Writing · Tagged
28 pieces on this thread.
Positioning · March 20, 2026 · 8 min read
Positioning is a choice about who you're for and why you're worth switching to. Most companies never make it, so the market makes it for them. This guide covers what the choice actually contains, the five ways it decays, and where to start repairing it.
Go-to-Market · March 7, 2026 · 8 min read
Not every launch deserves the same investment. A tier framework sorts releases into T1, T2, and T3 before anyone builds a plan. T1 gets eight to twelve weeks and a cross-functional team, T2 gets four to six weeks and a focused activation, T3 gets a changelog entry and one sentence to sales. The tiers matter less than the question they force, which is what a launch is worth before we spend on it.
Product Marketing · March 6, 2026 · 7 min read
You don't need thirty tools. Every tool in a PMM stack repeats back what you already gave it, tidier and louder, which is worth paying for only when the repeating is the bottleneck. Five categories carry the weight. Research, messaging, enablement, competitive, and AI. The highest-return investment is the one most of us skip, which is a structured research habit built before any software gets bought.
Product Marketing · March 1, 2026 · 7 min read
Pricing is the most consequential number in a B2B SaaS business, and product marketing usually meets it last. A price has to be readable on its own. When every deal needs a rep standing next to the number to explain it and discount it, we haven't set a price. We've built something that needs an attendant. Five pieces belong to PMM. Willingness-to-pay research, the value metric, packaging, competitive framing, and the price increase. Own the research and we end up in the room where the number gets set.
Product Marketing · March 1, 2026 · 9 min read
Company size and industry describe a buyer. They don't predict one. The segments that earn their keep are boarding groups, defined by what just happened inside a company and what that company now counts as success. Two or three of them, pulled out of the twenty deals that felt easy, validated by reps, and tested against the generic message for a quarter. Any segment that doesn't change what we say is a filter.
Product Marketing · February 28, 2026 · 7 min read
ABM runs on one unit of work. Call it the account thesis, a paragraph that says why this company, under these particular pressures, should care about this product this quarter. Most programs skip it and ship templates with the logo swapped, then wonder why target-account pipeline looks like everyone else's. This post covers what PMM owns instead. The four inputs to a thesis, what the tiers really change, the parts bin that makes account-level messaging repeatable without custom production, and the two comparisons that say whether any of it landed.
Product Marketing · February 28, 2026 · 7 min read
Most partner programs are a page, a portal, and a deck from eighteen months ago. The content is technically accurate and addressed to nobody, like a letter from the HOA. Partners open it, realize they'd have to rewrite the whole thing before any client conversation, and improvise instead. Call that the translation tax. It's the work we push onto partners before anything we made is usable, and they only pay it once before they stop opening the folder. A channel performs when that tax gets driven toward zero. That means sorting partners before building anything, writing in the partner's language rather than ours, enabling them the way we'd enable a new rep, and putting two names on the deal.
Product Marketing · February 27, 2026 · 7 min read
Most positioning documents are accurate, approved, and unusable. They read like an explanation of benefits. Every line is true and none of it tells the buyer what to do next. The fix is to write the crown quote instead, the four-sentence version a dentist gives you when the tooth is cracked. What's wrong, what happens if you wait, what it costs, and why this option and not the cheaper one. Six sections, one page, reviewed every quarter.
Product Marketing · February 27, 2026 · 7 min read
A store's return policy tells you what it thinks of you after the money moved. Our customer programs do the same thing, and most of them say the relationship ends at the invoice and restarts at renewal. Call that the renewal-only relationship. It costs more than anything on the dashboard shows, because the customers who already bought are the only people who can tell us whether our positioning is still true. Four programs fix it. References sorted by segment, proof that admits what was hard, enablement written to an outcome, and a community somebody actually reads. The proof is useful. The language is worth more.
Product Marketing · February 27, 2026 · 8 min read
Product management owns the roadmap. Product marketing owns the narrative. That answer is correct, and it has never once ended the argument, because the argument was never about definitions. Four decisions sit in both roles' laps. Pricing, personas, customer research, and launch. Press down on one and the others move, which means either role can get exactly what it asked for while the company loses the deal. Call that a box win. What ends the argument is writing down who decides in each of the four, before the next disagreement shows up.
Product Marketing · February 27, 2026 · 8 min read
We own the messaging framework and we can't make anyone use it. Every PMM deliverable carries a distribution fee, the part that gets paid after the writing is done, in other people's calendars, and it never shows up on the plan. Non-adoption is silent, so a framework can be live, linked, approved, and dead. Pay the fee early instead. Build the relationships before there's an ask, keep a standing rhythm with the four people whose behavior your quarter depends on, hold one living positioning document the organization actually quotes, and report upward in the metric leadership already watches.
Product Marketing · February 26, 2026 · 8 min read
Most positioning workshops end in a truce. Everyone trades away the claim they cared about, nobody's wrong, and the company comes out undifferentiated. That happens when nobody brings evidence, so opinion becomes the only currency in the room and the loudest holder sets the rate. The fix is the two weeks before the session. Stakeholder interviews in verbatim language, a competitor map built from competitors' own words, and win/loss read honestly. Then the room's job gets small. Admit the evidence, keep the claims that survive being checked, draft the statement live, and pressure test it before anyone leaves.
Sales Enablement · February 19, 2026 · 7 min read
Most competitive battlecards are written to make us look good, which is why nobody opens them. A rep has about fifteen seconds and needs words to say out loud, not a feature matrix. The line that earns the open is the loss line, one honest sentence naming where this competitor beats us. Build the card around the live conversation. Interview reps first, fit it on one screen, put the traps on it, and put the card where the deal already is.
Product Marketing · February 12, 2026 · 8 min read
Analysts already know what we sell. The forty-slide briefing is the lane we keep switching into, and it never moves. What they don't have is our read on the market and what customers did after the contract signed. What we don't have is theirs. The half of the call where information travels back toward us is the return half, and most vendors never schedule it. Protect the last fifteen minutes, spend inquiry hours as research instead of emergency support, and write down every piece of skepticism an analyst voices in passing. That skepticism is a chip in the windshield. It becomes next quarter's enterprise objection.
Product Marketing · January 29, 2026 · 8 min read
A category names the condition a market is already stuck in, clearly enough that the people stuck in it can act. Call it the gate announcement. The work is a plain name for the problem, a claim with an enemy behind it, other people repeating the words, and the patience to say the same thing for two to five years while the numbers stay flat. Most companies quit around month eighteen. The ones that don't end up owning the terms everyone else has to argue with.
Product Marketing · January 22, 2026 · 7 min read
In a product-led motion the product is the channel, so the messaging has to work with nobody standing next to the buyer. That exposes the last-page problem. IKEA hides the picture of the finished thing until the end, and most self-serve products do the same to their users. The PMM job is moving that picture to page one on three surfaces. The story before signup, the words inside onboarding and empty states, and the upgrade moment that has to close in two sentences and a button.
Product Marketing · January 15, 2026 · 7 min read
The first ninety days in a product marketing role are a diagnostic, and you only get them once. The instinct is to ship something visible in week two, which produces credible fiction. Work that's well-made, confidently formatted, and quietly wrong, because it was built on an inherited view of the buyer instead of a firsthand one. Spend the first month listening, the second turning what you heard into a position people can argue with, and the third shipping one thing that proves you understand the business rather than the product.
Product Marketing · January 8, 2026 · 7 min read
An ideal customer profile is a filter, and most of them filter nothing. The document usually describes who leadership wants to sell to, not who the company actually keeps. Build it from the twenty customers who stayed, expanded, and sent you people like them. Then write the exclusion list, because naming who you're wrong for is what makes who you're right for mean anything.
Product Marketing · January 1, 2026 · 8 min read
Product marketing influences everything and owns almost nothing, so when leadership asks for our number we reach for the countable thing. Content shipped, sessions delivered, battle cards refreshed. Call it the beige scorecard. All of it is true, none of it is nourishing, and it has never won a headcount argument. The way out is a set of metrics ordered by how close they sit to our own hands, from message pull-through and competitive win rate out to shared revenue contribution. Report the indicators that predict rather than the ones that confirm, name the metrics we share, and say the causal chain out loud.
Go-to-Market Strategy · December 11, 2025 · 7 min read
The pricing page is the highest-intent page we own, and most of us hand it to design and finance. It answers how much while the buyer is asking whether it's worth it. Name the tiers for the buyer, anchor on the middle option, put the proof next to the price, and answer the objection before it gets typed into a chat window.
Strategy · November 27, 2025 · 7 min read
In a crowded market, "better" is the claim every competitor already makes, and saying it hands the leader the terms of the comparison. A position stated as a comparison is borrowed, and the rent comes due. Start from the job the buyer is hiring the product to do, then pick one fight and stay in it. Head-to-head, flanking, differentiation, or a category we name ourselves.
Competitive Strategy · November 20, 2025 · 7 min read
Every lost deal has a reason that's safe to say and a reason that's true. Price is almost always the safe one, and it's the one that lands in the CRM and shapes the roadmap. Win/loss analysis is a structured program of interviewing buyers after the decision, with someone neutral asking about the process instead of the product. Two to four a month, tagged the same way every time, routed to product and sales so it doesn't die in a deck.
Product Marketing · November 13, 2025 · 7 min read
Every B2B software company already does product marketing. It gets done in fragments by a founder, two reps, and whoever on the team writes best, and nobody ever opened a req for it. Call that the unposted job. It costs nothing on paper, which is why it runs for years. This post covers the symptoms that say it's costing real money, the inflection point where the hire pays for itself, what to look for in a first PMM, and what to do when a full-time hire isn't realistic yet.
Go-to-Market · November 6, 2025 · 7 min read
A launch has exactly one date on it, and every argument about scope and sequencing gets settled by how close the work sits to that date. Call it date gravity. The announcement always ships, and the work that decides whether a launch produces revenue mostly sits outside the countdown. This post covers what to build before the date, how to run the week itself, and what to keep doing for the ninety days nobody scheduled.
Product Marketing · October 30, 2025 · 7 min read
Every feature has to survive three questions. What is it, so what, and why does it matter. Buyers only read the third one, and most product pages never reach it. Lead with what changes for the buyer, make the claim specific enough to be checked, and let the capability turn up later to explain how.
AI & Strategy · October 23, 2025 · 7 min read
AI got good at the tactical half of product marketing, which means the tools stopped being anyone's advantage. What separates PMMs now is the returned hour. That's the time automation hands back, which belongs to nobody until someone says out loud where it goes. Decide that before you automate, or the hour gets eaten by faster versions of the same work.
Strategy · October 16, 2025 · 7 min read
Everything a competitor publishes has been reviewed by someone whose job is to make the company look inevitable, and that polished surface is where most competitive intelligence programs start and stop. The useful material sits in what a competitor can't edit. Job postings, earnings-call answers, and the shape of their two-star reviews give away next year before any announcement does. Call that the involuntary signal. This post covers how to collect it, how to compress it into a card a rep opens before a call, and how to keep the whole thing from rotting.
Product Marketing · October 2, 2025 · 7 min read
Most GTM dashboards are built out of numbers that can only come back good. The five worth an hour a month are win rate by sales stage, sales cycle length, attach rate, sales velocity, and pipeline influenced. Each one is an indicting number. It can come back bad, and when it does it names the thing to fix.