From Bare Strategy

Writing

One idea at a time. New every week.

Product Marketing · February 5, 2026 · 6 min read

How to build a B2B messaging house: the framework PMMs actually use

Four descriptions of one product, all published this week. The copy is fine and nothing sits underneath it. A messaging house holds six parts. One value proposition, three pillars, proof under each, an unlike line, segment variations, and objection responses. Most teams finish the document and stop there. The house only counts when someone who didn't write it says a line out loud without looking it up.

messaging positioning product marketing messaging house B2B SaaS

Product Marketing · January 29, 2026 · 8 min read

Category creation: how PMMs build markets nobody else owns

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.

PMM

Product Marketing · January 22, 2026 · 7 min read

Product-led growth and the PMM: how your role changes when the product is the channel

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.

PMM

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

The newsletter

One idea in your inbox, every week.

No sequences, no funnels.