From Bare Strategy

Writing

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Product Marketing · January 15, 2026 · 7 min read

The PMM's first 90 days: how to earn your seat at the table before you know the product

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.

PMM

Product Marketing · January 8, 2026 · 7 min read

The ICP playbook: how to define your ideal customer profile before your competition does

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.

PMM

Product Marketing · January 1, 2026 · 8 min read

The PMM metrics playbook: how to prove your impact when you don't own the number

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.

PMM

Product Marketing · December 25, 2025 · 8 min read

Voice of Customer research: how PMMs build messaging that actually converts

Most B2B messaging is written from the inside out, in the language of the people who built the product. Voice of Customer research is how we get the buyer's own sentences instead. Talk to wins, losses, and near-misses. Mine tickets, reviews, and recorded sales calls for the words buyers use before they know our category exists. File the raw quotes in a language bank. Then run the highlighter test on the page we already published. A buyer who hears her own sentence come back to her feels understood, and understood buyers buy.

voice-of-customer product-marketing messaging customer-research B2B-SaaS

Go-to-Market · December 18, 2025 · 7 min read

The GTM alignment playbook: how PMMs bridge product, marketing, and sales

Product, marketing, and sales each end up serving a slightly different customer, and every one of them is optimizing correctly. That's the three-customer company, and it's the default state at every ARR level. Alignment doesn't arrive through a mandate or a bigger meeting. It comes from one findable positioning document, a room before every ship, a working loop back from the field, shared numbers nobody can move alone, and a PMM useful enough that people reach for the story instead of writing their own.

go-to-market product-marketing GTM-alignment B2B-SaaS sales-and-marketing

Go-to-Market Strategy · December 11, 2025 · 7 min read

Your pricing page is a sales rep. Most companies treat it like fine print.

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.

PMM

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