit the generic ICP. Not because the framework is bad, but because it was designed to cover breadth, not to go down to that level.

The same limit shows up in GTM, in an even less visible way. 

Every vertical has its own high-performing channels. In my vertical, WhatsApp communities, in-app communications, actions inside the ERP itself, and in-person events are the paths that generate real engagement. In other verticals, it might be email marketing, trade shows, or paid traffic. 

The horizontal PMM has no way of knowing what those strengths are for each vertical. So they operate with what works on average: the default channel, the safer approach, the playbook already validated somewhere else. 

The vertical PMM builds that knowledge over time. They know where their sector’s buyer is. They know which formats generate response. They know the shortcuts that cut the distance between awareness and a real commercial conversation. 

That knowledge isn’t in any framework. It lives in accumulated experience inside the vertical. That’s exactly where, in the ICP that doesn’t go deep enough and the GTM that doesn’t know the right channels, horizontal playbooks hit their most concrete limits. 

The structural tension nobody draws 

So far, the limits I’ve described are about the market. How the buyer thinks, what they want to hear, where they are. 

But there’s a second set of limits. These are internal. And in my experience, they’re the hardest to navigate. 

In companies with multiple verticals, the specialist PMM is already managing a considerable internal ecosystem: product directors, sales

leaders, service teams, managers from every area impacted by the vertical’s launches. That alone is a lot of people with different goals, expectations, and rhythms. 

Then the cross-solutions arrive: solutions that serve multiple verticals simultaneously and need to be launched, positioned, and communicated in your sector’s context, too. With them come new stakeholders: horizontal product teams, corporate marketing leaders, commercial areas with their own targets. Each has a view of what’s a priority. Each has expectations about what the vertical PMM will deliver for them. 

This is where the complexity explodes. 

The vertical PMM is now at the center of a tension no playbook maps. On one side, the vertical’s own launches already in progress. On the other, cross-solutions competing for the same calendar, the same customer attention, and the same team bandwidth. 

The questions that come up aren’t operational. They’re strategic. 

Which GTM gets more investment? Which launch has more revenue potential for the vertical? Which initiative will generate the most genuine interest from sector customers, not in theory, but right now, at this moment in the market? 

These decisions need someone who deeply understands the sector, the customers, and the vertical’s competitive moment. The horizontal PMM doesn’t have that context. The sales team has targets, not necessarily market vision. 

It falls to the vertical PMM. Every time.

The vertical PMM sits at the center of a tension that no framework maps, and it always falls to them to solve it.

The horizontal playbook was designed for a simpler world: one product, one market, one clear line of priorities. In companies with multiple verticals and cross-solutions, that world doesn’t exist. And as long as the framework doesn’t recognize that, the vertical PMM carries that weight without a manual. 

The function that exists but has no name 

There’s a function that horizontal playbooks don’t describe anywhere. It doesn’t appear in job descriptions, it’s not in career frameworks, and it’s rarely recognized as strategic. 

But in vertical SaaS, it can be the difference between a launch that arrives well positioned and one that has to explain itself before it can be evaluated. 

It’s the function of context translator. 

The context translator in action

Let me give you a concrete example. 

Once, a high-potential cross-solution was being prepared to go to market – high priority, real value for the vertical’s customers, and an excited team behind it. Everything seemed right, until we spotted a problem that no one outside the vertical would have caught: the product name would create direct confusion with a specific competitor in the sector.

For anyone who doesn’t live in that market, it was just a name. For someone who knows the players, the language, and the vertical’s history, there was a real risk of noise, confusion about what the product was, who it belonged to, and what made it different. 

The decision was to hold the launch and revisit the naming – a step back that disrupted multiple teams, reopened positioning conversations, impacted the GTM, and delayed market entry.

But that step back ensured the launch arrived without friction, without noise, and without the burden of correcting an incorrect perception after it had already taken hold. 

The horizontal PMM didn’t fail here. They simply had no way of knowing. Nobody does, unless they live inside the sector, follow the competitors, and understand how the buyer interprets every detail. 

The invisible work of the context translator

That’s the invisible work of the context translator. It’s not customizing a campaign or adapting a template. It’s being the filter every communication, every positioning decision, and every launch has to pass through before it reaches the sector’s buyer. 

That’s exactly the gap horizontal playbooks don’t cover, not because of any limitation in the frameworks themselves, but because they were built for a level of abstraction where this kind of knowledge simply doesn’t exist yet. It only forms with time, immersion, and genuine proximity to the market. 

The more cross-solutions a company launches across multiple verticals, the more critical this function becomes. And the more expensive it gets to ignore it.

The context translator function exists in many companies, but few name it, value it, or structure it the way they should.

What actually works differently in practice 

Diagnosing the playbook’s limits is necessary, but it doesn’t solve anything on its own. 

The question that matters is different: how do you operate in an environment where the standard framework doesn’t cover the ground that needs to be covered? 

Four behaviors make a real difference. None of them appear in any manual. 

1. Map active pains, not permanent ones

Knowing your vertical’s ICP isn’t enough. The market changes, the sector changes, and the pain that was driving the buyer two years ago may not be the same one driving them today. 

Active pains rarely show up in one place. They arrive from trade shows, from sector influencers, from customer conversations, from the sales team that’s on the front lines. The signal is usually weak at first: a mention here, a complaint there, a topic that starts appearing in more than one conversation at the same time. 

The vertical PMM who isn’t paying attention across those channels misses that signal. And by the time the pain has become everyone’s talking point, the window to be relevant has already closed. 

2. Build relationships with horizontal solution PMMs 

That relationship doesn’t get built in a single meeting. It takes time, and the value runs both ways. 

When a product from my vertical became a cross-solution, I needed to understand how it would be positioned in other sectors. I got closer to PMMs from other verticals and quickly realized their personas were completely different from mine. I proposed a joint effort: we traded context, compared personas, and built more accurate documentation for each vertical collaboratively. 

I played the opposite role in that moment. I wasn’t just a receiver of horizontal context; I exported knowledge from my vertical to others. Our relationship made the whole process faster. Without it, it would have taken much longer to reach the same result. 

3. Educate stakeholders with results, not arguments

Once, we needed to build out a sales enablement program for the vertical’s sales team. The manager in charge pushed back, thought an email and some documentation would do it. He was in a hurry. 

We went that route, and the results showed the problem: the team wasn’t converting opportunities effectively. Objections weren’t being broken down. Conversations were stalling. 

With that documented, we went back to the stakeholder with data, not opinion. The sales enablement sessions were approved. What followed was different: a session with the entire vertical sales team, with room to ask questions, get closer to the product team, and better understand the communications. Conversion rates improved consistently. 

The lesson wasn’t about sales enablement. It was about how to convince decision-makers: not with arguments, but with evidence of what happens when vertical context gets left out of the room. 

4. Turn knowledge into a shared asset 

The vertical knowledge built up over time is one of the most valuable assets a vertical PMM can create. The problem is that in most companies, it lives in one person’s head, and that becomes a bottleneck, not an advantage. 

Detailed personas, positioning frameworks, campaign results, documented and justified decisions, in-depth context briefings: all of this enables other teams to act with more precision in your market. 

A concrete example: when we identified a success story in the vertical, we sent it to the PR team for a potential press release. That person doesn’t live in the sector. To create something relevant, they need context: who the client is, what the problem was, what changed, how the market will interpret it. If that context isn’t documented, the press release comes out generic or doesn’t come out at all. 

When it’s documented, it comes out right – fast, with no back and forth. 

That’s the multiplier effect of well-structured vertical knowledge. It’s what separates a PMM who operates alone from a PMM who enables an entire organization. 

What the playbook won’t tell you

Horizontal playbooks aren’t wrong. They were built with purpose, validated in real contexts, and they continue to be useful as a starting point. 

The problem isn’t the framework. It’s assuming it’s enough. 

In vertical SaaS, the buyer thinks inside their own sector. Personas have a depth that the generic ICP doesn’t reach. The channels that work are the ones the vertical built over time. Pains change, and whoever isn’t monitoring them loses the timing. Launches carry nuances that only someone who lives inside the market can see. 

All of that demands a function that horizontal playbooks don’t describe. A function many companies have, but few name, value, or structure the way they should. 

As long as that function goes unrecognized, the cost shows up in ways that are hard to trace: a campaign that doesn’t engage, a launch that creates noise, a sales team that stalls on objections, a press release that goes out without context. Individually, each one looks like an execution problem. Together, they’re the signal of a playbook that has reached its limit. 

So the question remains, for the PMM and for the leader: 

How many opportunities has your company already lost because the horizontal playbook reached the wrong buyer, at the wrong time, speaking the wrong language? 

Probably more than show up in any report.