Tom Shoemaker, VP of Product Marketing at Propel Software, explains why the biggest threat to a great product usually isn’t the engineering. It’s the handoff.
Here’s a stat that stopped me for a second during this conversation: one manufacturer using Propel’s platform saw their engineering throughput jump 500%. Not 50%. Five hundred percent. What used to be one project became six. That’s the kind of number that makes you want to know exactly what changed, and it turns out the answer isn’t really about engineering at all.
I sat down with Tom Shoemaker, VP of Product Marketing at Propel Software, for this week’s episode of Deconstructing Data. Tom’s been at Propel for about five and a half years, after a career path that started in mechanical engineering (he wanted to design roller coasters, which is objectively a great answer to “what do you want to be when you grow up”) and eventually landed him in product and solution marketing leadership roles. Propel helps manufacturing companies, the kind that make physical products, connect the dots between what engineering builds and what the market actually needs to buy it.
Why do good products fail in the market?
Tom’s answer here is the whole thesis of the conversation, and it’s one I’ve seen play out in my own industry too.
“A lot of products don’t succeed in the market and it’s not due to the engineering that went into them. It’s often due to the disconnected handoff between engineering and, let’s say, marketing or sales.”
— Tom Shoemaker, VP of Product Marketing, Propel Software
Tom calls this the “product value gap.” On one side you’ve got the product camp: R&D, mechanical and electrical engineers, quality, regulatory, supply chain, production. On the other side you’ve got the customer-facing camp: marketing, product marketing, commerce, sales, service. Each side can be excellent at its own job and the product still fails, because nobody translated the technical definition of the product into something the market can actually understand and buy.
He put it well with an old adage: if a tree falls in the forest and no one’s there to hear it, does it make a sound? You can build the technically best product in the world, but if your marketers don’t know how to position it and your sellers don’t know how to sell it, none of that engineering excellence matters.
I’ve experienced this exact problem in marketing. You build something incredible, but the people who built it often don’t fully understand how the customer actually uses it. Somebody has to sit in the middle and translate.
What data actually needs to flow between engineering and sales?
This is where it gets specific. Tom broke down how differently the two camps even talk about the same product. Engineers think in terms of parts, manufacturers, bills of material, change events, and quality events, the language of PLM (product lifecycle management) and QMS (quality management systems). The commercial side thinks in SKUs, orderables, accessories, bundles, and assets, the language of what actually gets sold and serviced.
Same product. Completely different vocabulary. And when that data doesn’t stay linked and synchronized as the product evolves, you lose real opportunities. Tom’s example: engineering swaps in a higher-performing motor. If marketing doesn’t know, that’s a selling point nobody promotes. If sales doesn’t know demand is spiking in a specific region, that information never makes it back to influence sourcing or manufacturing location decisions. Information sitting in one camp that would change decisions in the other camp is, as Tom put it, “no shortage of different ways” this connection matters.
There’s also a service angle people underestimate. For products like industrial or medical equipment that live at a customer site for 10, 15, 20 years, a lot of the real revenue comes after the initial sale, through service contracts. If service teams can’t find spare part information because it’s buried in engineering systems they don’t have access to, that’s lost revenue and a customer relationship taking damage.
How is AI actually changing product-to-market collaboration?
I asked Tom directly whether AI is playing a real role here yet, and his answer was an emphatic yes, across every function:
“It can help the engineers process changes faster. It can help quality people look for patterns… to figure out what the root cause is to prevent future reoccurrence. It can help sellers look at your price book, your portfolio, and determine, oh, if I’m selling this to that customer, perhaps there’s opportunity to sell some add-ons or brand extensions or accessories.”
— Tom Shoemaker, VP of Product Marketing, Propel Software
He also pointed out something I hadn’t fully considered: marketing teams now have to build product content that accounts for how people search using LLMs, not just traditional search engines. That’s a new translation layer on top of the old one.
What does this actually look like when it works?
Tom gave two customer examples that made the abstract stuff concrete.
The first: a German industrial equipment company that evolved from distributor to value-added reseller to engineer-to-order manufacturer. Their first big win with Propel was purely on engineering throughput, that 500% productivity jump I mentioned up top. Then they tackled the next bottleneck: getting new products from engineering into their e-commerce storefront, which used to take weeks because product data was getting exported into a “dumb static spreadsheet” and manually pushed into their online store. With the product thread connected end to end, that process now takes minutes.
The second example is the one that really stuck with me. Savant Systems, a smart home and equipment automation company, grows partly through acquisition. They bought GE Lighting, a 100-plus-year-old brand name, along with an automated blind systems company. Because their engineering-to-marketing-to-sales connection was so tightly built, they had the acquired products live and sellable on their e-commerce channel the same day the acquisition closed.
“That’s kind of unheard of, to be able to do that. And obviously what’s the goodness from that? Well, you don’t miss a beat in selling.”
— Tom Shoemaker, VP of Product Marketing, Propel Software
Anyone who’s lived through a post-acquisition integration knows that’s usually a multi-month slog, not a same-day flip.
So why do good products still lose to worse ones?
This is the question that got the best answer of the conversation. Tom’s framing: think of it like a decathlon, not a single event. You can win the technical event and still lose the overall competition if you’re weak everywhere else.
“You could be good in one event, you could win that one event and be mediocre or bad in the other events, and that’s not going to serve you well. But you could be second or third good in a lot of events and that could win you the greatest athlete in the world.”
— Tom Shoemaker, VP of Product Marketing, Propel Software
Beta was arguably the better format than VHS. Better film chemistry lost to Kodak’s positioning and branding. Technical superiority alone has never been enough, and it never will be. The companies that win are the ones that string together good-enough performance across engineering, positioning, branding, and go-to-market execution, rather than betting everything on one dimension.
The bigger picture
What I keep coming back to from this conversation is that “product data” isn’t really a technical problem, it’s an organizational one. The data exists. The gap is in translation and access. Engineering and quality have always had a seat at the product table. Sales, marketing, and service have historically been sitting at the kids’ table, unable to see the same information in a form that’s useful to them. Fix that, and you’re not just running a tighter operation, you’re unlocking real revenue that was sitting there the whole time.
If you want to learn more about what Tom and the team at Propel are building, connect with him on LinkedIn or check out propelsoftware.com.
And if you’re thinking about how better data, wherever it lives in your organization, could change how you go to market, that’s exactly the kind of conversation we love having at BDEX. Visit bdex.com and click “Talk to an Expert” to get started.
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Watch the full episode: Driving Product Success with Unified Data Systems
This article was adapted from an episode of Deconstructing Data, BDEX’s weekly podcast on data-driven marketing. Tune in live every Thursday at 4:15 PM Eastern on LinkedIn.
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