I'm a product marketing consultant for B2B tech. The part of the work I enjoy the most is the strategic piece. I have all this information, all these inputs, I talk to the team, I talk to the customers, I know the market, I study the competition, and then I put all the pieces together into a narrative, a story. That's the bit I genuinely love doing.

A lot of what I do is positioning and messaging, building go-to-market processes, sales enablement, all the way through. And a big part of it isn't even the framework itself, it's facilitating the whole thing from start to finish: hosting the workshops with product, sales, and customer success, getting everyone in a room, gathering their input, and getting the stakeholders bought in. That's the work that actually makes product marketing land.

Everyone is going all in on solving their growth problems through AI, and over time I think a lot of tech founders will realize that if they can't do it right now without AI, AI isn't going to magically fix it. If your company can't decide on messaging in three weeks, ChatGPT isn't going to solve your positioning problem either. AI can be an enabler, it can analyze vast amounts of data and find patterns, but it can't create the strategic piece, because that requires a lot of human insight and context it doesn't have.

The thing people forget is that so much of product marketing runs on internal relationships. I know what the VP of product cares about, I know what the CRO wants, I know how to talk to them to get them on board. You can feed AI the most incredible positioning framework in the world, but did you get all the stakeholders bought in, or did this work in isolation and then nobody on the team actually backs it? I had a CMO reach out for help on positioning, and after a few calls he said, I really want to work with you, but I'm getting pressure from my CEO and founders. We have all the data, all the customer interviews, all the competitor work, so why aren't we just feeding it to ChatGPT and having it create the positioning. He even admitted the ChatGPT results were pretty good and he couldn't give a strong argument against it. So I told him it sounds like you've already convinced yourself. What I bring is real experience across a vast majority of products like yours, for your same type of audience. AI doesn't have access to my brain or that understanding of the ecosystem. And is AI going to host the workshops, bring everyone into a room, explain it, get their input? I said, now it's up to you, I'm not going to try to convince you more than that.

I had this realization recently and I wrote about it. For a lot of clients I was creating sales enablement materials, and I had everything: sales recordings, transcripts of calls with customers, competitor information. So I was feeding all of it to AI and churning out battle cards, one-pagers, all this collateral. I prompted it perfectly, I had my structure, I was reviewing it, and I felt incredibly productive because I was doing it so fast.

Then about three months later someone asked me, how do I answer this objection, what do I say when this competitor shows up in a sales call and they want to compare these two features. And I didn't know what to say. Because I'd been using AI for all of it, I didn't even store the information in my brain. It was insane. I realized it wasn't helping me, it was making me stop thinking. It shipped the materials fast, but it was replacing me instead of making me more capable. So now I use it to move faster, organize, find patterns, but I never use it to make the final strategic call or decide the direction.

I had a seed-stage client, four people on the team, and after we launched the positioning the CEO wanted to make viral content. How can we make this go viral, what angles would work. I was sitting on the call thinking, this is not how it goes. You can get lucky, but think how many SaaS tools out there want one content piece to blow up and send signups through the roof. Long story short, they didn't last long, maybe four more months, and they had to close down. Content takes time. For someone to decide to try your product they need multiple interactions with your brand, maybe five to ten touch points, and then the work doesn't stop at creating it, distribution is the most important part.

The simpler version of this is the bullshit test. We all know what a good software website looks like, so the moment I land on one I'm judging it. Do they have customers, can I see the logos, are there customer stories, how big is the resource center, do they host webinars. You don't need a ton, but if there are only four blog posts on one landing page, that doesn't inspire confidence, it just looks like you're getting started. Your website is your business card in a digital world. Build the trust: reach out to your champions, interview them, put customer stories front and center. It's all an engine, every piece has to work together, otherwise it doesn't take off.