From Bare Strategy
One idea at a time. New every week.
Positioning · March 8, 2026 · 7 min read
Near-zero signup-to-paid conversion is a positioning problem long before it's a funnel problem. Broad positioning fills the top of the funnel with a curious majority who look identical to buyers in every dashboard and never pay. The repair is language specific enough to push the wrong people away before they ever sign up.
Sales Enablement · March 7, 2026 · 7 min read
The standard demo accumulates. Every feature in it earned a slot after some lost deal, nothing ever gets taken out, and eventually the demo can't do the job it exists for. What goes in, and in what order, is a positioning decision wearing a sales costume. PMM owns the narrative spine, the environment requirements, the variants that decide which slice of the product this buyer sees, and the competitive moments. A demo should carry the nine pages that belong to the person on the call, not the whole manual.
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
A GTM plan that lists what marketing will do gets rejected. A GTM plan that states a bet gets approved. The bet page comes first, one paragraph naming the segment, the claim, the number, and the date. Everything after it is evidence. Four parts carry that evidence, in order. Who exactly the market is, what our one winning claim is, the route a prospect actually travels, and the early signals that tell us it's working before revenue does. Detail is what we produce when we can't name the bet.
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 5, 2026 · 8 min read
Most PMM teams accumulate instead of getting built. One generalist works, so we hire another generalist, and five people in nobody can say who owns the launch process. That second hire is a recognition hire, the person we bring on because we already know how to evaluate them rather than because the team is missing what they do. The second PMM should be the most different hire we make. The third should go deep on a revenue gap we can name out loud. And the operating model has to be written down before it's needed, because headcount is a setting and somebody still has to watch the road.