Propel VP of Product Marketing on Building Products for High-Stakes Industries

What happens when product teams operate in markets where failure isn’t an option? In this podcast hosted by iDonate VP of Product Nacho Andrade, Propel VP of Product Marketing Tom Shoemaker explores how teams can navigate building products for high-stakes industries. He digs into the realities of PLM, quality management, commercialization, and the rising role of AI across hardware and medtech. The conversation offers a grounded look at collaboration, learning, and delivering reliable products when the margin for error is razor thin.

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Show Notes

1. Propel builds enterprise collaboration software for companies that manufacture physical products.
2. The platform is built on Salesforce, giving it reliability, extensibility, and rapid innovation advantages.
3. Propel unifies PLM, quality management, and product information management into one system.
4. Many customers operate in high-stakes, regulated sectors like medtech and industrial equipment.
5. Product success in these industries depends on speed, quality, and coordination across global supply chains.
6. Companies often work with multiple manufacturers, designers, and distributors, creating complex orchestration challenges.
7. Commercialization is as important as product development; sales channels must be equipped with the right information.
8. Propel competes with large incumbents like Oracle and Siemens by offering a more modern, adaptable system.
9. Cloud-native architecture gives Propel flexibility that older, on-prem systems lack.
10. Product marketing sits at the intersection of product, go-to-market teams, and market influencers.
11. Win/loss analysis is one of the most effective ways to learn what truly matters to buyers.
12. Customers increasingly expect embedded AI to be contextual, trusted, and privacy-safe.
13. Every customer Propel speaks with is actively exploring AI, even in regulated industries.
14. Propel’s AI strategy focuses on agentic workflows embedded inside daily tasks, not standalone chat tools.
15. Example use cases include querying complex product data and auto-generating training programs from long documents.
16. Human-in-the-loop review remains essential for quality and regulatory compliance.
17. Tom’s career path spans engineering, pre-sales, quality, and marketing, showing the value of cross-functional experience.
18. He emphasizes carving out opportunities by taking on work that needs to be done, even if it’s outside the formal job description.
19. “Learn fast” is more useful than “fail fast” in industries where safety and reliability matter most.
20. Effective product teams bring more voices into the process to increase learning and reduce blind spots.