Digital products that break through share a simple advantage: Product and marketing act as one team from concept to launch. Explore how our research can help you build this integration and turn ideas into market-winning experiences.
of digital products fail due to poor customer engagement
projected growth in AI-powered services over the next five years
higher market capitalization growth for mature product-centric organizations
Unifying product and marketing to drive growth
Digital products and experiences now shape the global economy and most customer decisions. From AI-powered services to immersive experiences, these offerings are conceived, delivered, and refined entirely through digital channels. Adoption is surging: Transaction volumes jumped 70% in the past two years, and the market is on track to grow 28% over the next five years, reaching $415 billion in 2030,¹ up from $125 billion in 2025. Rapid growth leads to fierce competition, making it harder than ever to turn a product launch into lasting advantage.
Our research reveals that organizations integrating product and marketing functions for digital products outperform their peers by up to 50% in market capitalization growth.² The seamless interplay of product and marketing is poised to become the differentiation factor in a competitive digital economy. More than 70% of organizations consider the alignment between product and marketing teams to be the most critical part of their digital transformations—and rightfully so.³ This emphasis is well-founded: Approximately 80% of digital products fail due to poor customer engagement.⁴ Companies should consider blending product management and marketing expertise into a single, unified approach rather than separate business functions, to succeed in today's market.
Expanding on the value of the product and marketing-led model
Organizations that develop comprehensive ecosystems to meet customer needs beyond their core and adjacent businesses and integrate product and marketing practices throughout the product lifecycle outperform their peers in market capitalization growth. Based on our proprietary data on organizational product practices, we built a portfolio of the most mature product-centric organizations across industries. As the graph below highlights, the most mature product-centric organizations outperform the S&P 500 by up to 30% in terms of market capitalization growth.
Out of the list of the 30 most mature product-centric organizations, we identified 10 organizations across represented industries (Consumer, Life Science & Health Care, Technology, Financial Services) integrating product and marketing functions and skills across their entire digital product lifecycle. Those organizations outperform their peers even more, outpacing the S&P 500 by up to 50% in terms of valuation growth. There is no moment in time when organizations applying an integrated product and marketing approach within their lifecycle fall behind the S&P 500.
All data used are indexed stock prices.
Implementing the product and marketing-led model
The roles and process
As outlined above, organizations can differentiate with a product- and marketing-led approach. In this new era in which customer needs are shifting quickly and customers expect innovative products, a new role in the product lifecycle is emerging that can embody the integration between product and marketing functions—the product marketing owner.
The product marketing owner serves as the voice of the customer throughout the product lifecycle and acts as a translator between product engineering, design, and marketing teams. Successful product marketing owners combine two core skill sets: (1) product development and (2) product marketing expertise.
The product marketing owner works closely with the technical product owner across the product lifecycle, owning the customer. The product marketing owner provides deep customer insights that inform product development and connects the dots between product teams and the marketing organization to develop and execute effective product campaigns. The technical product owner focuses on the end-to-end development of the product, working with the entire product ecosystem to bring a product to life. Marketing owns the cohesive orchestration of go-to-market strategies across the product portfolio. Below is an illustration of the product lifecycle, highlighting roles and responsibilities between product marketing owners, technical product owners, and marketing.
Three digital product archetypes
Our analysis surfaced three distinct archetypes that reveal how organizations structure product, marketing, and engineering to bring digital offerings to market—each with its own benefits and considerations:
1. ENGINEERING-LED
Engineering plays the primary role in defining the product and developing the execution plans. Marketers execute the communications and engagement elements.
When to use it: When the product fit is confirmed, and the focus is on scaling quickly
Considerations: Lack of deep understanding of customer and market insights
Example: A leading technology organization operates in a fast-paced environment where tech innovation is at the center of its value proposition. Focused on scaling core and adjacent innovations in known spaces, this company quickly validates market hypotheses with UX/UI screens to ensure user acceptance. The product team quickly moves from UX/UI validation into product development, driven by technical product owners or engineering teams. Through a rapid UX/UI market validation approach, followed by engineering development, the product team reduces the product development lifecycle by more than 50% for digital product innovations close to the core business.
2. MARKETING-LED
Marketers own “customer-driven" research and go-to-market planning. The marketing team provides insights and feedback to engineering and product owners to drive new product development.
When to use it: When you’re a brand-driven organization, aiming to win a customer base attracted by the brand, beyond the product itself
Considerations: If your organization needs to innovate across the product set rather than within it
Example: A leading consumer company invests heavily in building like-minded communities of customers around sports and wellness affinities. Digital marketing is key to driving acquisition and retention. The organization hyper-focuses digital product initiatives around digital marketing, personalizing engagement to convert and retain customers. Customer segmentation, research, and digital campaigns are designed by the digital marketing team and executed by the engineering team. This organization increased acquisition rates on digital channels by 25% in existing core customer segments.
3. PRODUCT AND MARKETING-LED
Marketers and product teams work together across the entire lifecycle, balancing customer, business value, and feasibility. Marketing is integrated into product decisions, partnering with product teams on research, product design, development, and launch.
When to use it: When you’re a product-led company whose customers expect exceptional digital experiences. This also applies in cases where there is an opportunity to grow by expanding product offerings across industries and delivery plays.
Considerations: If your organization wants to enter a new market or differentiate in an existing one where the solution space is unknown
Example: A leading payment network drives product innovation beyond core business at scale through an integrated model with structured, rapid feedback loops. True domain expertise within organizational functions unlocks innovation and prompts a highly collaborative environment. Integrating marketing, product, and engineering teams enables this organization to identify and launch core (e.g., digital experience enhancements), adjacent (e.g., digital lifestyle/wellness products), and transformational (e.g., data and insights products) opportunities beyond payments, driving new revenues.
The amplifying factor of GenAI
Speed to value and connectivity
Leading product marketing owners in mature product organizations can leverage the power of AI to accelerate the speed to value of new products and enhance the connectivity between product and marketing functions. There are four key areas along the product lifecycle where AI can unlock value for product marketing owners:
Generative AI (GenAI) allows product marketers to synthesize vast amounts of qualitative and quantitative data—surveys, reviews, support tickets, social media—into actionable insights. With AI-assisted trend detection and segmentation, marketers can quickly identify customer behavior and preferences shifts. This enables real-time product positioning and roadmap refinement, ensuring alignment with evolving user expectations.
GenAI accelerates the formation of user stories and experience outlines by turning strategy and customer insights into early product concepts. This can help ensure that engineering teams begin development with a clear, customer-centric vision. AI tools can simulate use cases, generate mockups, or suggest UX flows based on user personas and market signals—bridging gaps between marketing, design, and product.
At launch, GenAI helps product marketers define and refine go-to-market strategies. From identifying high-potential segments to generating tailored messaging and choosing optimal channels, AI supports faster decision-making and sharper targeting. As campaigns roll out, marketing teams can use GenAI to automate content creation, personalize web, email, and social outreach, and continuously optimize performance in real time.
GenAI streamlines performance analysis by aggregating campaign metrics and surfacing patterns through intelligent dashboards and experimentation frameworks. It enables product marketers to quickly identify what’s working, where to pivot, and how to feed those learnings back into product development. These insights become critical inputs for technical product managers in planning future releases or iterations.
Making the shift to the product and marketing-led model
When product and marketing move in lockstep, results follow. According to our research, organizations that run an integrated model have outpaced the S&P 500 by 50%. The product marketing owner orchestrates the integration of product and marketing functions through a versatile skillset across product and marketing. Leading product marketing owners leverage the power of GenAI to design attractive product offerings, and market those effectively through high-performing campaigns.
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About the authors
Menes Etingue Kum is a senior manager at Deloitte Digital, in our Digital Product and Innovation practice, where he helps financial service companies define and execute on innovation strategies that elevate the human experience.
Katie Denlinger is a principal at Deloitte Digital where she leads Marketing Strategy & Transformation. She serves as a strategic advisor to consumer-first companies who are challenged to do more with less in a fast-changing market.
Anthony Jardim is a leader in Deloitte Digital’s retail practice focused on transforming retail operations, people, processes, and technologies to support the growth required in today’s digital retail environment.
Baylee Simon is a leader in Deloitte’s Marketing Strategy & Transformation practice, where she collaborates with CMOs and senior leaders to help drive profitable growth via elevated brand and marketing strategies, improved marketing effectiveness, and impactful customer experiences.
Courtney Sherman, Tim Juravich, Jonah Conlin, and Madalyn O’Dea contributed to this POV.
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Sources
1. Keywords everywhere team, "AI market size and stats (2024)," Keywords Everywhere, 2024.
2. René Rohrbeck and Menes Etingue Kum, "Corporate foresight and its impact on firm performance: A longitudinal analysis," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 2017.
3. Tim Smith, Mark Lush, and Garima Dhasmana, "Measuring value from digital transformation," Deloitte, accessed September 15, 2025.
4. Amelia Dunlop, Courtney Sherman, and Menes Etingue Kum, "Mindsets matter: Driving GenAI adoption and success," Deloitte Digital, 2024.
