Portfolio and product marketing teams aren’t failing because of capability gaps; they’re failing because of structure, according to our latest research report, The State Of Portfolio And Product Marketing In 2026. The newly released study found that, as organizations centralize budgets at the same time as embedding portfolio and product marketing teams further into business units, those marketers are losing visibility into enterprise strategy. The result is a growing gap between strategic intent and day-to-day go-to-market (GTM) execution.

GTM discipline breaks down slowly, then quickly.
Across regions, the data revealed that portfolio marketers faced a consistent set of challenges, several of them interconnected:

• Strategy clarity is eroding. Company strategy is less well understood than product strategy, leading to inconsistent positioning and prioritization.
• GTM processes lack rigor. Many teams operate without a clearly defined GTM process, forcing ad hoc decisions and reducing launch consistency.
• Alignment remains fragile. Product, marketing, and sales leaders often fail to align on GTM strategy, creating rework and conflicting narratives.
• Insights are underpowered. Despite being the top priority cited by portfolio marketing teams, many still report this as a concern. They also rely heavily on external partners to deliver critical insight work, which limits their influence.
• GenAI momentum is slowing. Fewer than half of teams are actively using it, with limited plans to expand.

The report then goes into further detail, with regional breakdowns and analysis. These reinforce the core theme that the issues are more to do with structural choices than skill. For example:

• North America teams lead the pack in terms of scale (team size, number of products supported) and have larger budgets, but they often spread themselves too thinly, supporting large portfolios with limited depth and heavy outsourcing. They run the risk of outsourcing capabilities that should be kept in house.
• Europe prefers to organize its portfolio marketing teams by specialization (such as market and competitive insights or sales enablement). This delivers stronger data access and higher usage of core deliverables, but they still struggle to translate insight into execution.
• APAC operates in the most constrained environment of all, leaning heavily toward product-centric structure. This limits the influence of portfolio marketers, resulting in lower adoption of their deliverables by internal audiences.

The report concludes with recommendations of what leaders must do next if they recognize some of these challenges in their product and portfolio marketing teams. Recommendations include making GTM alignment a shared executive responsibility, avoiding purely product-centric organizing structures, strengthening data literacy among teams, and rebalancing outsourcing decisions.

In 2026, the competitive advantage will not come from doing portfolio marketing better. It will come from structuring it better. Click here to read the full report.

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