Product Marketing Brief Template With a Filled Example

“Claims we will not make” is the field I would add first to any product marketing brief template. It lists the sentences nobody working on the launch may write or say, the reason each one is off limits and the line to use instead. A product marketer needs it because the brief is the page that web, content, sales and an agency all write from, and a brief that only lists what to claim leaves every writer to guess where the limit sits.

Three published templates show how close they get. Noah Cisneros’s PDF template has a “Compliance Guardrails” box for “Key compliance/legal concerns for bank product”, and keeps its proof points in a section of their own, apart from the key messages.

Smartsheet’s template has a Requirements box asking what “must be” included in the product and the promotion, and no box for what stays out. The meetingnotes.com template credited to Delyn Simons of Shopify has a Core Message and a Secondary message with no proof under either, and its nearest thing to a limit is a Notes box for “Key things to be aware of”.

My view is that a product marketing brief should hold only the decisions every asset built from it inherits, and nothing the launch plan already holds. Tier, dates, owners, channels and goals have a home in the plan, so the brief links to it instead of copying it, and the space that frees up goes to proof and to the claims we will not make.

What Is a Product Marketing Brief?

A product marketing brief is the internal document a product marketer writes after the product manager’s product brief and before any launch asset exists. It fixes the audience, problem, competitive alternative, positioning statement, each message with its proof, the claims we will not make, enablement asks and open questions.

Asana’s template page defines the product brief that comes first as “an internal document that summarizes a product’s scope, goals, and direction”, and adds that “Usually, the product manager creates the product brief during the planning stage.” Asana’s definition also covers “how you’ll bring it to market” in a single clause. The product marketing brief is where that clause turns into a positioning statement, messages and proof, and it is the launch brief at the top of the positioning and messaging block, weeks -12 to -8, in my product launch checklist.

The Product Marketing Brief Template, Field by Field

Copy the block into a doc and fill sections 3, 5 and 6 first, since the positioning statement in section 4 is built from 3 and 5, and section 6 goes to legal with the first draft. The header links the launch plan, the messaging framework and, for a new product line, the GTM strategy instead of repeating them. Sections 3, 5, 6 and 7 are the ones the three templates above leave out or leave thin.

PRODUCT MARKETING BRIEF

Product / release:  ____________________   Version: ___   Date: ________
Brief owner (PMM):  ____________________   Approver: _______________
Launch plan:        [link] - tier, date, owners, channels, goals,
                    milestones and risks live there, not here
Messaging:          [link] - the messaging framework holds the full
                    matrix and pillars
GTM strategy:       [link] - new product line only: pricing,
                    packaging, sales motion

1. AUDIENCE
   Buyer (signs):   ________________________________________________
   User (uses it):  ________________________________________________
   Segment:         ________________________________________________

2. PROBLEM, IN THE BUYER'S WORDS
   Quote:   "_______________________________________________________"
   Source:  interview / sales call / ticket / review    Date: ________

3. COMPETITIVE ALTERNATIVE
   What the buyer uses today (a named product, a spreadsheet,
   an agency, or nothing): _________________________________________
   What it costs them:     _________________________________________

4. POSITIONING STATEMENT
   For [audience] who [problem], [product] is a [category] that
   [key benefit]. Unlike [the alternative from section 3],
   [product] [the difference, backed by proof in section 5].

5. MESSAGES AND PROOF
   Primary message:      __________________________________________
     Proof:              ____________________  Lives in: __________
   Secondary message A:  __________________________________________
     Proof:              ____________________  Lives in: __________
   Secondary message B:  __________________________________________
     Proof:              ____________________  Lives in: __________

6. CLAIMS WE WILL NOT MAKE
   Claim | Why not | Say instead | Unlock when
   1. ______________________________________________________________
   2. ______________________________________________________________
   3. ______________________________________________________________

7. ENABLEMENT ASKS
   Team | The ask (to them or from them) | Format | Due
   Sales:             ______________________________________________
   Customer success:  ______________________________________________
   Support:           ______________________________________________
   Web and content:   ______________________________________________

8. OPEN QUESTIONS (empty before sign-off)
   Question | Who decides | By when
   ________________________________________________________________

Each section passes or fails on a check a reviewer can make in under a minute:

Section	Done when	Fails when
1. Audience	Buyer and user are named roles, with a company size	It says “SMBs” or “marketing teams”
2. Problem	It is a sentence a buyer said, with a source and a date	It restates the feature list
3. Competitive alternative	It names what the buyer does today, a spreadsheet or nothing included	It lists every vendor in the category
4. Positioning statement	The “Unlike” clause names the alternative from section 3	The “Unlike” clause is missing or names no one
5. Messages and proof	Every message has proof a reviewer can open, and the place it lives	The proof is an adjective
6. Claims we will not make	Every row has a reason, a replacement line and an unlock condition	It bans words and offers nothing to say instead
7. Enablement asks	Every team has one ask, a format and a due date	One line reads “enable sales”
8. Open questions	Every question has a person and a date, and the list is empty at sign-off	It says “TBD”

Section 4 uses the statement shape from my product positioning guide, with the “Unlike” clause pointing back to section 3, so the alternative is named once and used twice. In section 5, proof is anything a reviewer can open: a capability your docs state (the bottom rung of feature vs benefit vs value is the test), a customer result you have permission to use, or a benchmark someone else could rerun.

How to Fill the Claims We Will Not Make Section

Atlassian’s guide to product requirements documents already asks product managers for a list like this. It gives a PRD a section called “What we’re not doing”, telling the team to stay focused “by clearly calling out what you’re not doing” and to “Flag things that are out of scope at the moment, but might be considered at a later time.”

The website brief in step one of building a personal website with Claude Code keeps the PRD version of this row, “Out of scope”. Section 6 applies the same idea to launch copy: a claim goes in when its proof will not exist on the day the asset ships, and it comes out when the proof arrives.

What an unsupported number can cost is on the public record. In April 2025 the FTC proposed an order against Workado, which it said had promoted its AI Content Detector as “98 percent” accurate, while independent testing put its accuracy on general-purpose content at 53 percent, according to the agency’s complaint (FTC press release, April 2025). The order bars Workado from effectiveness claims unless it has “competent and reliable evidence to support the claim at the time it is made”, and the FTC approved it as final in August 2025.

Put a claim in section 6 when	Example line	Say instead	Unlock when
A number has no test behind it on the ship date	”98% accurate”	The figure your test supports, with the test named	The test is run and written up
It says the product replaces a person or a profession	”Replaces your marketing analyst”	The task it takes off their desk, with the time saved	Never in this wording
It is a first, a best or a number one	”The first AI analyst for finance teams”	The capability, with the date it shipped	A source you can cite says it
It credits AI with work the product does by rules	”AI-powered lead routing"	"Routes leads by territory and deal size”	A model ships and its accuracy is measured
A certification or audit is unfinished	”SOC 2 Type II certified"	"SOC 2 Type II audit in progress”	The auditor issues the report; then write “SOC 2 Type II report available”, never “certified”
The feature is still on the roadmap	”Native Salesforce sync”	Nothing in launch copy	It ships
It names a competitor	”3x faster than RivalCo”	Your own measured number with its source, and no multiple; the battlecard lists the multiple as do-not-say	Legal approves a test you would publish

The replace-a-person row has an FTC case behind it as well. In its Operation AI Comply announcement of September 2024, the FTC said DoNotPay claimed to offer “the world’s first robot lawyer”, but “the product failed to live up to its lofty claims that the service could substitute for the expertise of a human lawyer.” Lina Khan, FTC Chair at the time, said “there is no AI exemption from the laws on the books”.

The Commission approved the final DoNotPay order on January 16, 2025. It requires DoNotPay to pay $193,000 in monetary relief and prohibits it from advertising that its service performs like a real lawyer unless it has sufficient evidence to back it up.

I would hold every launch, B2B or consumer, to the Workado order’s rule: competent and reliable evidence at the time the claim is made.

The unlock column keeps section 6 from turning into a permanent ban list. When the auditor issues the SOC 2 report, the row leaves section 6 and the report becomes proof under a message in section 5. That message names a report, not a certificate: the AICPA’s SOC 2 guide is titled “Reporting on an Examination of Controls at a Service Organization”, and CPAs issue SOC 2 as an assurance report, so the line is “SOC 2 Type II report available”.

Send section 6 to legal with the first draft of the brief, so the review happens once, on one list, before any asset is written.

A Filled Product Marketing Brief Template for Acme Insights

Acme Insights is fictional. It is the sample product five of the free tools on this site load as placeholder data, a revenue attribution platform for demand generation leaders, so every name, quote and number below is sample data rather than a result. Due dates count days before launch, so T-14 is two weeks out.

Header and Sections 1 to 4

Section	Acme Insights v2
Header	Launch plan and messaging framework: linked. Owner: the PMM. Approver: the VP of Marketing
1. Audience	Buyer: VP of Demand Generation at a 200-2,000 employee B2B SaaS company. User: the marketing ops manager who builds the quarterly attribution report
2. Problem	”Every quarter the board asks which channels made pipeline, and my ops lead spends three days in spreadsheets on an answer I still can’t defend.” Sample interview, VP of Demand Generation, dated two weeks before kickoff
3. Competitive alternative	A quarterly CRM export reconciled by hand in a spreadsheet. Second: a legacy attribution suite, six months to implement and $80K to license, per lost-deal notes
4. Positioning statement	For VPs of Demand Generation at 200-2,000 employee B2B SaaS companies who must explain channel spend to the board every quarter, Acme Insights is a revenue attribution platform that ties pipeline to the channel that sourced it in under 45 days, without engineering. Unlike a quarterly spreadsheet built from CRM exports, Acme Insights reconciles every closed deal against the CRM every night

Section 5: Messages and Proof

Message	Proof	Lives in
Primary: attribute pipeline to channel in under 45 days, without engineering	Kickoff-to-first-report time logged for every design partner; adding or reweighting a channel needs no engineering ticket	Implementation tracker; setup guide
Secondary A: answer the board’s channel question in 30 minutes instead of three days	NorthWind Labs: “We cut attribution work from 3 days to 30 minutes a quarter.”	Signed quote approval
Secondary B: channel numbers that match the CRM	Closed-won totals reconciled against Salesforce or HubSpot every night, with a variance report	Product docs; demo account

Section 6: Claims We Will Not Make

Claim	Why not	Say instead	Unlock when
”AI-powered attribution”	v2 assigns credit with weighting rules the customer sets; no model is trained	”Weighting rules you set and can explain to your CFO”	A trained model ships and its accuracy is measured
”Proves marketing ROI”	v2 credits channels by rule and runs no holdout test, so it cannot show what would have happened without a channel	”Shows which channels sourced and influenced pipeline”	Never in this wording
”SOC 2 Type II certified”	The audit period ends after launch day, so no report exists yet, and a SOC 2 is a CPA’s report, not a certificate	”SOC 2 Type II audit in progress”	The auditor issues the report; then “SOC 2 Type II report available"
"Works with your whole stack”	60+ native integrations still leaves out any tool not on the list	”60+ native integrations, including HubSpot, Salesforce, Segment and GA4”	Never; keep the count current
”4x faster to implement than [legacy suite]“	The six-month figure comes from lost-deal notes, not a test anyone could repeat	”Live in under 45 days” in every asset, the battlecard included; the lost-deal notes stay internal context, never a talk track	A published, repeatable implementation benchmark

Section 7: Enablement Asks

Team	Ask	Format	Due
Sales	Certify on the new talk track; each AE brings one deal lost to “we’ll keep the spreadsheet”	45-minute session plus a recorded pitch	T-14
Sales development	Rewrite sequence openers around the primary message, with “AI” removed from every step	Sequence copy for review	T-10
Customer success	Name five customers willing to take a reference call about the 45-day claim	Account list with owners	T-21
Support	One macro for “does it integrate with X” that links the integrations page	Help desk macro	T-7
Web and content	Launch page and post that use the primary message word for word, checked against section 6	Page and post drafts	T-10

Section 8: Open Questions

• Can NorthWind Labs be named in paid ads, or only on the website? Customer marketing decides by T-30.
• Does “under 45 days” still hold once 20 implementations are in? The PMM and the implementation lead decide by T-21.

The “Say instead” lines in section 6 go straight into the sales talk track, the integrations line into the support macro, and the T-10 web and content ask is where section 6 gets checked against real copy before anything ships.

Product Brief vs Marketing Brief vs PRD: Which Brief Is Which

Five documents get called a brief or sit next to one, and they differ by owner, reader and timing. The product brief and PRD rows follow Asana and Atlassian, linked above; the other three rows are the split I recommend. Some templates sold as a marketing brief belong in the creative brief row: JotForm’s marketing brief template says the document “summarizes the marketing strategy for a specific campaign.”

Document	Owner	Main reader	What it settles	When
Product brief	The product manager	Stakeholders “from the product team to product marketing executives” (Asana)	The “why” and “what”, in Asana’s FAQ	Planning stage
PRD	The product manager, with the team	The team building the product	”the purpose, features, and behavior of a product” (Atlassian); Asana calls it the “how”	After the product brief
Product marketing brief	The product marketer	Everyone who writes, designs or sells for the launch	Audience, alternative, positioning, messages with proof, claims we will not make, enablement asks	After the product brief, before any asset is briefed
Launch plan	The launch owner, often the PMM	The launch team	Tier, date, owners, channels, goals, milestones, risks	Alongside the product marketing brief
Creative brief	A marketing or creative lead	Designers, copywriters, an agency	One asset or campaign, with its “project requirements, objectives, and deliverables” (Atlassian’s creative brief template)	Per asset, after the product marketing brief is approved

Asana’s FAQ adds that “Most effective product briefs are one to three pages.” Keep a product marketing brief to two pages, because the launch plan and the messaging framework carry the detail it links to.

The Field-to-Asset Map

Seven of the eight sections feed an asset built after the brief; open questions feed nothing because they are empty at sign-off. The table adds the template or guide on this site for building each asset.

Brief section	Feeds	Build it with
Header: launch plan link	Everything the launch plan holds, listed in the which-brief table above	Product launch plan template
1. Audience	Buyer persona; the columns of a messaging matrix	Buyer persona generator
2. Problem	Landing page hero; the pains on a value proposition canvas	Value proposition canvas generator
3. Competitive alternative	Battlecard; objection handling	Competitive battlecard template and the battlecard generator
4. Positioning statement	One-pager; the first slide of the sales deck	Product one-pager template
5. Messages and proof	Messaging matrix and hierarchy; homepage, emails, ads	Brand messaging framework
6. Claims we will not make	Legal review; every creative brief; the battlecard’s do-not-say list	Stays in the brief
7. Enablement asks	The launch enablement package	Sales enablement checklist

Pricing, packaging and the sales motion belong to the go-to-market strategy, which the header links for a new product line and the brief should not restate.

Launch Brief, Messaging Brief or GTM Brief: Cutting the Template

The same document travels under several names, and each request needs a different cut:

If you were asked for	Keep	Move out
A full product launch brief	All eight sections	Nothing; the header already links the launch plan
A one-page launch brief, like the one in my SaaS launch playbook	A why-now line you add, then sections 2 to 4, the primary message and the goals from the launch plan	Everything else, linked from the page
A messaging brief	Sections 1 to 6	Enablement asks go to the enablement plan, open questions to the kickoff agenda
A go-to-market brief for a new product line	All eight sections, with the header’s GTM strategy link filled in	Pricing and packaging, which stay in the linked strategy
A brief for a Tier 3 release	Sections 1, 5 and 6	Positioning and enablement, unless the release changes either
A creative brief for an agency	A creative brief of its own, with sections 5 and 6 pasted in	Everything else stays internal

Fill Sections 3, 5 and 6 First

A product marketing brief template is worth copying when it holds what the assets built from it cannot decide for themselves and links the launch plan for everything else. Section 6 is the part the three published templates above leave out or shrink to a compliance box. Before your next launch kickoff, fill sections 3, 5 and 6, then send section 6 to legal with the draft. Write its first row today.