1 / Get your messaging to match the emotional state of your market.

Indeed would poke fun at the job search in its ad campaigns in the past. AI anxiety is driving the company to double down on empathy and act as a guide, showing where jobs are and how skill sets will evolve.

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2 / Your answers to these 5 questions will dictate the number of users in your product.

These questions in order are: “(i) What counts as activation (a.k.a.the tangible value moment)? (ii) Where are you losing the most users? (iii) Where are you losing the most money? (iv) What’s the line between sales and self-service? (v) Who owns what?”

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3 / You didn’t lose a customer due to competition or dissatisfaction. Maybe you’re no longer relevant!

SaaStr canceled its Notion subscription after the latter sent a re-engagement email about low activity. Notion was tied to only one job (Monday staff meeting) at SaaStr, and an AI agent now owns that job. You’ve got to figure out how many discrete jobs your customer is relying on you for. Too few, and don’t be surprised by churn.

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4 / Don’t reinvent a category. Find the underserved and reposition an existing category to win them.

Bloom wouldn’t stand a chance competing against Red Bull or Monster under the basic moniker of an ‘energy drink.’ Instead, they chose a distribution strategy (among other choices) that targeted traditional convenience stores with a pitch about increasing female traffic.

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📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS

“Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd” by Youngme Moon

1 / 3 ways for brands to escape sameness: (i) Subtract when everyone’s adding. Ex: Google’s iconic single search bar vs. other search competitors. (ii) Change the frame of reference. Ex: Cirque du Soleil incorporates elements from the circus, yet it’s not the same. (iii) Say you’re not for everyone. Ex: Think MINI Cooper, Red Bull, Marmite here.

2 / Nothing makes you conform faster than a comparative metric. When you see yourself lagging business rivals on such a metric, it’s impossible to stop playing catch-up in service to that metric.

3 / 3 lenses to shape your brand for tomorrow: (i) Ask ‘what’s gone scarce for your consumer?’ (ii) Reflect a commitment to a big idea. (iii) Stay intensely human / add a human touch within the firm.

🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES

1 / My latest essay → Crawl, Walk, and Run: A model to help developers win inside your product

2 / Why Every Pricing Structure is Vulnerable & How to Deal With This Challenge: The Case of “Unlimited” Price Offers

3 / Bundling & Unbundling Capabilities (and AI)

4 / Why AI Shifts Product Management Strategy to Discovery and Market Execution

5 / What systems thinking looks like for PM’ing AI products

1 / Turn your research findings into critical hypotheses you can test in 2 weeks.

Stop waiting to get your findings into product work. Take your readout, use AI to dig deep into the insights, and turn it into 3 hypotheses using this formula: “if we [change X], then [metric] will move, because [what the research told us].” Kill whatever turns out to be false.

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2 / For dev products: Explore an ambassador-first strategy to market to developers.

Cursor offers its ambassadors funding for local events and merch in return for “running meetups, hackathons, and forum moderation in their own cities.” This allows in-person presence in cities from Colombo to Tokyo to the Hague without opening an office.

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3 / Follow these 3 customer interview tactics to get feedback on something that doesn’t exist yet.

(i) Understand their existing behavior by asking about their current workaround. (ii) Prototype the experience you have in mind and then interview them about it. (iii) Prod them further on the “decision” the proposed product would change to unpack the true value behind it.

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4 / Expand your brand category by addressing these 3 core components.

Michelle Wiles proposes the brand expansion formula: (product innovation + credibility) X code expansion. An example of this formula in action is On’s stellar growth beyond its linchpin running shoe into new products (ex: tennis shoes), celebrity partnerships (ex: Federer), and an evolved yet recognizable aesthetic.

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📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS

“Difference: The one-page method for reimagining your business and reinventing your marketing” by Bernadette Jiwa

1 / Use the difference map to identify opportunities to add value and create products people want. The 6 pillars behind the map are: (i) Principles - What’s the truth about the market and who we want to serve? (ii) Purpose - Why do we exist? (iii) People - Who is this for exactly? (iv) Perception - What do people believe? (v) Personal - How can we change how people feel? (vi) Product - What do people really want?

2 / “Difference thinkers” start with empathy. This reflects in the way a product or service takes flight to create a difference, starting with the ‘truth’ followed by the ‘people’ it impacts and then the actual ‘idea’ alongside the ‘launch’ plan.

3 / The bell curve has melted. There’s no mass market. Game-changing innovations are designed to cater to people at the edges of the curve and not the average Joe in the middle of it. For example, Airbnb started by appealing to people who didn’t mind sharing a stranger’s apartment instead of booking a hotel room.

🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES

1 / Beyond Tech’s Power: On Status, Sacrifice, and the Search for Legitimacy

2 / The Art of Dealing with Ambiguity: What 18 Years at Amazon Taught Me About Defining Problems

3 / Rewiring GTM from the Top-Down: AI is coming for GTM, whether you plan for it or not

4 / The Prototype Is a Question, Not a Product

5 / The Glitchy, Gloppy Look of Now. After years of corporate millennial blanding, consumer culture oozes into shape for a new generation.

1 / Curate your product testimonials around proving specific claims.

Testimonials can feel random when they hit on random features or obscure value props. Inworld took testimonials from multiple industries and lumped them under the singular claim that their voice AI feels human no matter the industry.

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2 / For D2C: A discount shouldn’t be the first option to save a cancellation.

Brands usually offer some discount, like 20% off, when they’re about to lose a customer. A smarter call would be to solve for the reason why someone’s leaving. If price is the issue, explore a smaller bundle or lower frequency. If they have too much product, offer to skip or pause.

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3 / For industrials: Try demand-based segmentation to capture tomorrow’s demand.

Consider these 2 concepts: (i) Load is what the market demands and (ii) Capacity is the market’s throughput. You can find publicly available data for load and capacity for industrial projects. Markets where load outstrips capacity will contain the buyers of tomorrow!

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4 / Right-size your ABM program to lead to higher conversion rates.

Snowflake limits 20 ABM accounts per AE for the major accounts. Accounts going through this sort of targeted ABM outreach convert at a 32% higher rate vs. others.

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📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS

“Anything but Vanilla: The Roadmap to Differentiation in a World Full of Bland Brands” by Marcos G. Figueira

1 / Think of differentiation as your brand’s DNA. A promise that no one else can make, so much so that if you remove it, you’ll be just another player in the market.

2 / You can kickstart real brand differentiation by asking these 3 questions: “(i) What problem are we solving, and who has that problem? (ii) What are the values and beliefs of our ideal customers? (iii) What does our audience care about beyond just the product?”

3 / A few ways to build brand recall: (i) Distinctive Assets: logos, colors, design elements. (ii) Consistent Messaging: clear, consistent, repeated across channels. (iii) Emotional Connections: evoke emotions. (iv) Storytelling: use stories to organize information that sticks. (v) Repetition & Frequency: “the more often someone interacts with your brand, the stronger the recall will be.”

🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES

1 / Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers - not specialists - in the AI era

2 / The Tech Bro-ification of Marketing

3 / How Jensen Huang Turned a Green Van and 30 Years of Rejection Into Nvidia

4 / Why is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

5 / The MVP is Dead: The MVP was never about the product!

1 / Reframe your product through a partner to expand reach.

Robinhood partnered with Kalshi to offer prediction markets within its investing app. Kalshi is now able to tap into an “investment” minded audience with access to much higher-sized bets. Robinhood, in fact, drove 50% of Kalshi’s trading volume in less than a year!

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2 / Allow the prospect to self-serve their own interactive demo experience.

This comes in handy when you appeal to multiple personas. Wise offers 6 different pathways into a single demo that branches into its own set of tours.

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3 / Your content strategy only needs these 3 pillars, and it doesn’t take a big team or budget.

Solve for virality, discoverability, and relationship through your content: (i) Viral Loops - Social. For attention. Low cost and limited shelf life. (ii) Discovery Loops - AEO + SEO. Evergreen. Answer real questions. (iii) Relationship Loops - Long-Form/Newsletter. Builds trust. You own the channel.

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4 / Use this framework for awareness spending and to stay authentic with your audience.

Sentry starts with (i) “known quantities” like influencers, podcasts, newsletters that speak to their ICP before (ii) maxing out other channels and (iii) finally running an affinity analysis to discover other interests of their core ICP.

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📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS

“Stupider People Have Done It: Marketing Truths, Career Moves, and Life Advice for Doers” by Jay Schwedelson

1 / Set up an onboarding session with whatever AI platform you use. Share who you are, what you want to achieve, your worries, what you’re good at, and where you fall short. This initial homework helps AI’s pattern recognition to personalize its output for you.

2 / Social proof is king or queen. It’s not content anymore! Proof is the shortcut that helps people trust you, click your link, buy from you, or run away from you. Explore awards, client or partner logos, testimonials, and user-generated content in this scenario.

3 / Become well known for one thing. Expand later. The formula works like this: “[famous person or thing], known for [something specific], expands to [something more] to [something much more].” For example, Taylor Swift: from queen of the breakup song to a powerhouse impacting the entire US economy

🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES

1 / How tech workers are feeling in 2026: a workforce splitting in two

2 / The People Who Will Thrive in the AI Age: What will differentiate people is not how smart they are but their relationship to mental effort.

3 / AI Won’t Replace Product Marketing…But It Will Expose Weak PMMs

4 / How to Make Your B2B Brand Stand Out in 2026

5 / The Right Way to Vibe-Code

1 / Let your reps see how much they’ll earn per deal by sticking to simple terms.

Everstage simplifies potential earnings for its reps by focusing on 3 levers: (i) Overall Quota: % of their sales target they hit, (ii) Multi-Year Accelerator: extra commission for longer contracts, and (iii) One-Time Revenue: additional rewards for certain upfront payments.

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2 / Annual subscriptions aren’t always the best! Consider a monthly subscription for your product in these scenarios.

If: (i) you’re pre-PMF and still learning what dictates retention, (ii) you’re still building trust in your brand, (iii) your audience skews under 34, (iv) your primary use case naturally ends in 3-6 months, and (vi) your conversion rate is low.

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3 / Give your users a number if they’re struggling to compare “fuzzy” options.

Stubhub provides a single score (with a qualitative description) of the seat you’re buying. It’s usually out of 10 and lets you compare seats quickly to decide for yourself how much value you’re getting for the money you’re spending.

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4 / Use your content to label the problem that doesn’t have a name yet!

Back in 2015, product teams weren’t searching for “best platform for product analytics.” Amplitude, in collaboration with Animalz, built content around the questions these teams were already asking, added a financial case to address the issues those questions raised, and offered the vocabulary for something that didn’t have a name at the time.

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📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS

“I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything” by Joanna Stern

1 / FIVE rules to live in the AI world: “(i) Work with the AI, not for it. Keep your judgment in the loop. (ii) Set boundaries for your ‘relationships’ with bots. (iii) Think about who’s watching. Tweak data collection settings. (iv) Raise humans, not robots. (v) Keep building your own training data. Do analog things!”

2 / “What happens when the thing we stop practicing is thinking?” We may not bounce right back to our baseline even after we stop using AI. You have to figure out how to avoid losing key skills like “organizing thoughts, constructing arguments, solving problems.”

3 / Intelligent machines help humans in THREE key ways. Let’s look at an example with doctors. (i) Accuracy - ex: increase in cancer detection rates. (ii) Confidence - ex: helps confirm the final decision. (iii) Prioritization - ex: prioritize reports with suspicious or malignant findings.

🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES

1 / The Great Decoupling: How software, caregiving, and childcare inflation are reshaping the relationship between time, work, and income.

2 / In the Age of AI, You Need a Point of View

3 / What will startups do in 2030? Every era needs its everymen.

4 / Stop outsourcing your marketing intelligence to AI. Do this instead.

5 / Disposable Software: Software is now just paper plates

1 / Positioning your startup really just means picking from these 3 options. Don’t overcomplicate it.

The options are: (i) position in a mature category against existing vendors, (ii) take an existing (but small) category to a new audience - ex: DocuSign bringing e-signature to companies that used paper, and (iii) create your own category.

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2 / Structure your PMM team around themes instead of individual products/features.

PostHog assigns each of its PMMs to a specific theme, such as data, observability, AI, or growth. This works as a better structure for PostHog’s broad product as they continue to ship features faster.

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3 / Add the smallest “unit of payment” that’s valuable to your user to the pricing page.

You don’t want to shock a user when they’re ready to pay or about to upgrade to a new plan by showing a huge number. The Wall Street Journal shows a paywall that reads $2/week instead of $100/year, since the former makes better sense for a news subscription.

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4 / Prove the value of your product in less than 60 seconds!

AI will start taking the burden of onboarding a new user. But the thinking of onboarding quickly in less than a minute matters. Ask yourself: “(i) Can your user do something meaningful without knowing where things live? (ii) Does the first interaction reduce fear? (iii) Is progress visible before any commitment? (iv) Does your product behave like a guide?”

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📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS

“The AI Product Marketer’s Playbook: Leveraging Generative AI for Product Marketing Success” by M. Rath

1 / Form your own rules around AI ethics. Be introspective about your AI strategies - “Is this being transparent with my audience? Does this reflect the real diversity of the people I serve? Am I using this data in a way that respects the person behind the screen?”

2 / Look for a spark of something to inject your “humanity.” Become an active editor. Go in multiple different directions at once. For example, ask AI for “contrarian positioning, unconventional angles, or messaging” to push it beyond its comfort zone and avoid its usual behavior.

3 / Future of the PMM role - Become the “champion of choice.” Pick the right segments, nurture a polarizing brand identity, and seek raw human emotion that algorithms lack.

🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES

1 / When the Coin in the Coffer Rings, a Soul from Purgatory Springs

2 / I’m leaving my VP Marketing role at Yonder. Here are the ten things I wish I’d known on day one.

3 / The Distribution Singularity: Why Speed, Story, and Surface Area Now Decide Who Wins in AI

4 / AEO: How to Make AI Recommend Your Product

5 / The do’s and don’ts of minimum viable product marketing

1 / Re-evaluate your GTM strategy by using AI to strip away everything that doesn’t “compound” in value.

BDRs at Owner used to spend 70% of their time researching leads and hitting up the wrong contacts. A uniform AI pre-call research solution now lets those same BDRs make 150-250 calls per day and has increased the average closed-won ARR per BDR per month by ~$50K.

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2 / Include your AI features in your freemium plan (if you have one) and don’t restrict it to your highest pricing tier.

Customers need to find their “aha” moment using your AI features before they choose to pay for it. AI expects them to change behavior, and setting this behind a paywall hurts them from forming new habits within your product.

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3 / Explore standard agentic AI workflows for your outbound motion when setting up your GTM systems.

Latest GTM surveys show that outbound remains a profitable motion and, in fact, “pays the bills” for companies. Incorporate agentic AI into common workflows such as reengaging a closed-lost deal, tracking your champions across companies, displacing your competitor via tech stack signals, generating first-call research briefs, etc.

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4 / Simplify your positioning with this no-B.S. formula to shape your demand-gen strategy.

The formula is Positioning = Target Market + Differentiation. To expand into a statement - “For [SEGMENT who is trying to do JTBD], we’re better than [ALTERNATIVE] because [DIFFERENTIATION].” As an example, Linear’s positioning would read “For anyone [using an issue tracker/tracking issues], we’re better than [Jira] because [you’ll actually enjoy using it].”

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📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS

“The Business of Expertise: How Entrepreneurial Experts Convert Insight to Impact + Wealth” by David C. Baker

1 / You can gauge the success of your professional expertise firm (if you start one) by the following criteria: Are you able to move the needle for your clients? Do they pay you a price premium? Are you directing the process? Are you staying engaged?

2 / 6 helpful principles to craft the positioning of your expertise: Positioning (i) must be declared publicly, (ii) should be semi-permanent, (iii) is inversely related to the size of the firm, (iv) is inversely related to the remoteness of your physical location, (v) is ideally narrowed to a single focus, and (vi) built on your expertise and NOT your implementation.

3 / Early ways to test the positioning of your expertise: (i) Are you able to give 20 insights off the top of your head on your expertise? (ii) The appropriate # of competitors is 10-200, and prospects are 2K - 10K, (iii) Can you buy a list? (iv) Can you answer which firms your employees will come from? (v) Will either the client come to you, or will they pay you to travel?

🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES

1 / The Abstraction of Value and the Value of Abstraction - “A 25-Year Thesis on the Migration Patterns of Technology, Capital, and Talent”

2 / You Can’t Fake Belonging: What the science says about why feeling like you fit in matters at work

3 / The Interior Design of Software: How Design Evolves in a Post-AI World

4 / Services: The New Software - “The next $1T company will be a software company masquerading as a services firm”

5 / The personalized Internet is here: Gemini → AI Mode → AI Overviews → Search

1 / Evaluate your ICP every 3 months by tapping into these 4 buckets of insights.

Lovable’s insights team informs the ICP with inputs from the (i) product data: usage, retention, ARR, conversion, (ii) ‘builder’ surveys: expectations vs. outcomes, (iii) deep-dive interviews: dialing deeper into the what, the why, and the hurdles, and (iv) internal AI agents: connect to the library of user calls, surveys, and interviews.

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2 / Turn all your existing context on a feature/product into a sales-first resource using this AI trick.

Product folks always have assets flowing everywhere at any moment - be it slides, UI overviews, proposals, etc. On any feature or product, feed AI all these source materials, and make the output sales-ready around these 4 categories: what it is for, when to use it, what’s required, and key constraints or trade-offs.

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3 / Explore using your product’s AI assistant as an activation tool.

Amplitude’s AI assistant is not another chatbot! It studies where the user is within the product and offers context-specific guidance. It can trigger in-product walkthroughs to help the user continue making progress. It uses any friction as a signal to step in and propose actions.

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4 / Consider partner-led strategy not just as a channel motion but as your core growth engine.

95% of Okta’s top 100 deals last year were partner-led! The company consistently spent 3 years cultivating the direction, incentives, removing friction, and investing in partner practices.

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📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS

“So What? Why? Who Cares?” by Doug Kimball

1 / The core messaging framework - (i) So What? What’s the main takeaway? Why does it matter right now? (ii) Why? What pain or insight drives your story? (iii) Who Cares? Who’s affected, and how does it change their world?

2 / 4 ways to create a sense of “Why Now?” - (i) expose the cost of inaction: real numbers, real stories, (ii) link to external triggers: regulation, economic shifts, industry changes, etc, (iii) create a competitive threat narrative: create FOMO with testimonials from existing customers, (iv) emphasize speed of results: time to value, accomplishments in the first 30-60 days.

3 / Use a visual anchor to support your story. Choose the anchor based on these criteria: Will it reinforce the message? What does it help the audience see instantly? What does it replace that you do not need to say?

🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES

1 / Who Owns Your Customer When AI Does the Shopping?

2 / AI isn’t coming for your job. It’s coming for your mind.

3 / Why your team keeps shipping products nobody buys

4 / The POV Problem: A position about why this account, why now, what matters, and what this specific call is actually for

5 / The new PMM stack: How AI fits across research, positioning, and GTM

1 / Simplify your value prop and pricing before you rejig your company website to be agent-friendly.

Buffer set up a machine-readable pricing link at the bottom of its pricing page. As agents start to evaluate software on behalf of humans, this move, along with a broader shift towards ‘llms.txt’, is informing AI crawlers where to look for the right information. So, if your pricing is too ambiguous, for example, the agent is very likely to simply move on to the next option.

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2 / Pick from these 5 archetypes of great storytelling to win attention, curb noise, and build compelling source material.

Plaid acquired its first newsletter business. OpenAI spent millions on a popular tech talk show. Anthropic was looking for a Head of GTM Narrative. As storytelling becomes more important, explore playing one of these archetypes - (i) Advocate: a voice for your product ecosystem, (ii) Analyst: use of data to become the trusted source, (iii) Teacher: novel frameworks and how-to guides for important skills, (iv) Provocateur: advocate for what most people disagree with, and (v) Builder: show how you run your business in public.

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3 / Drop in a short customer story at every key moment to embed social proof within the product experience.

This can take the form of case study snippets, “how others use this” tooltips, or aggregate usage patterns. Slack used to share usage stats during onboarding, like “Teams that use channels instead of group DMs see 25% fewer messages.”

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4 / Don’t rely solely on ticket volume (a lagging indicator); also pull in feedback from reviews, social comments, and community discussions to prioritize problems.

Support tickets serve as one input into deciding which problems to solve. A broader ‘social listening’ plan anticipates issues. Brands that win not only listen to “what customers say to them” but also “what they say about them” in different spaces.

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📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS

“AI Marketing Blueprint: 7 New Rules for Driving Pipeline and Revenue” by Shiv Narayanan

1 / 7 rules of marketing in the AI world: (i) help customers work their way through the buyer journey by themselves, (ii) invest in distinctiveness via authority and deep expertise, (iii) ensure your content pops up in spots where AI trains itself, (iv) create first-party content no one else will produce, (v) build product tools that AI platforms can use to create outputs, (vi) drive paid media to capitalize on your power in marketplace, and (vii) co-create content with prospects and use intent signals from your content engine.

2 / AI platforms are looking for signals to answer ONE critical question - “What is the best possible answer to this query and who has the best possible answer to this question?”

3 / 4 types of queries on AI platforms - “(i) Navigational: looking for the right website, link, video, etc. (ii) Informational: looking for answers to a particular question, (iii) Transactional: looking for the right product, service, or solution, and (iv) Generative: looking to create content, research, and insights.”

🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES

1 / How ‘Zombie Flow’ Took Over Culture

2 / How can you ensure paying customers don’t worsen the new user experience?

3 / The Economics of Software Teams: Why Most Organizations Are Flying Blind

4 / Why software’s AI boom means big opportunity for product marketers

5 / The Snare of the Slopreneur: AI slop entrepreneurs have no moat, but someone has to explore the new tech

1 / Adopt an “ice/water/steam” product roadmap to build credibility and offer a reasonable commitment for the other teams to plan around.

This roadmap shows increasing confidence the closer a commitment gets: “(i) Ice (next 2-3 months): locked in, specific features with dates, good for sales and marketing planning. (ii) Water (3-6 months): directional, showcases the problems you’re going after, share with the caveat that it’ll shift. (iii) Steam (6+ months): strategic, no dates, working hypothesis, outcomes and themes.”

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2 / For AI-native products: Focus on the user experience built on top of the models when tackling both human and agentic workflows.

Legora currently ranks as the fastest enterprise business to reach $100MM ARR (they did this in just 18 months). Some of their defining choices involved not competing with OpenAI and Anthropic on models, and instead focusing on scaffolding and the right user experience. They also took a forward-looking approach, building for AI agents alongside humans from day 1 as their industry moves toward autonomous legal work.

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3 / Stop subsidizing your most expensive users and create a “10X plan” that accounts for their cost!

OpenAI and Cursor both independently found that a small cohort of power users was hitting credit limits and deriving disproportionate value. Both companies approached this as a segmentation problem by creating a $200/month tier for these GPU-thirsty users rather than charging the same, smaller fee (for example, $20/month in OpenAI’s case) designated for the average user.

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4 / Use this checklist to ensure your messaging survives sales handoff and resonates with prospects.

Messaging can remain as a paper exercise when it fails due to too much setup, or sounds better than it explains, or feels like milquetoast after multiple internal reviews. Avoid this outcome by asking, “Could a rep explain this to a skeptical buyer without a deck?” Survive the sales handoff by verifying that your message can be explained in one or two sentences, mirrors how buyers talk about their problem, anticipates first objection, and doesn’t require perfect delivery.

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📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS

“Open to Work: How to Get Ahead in the Age of AI” by Raman & Roslansky

1 / The 5Cs that can help you capture your human edge at work - curiosity, courage, creativity, compassion, and communication. They form the engine of human innovation.

2 / A framework to find how AI will impact your work - Step 1: Write down the top dozen tasks that make up most of your time at work. Step 2: Sort them into 3 buckets - tasks AI can do alone, tasks you’ll do with AI, and tasks that remain uniquely human. Step 3: Assign the % of time that goes to each bucket. Bucket 3 contains durable value, and you want to expand that the most.

3 / “Onlyness” is the unique spot in the world that only you occupy and serves as the source of your power and ideas. Nilofer Merchant, who coined the term, suggested 2 exercises to find your onlyness - “(i) List 5 stories that formed and informed who you are. Ask what that means to you and what decisions you’ve made as a result of that. (ii) If you’re in a Disney movie and found a magic wand to solve anything, what would you fix?”

🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES

1 / My latest essay - Stop Shipping Trivia: The PMM guide to uncover real product insights

2 / A PMM’s guide to shipping at pace: Product teams are shipping faster than ever before. Here’s how to adapt to it

3 / Competent is the New Mediocre: Why AI Rewards the Best, Replaces the Rest, and Forces Everyone Uphill

4 / Subscriptions Will Survive In Exactly Two Places

5 / You Cannot Build Taste in a Burnout Culture

1 / Pick a cohesive one-liner story and fragment it uniquely by audience, platform, and moment in time.

Harvey’s one-liner is that it’s AI for law firms. Similarly, Honeydew’s is “online dermatology.” The latter can dynamically segment its audience and target marketing by skin concern (ex: acne, fine lines), by aesthetics (ex: minimalism, K-beauty style), or by purchase motivation (ex: TikTok virality, dermatologist recommendation).

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2 / For B2B Companies: Position yourself better as AI-native by listing your product on AI app marketplaces and making it easier to build agents around your tools.

Many AI-forward B2B companies, like Ramp, Vercel, and ClickUp, are on both the ChatGPT and Claude app marketplaces. New app listings indicate more than 50% of products are B2B. This gives the user another way to interact - for example, via the Claude connector, ChatGPT app, and MCP.

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3 / For AI Products: Improve in-app activity and re-engagement by allowing your users to rollover their AI credits even after the end of their subscription term.

Lovable noticed users within their product being active in random bursts. To enhance user-friendliness, the company allows users to rollover unused credits to the next month if they don’t use them entirely. This policy served as a natural trigger for users to resume building (i.e., using the product again).

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4 / Ask these 3 questions to build your unique POV for content drawing from actual customer research.

Consider this a framework to get beyond boring - “(i) What’s the real friction point your buyer is experiencing? (ii) What’s the counterintuitive truth about the friction your category is ignoring or getting wrong? (iii) What’s the resolution that makes sense once you accept the counterintuitive truth?”

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📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS

“Like: The Button That Changed the World” by Martin Reeves & Bob Goodson

1 / Robert Merton on “unanticipated consequences of purposive action” in the realm of social policy - (i) 3 types of unintended consequences: serendipitous benefits, negative side effects, and truly perverse results. (ii) 5 basic causes of unanticipated consequences: ignorance, error, immediate interests overwhelming considerations of longer-term ones, human values preventing actions that would produce better consequences, and a “self-defeating prophecy” attitude that can keep people from deviating from a negative but voluntary course.

2 / Challenge yourself to spot the next substrate (underlying layer) for technology innovation to guide significant investments. For example, PayPal was a business built on the substrate of transactions made efficient with the advent of internet connectivity.

3 / From “The Structure of Invention” Article - People create novel technologies by putting together “Lego blocks” in a new way. Once something’s put together, like say a radio circuit for transmitting radio waves, it can be thrown back into the Lego set. New things can pop up as completely new combinations, using new principles, and that keeps adding to your Lego set.

🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES

1 / Why Tech Bros Are Now Obsessed With Taste

2 / Every Generation Inherits a World. Alpha Gen Inherits a Business Model.

3 / White Collar Goes Blue: A working theory on the rights and reshaping of the professional laptop class.

4 / The Interface Was The Product And Now It Isn’t

5 / Ten ways to create an AI-shaped career

1 / Run Google Ads on the actual error messages your competitor’s product shows.

Anthropic (think: Claude Code) has started bidding on niche error messages that developers paste directly into Google search to find solutions. It’s a sly way to pop up for their prospects with an “I can fix this for you” message while they’re stuck looking for a fix.

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2 / For AI products: Get creative with outcome-based pricing by laddering plans based on the “amount of work it completes for the customer.”

Lindy, an AI assistant, details the specific actions it can perform for customers based on their plan (Pro vs. Enterprise). As an added kicker, the company includes a fake human assistant on their pricing page to communicate the value of its product in an aggressive way.

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3 / Create a low-stakes environment for your users to try your product’s core functionality during onboarding.

Wispr Flow is a voice-to-text AI tool that forces you to dictate a practice email and a note during its setup. This shows the tool in action, nailing the dictation right, and prompts the user not to second-guess the output in a real-world scenario.

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4 / For B2B brands: Take an inside-out, people-first, ecosystem approach to growing your company’s brand on LinkedIn.

Slate’s Head of Marketing suggests looking internally to your company’s employees as the first line of distribution. You have to support them as they get the message out on your behalf. And then layer in your customer advocates, creators, followed by partners.

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📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS

“The Science of Scaling: Using Data to Decide When - and How Fast - to Scale Revenue” by Mark Roberge

1 / The “Science of Scaling” framework has 3 sequential stages - “(i) Product-Market Fit: defined as generating customer success consistently, (ii) Go-to-Market Fit: defined as generating customer success and revenue consistently and profitably, (iii) Growth and Moat: defined as scaling revenue predictably while simultaneously building a sustainable moat around the business.”

2 / Product-Market Fit is “TRUE” if P% of customers achieve E event every T time. P = minimum % of customers achieving your definition of retention (ideal: 60-80%). E = event or set of events that represents retention (ex: product setup, usage). T = time frequency to evaluate retention event (ex: daily).

3 / 3 lenses to optimize price - Lens 1 - Buyer ROI: anchoring price on a portion of the ROI your product delivers to the buyer. Lens 2 - Unit Economics Goals: your company’s unit economics, regardless of the metric you choose. Lens 3 - Substitutes: value and cost of your solution compared to other methods solving the same problem.

🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES

1 / 10 Charts That Capture How the World Is Changing: From Peptides to Prediction Markets, AI Usage to VC Secondaries

2 / Aesthetics of AI: Observations on the Visual Identities of Standout AI Brands

3 / The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis: A Thought Exercise in Financial History, from the Future - NOTE: This viral blog post prompted a market selloff!

4 / Go AI Mode: The Playbook for Becoming Invaluable at Work Right Now

5 / How Staying Small Became AI Startups’ Biggest Flex

1 / For AI products: Explore capability-first messaging (vs. traditional outcome messaging) when there’s hardly any differentiation among market players who also talk about outcomes.

The players in the AI notetaker space showcase their offerings with the same high-level customer benefits. Granola goes a layer deeper and features its “product as the differentiator.” They focus on “how” their product works vs. vague claims.

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2 / For early-stage teams: Avoid getting lost in vanity numbers during the first 18 months and focus on these 3 metrics to verify if your customers are seeing “repeatable value” from your product.

Stage 2 Capital suggests looking at your (i) Leading Indicator of Retention (LIR) - “measurable behavior that signals a customer will stick, for ex: creating 3+ workflows in 30 days”, (ii) Time-to-Value - “how long it takes the customers to get to LIR”, and (iii) Customer Health Rollup - “Who’s healthy? Who’s stuck? Who’s at risk?”

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3 / For DTC brands: Create a different return experience for your VIPs if you have a loyalty program to improve your repeat purchase rate.

Black Sheep, an Australian apparel brand, offers 3 VIP tiers with different return benefits - VIPs get $15 bonus credit on exchanges vs. $5 for general customers, and first-time buyers have their fees waived entirely. On average, personalized return policies achieve a 55% repeat purchase rate, compared with 21% for brands with one-size-fits-all policies.

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4 / Pay attention to the workarounds your customer has built for your product to identify ‘friction areas’ before they become retention risks!

Hivebrite’s customers running in-person events would sometimes hire temps to manually fill out and upload attendee lists after the events. The company solved this quickly with a “simple QR code check-in feature.” Such quality-of-life improvements are usually dismissed as low priority, but they reduce friction massively.

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📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS

“Building AI-Powered Products: The Essential Guide to AI and GenAI Product Management” by Marily Nika

1 / 3 categories of AI product managers - (i) AI builder PMs who focus on “developing foundational AI technologies and models”, (ii) AI experiences PMs who craft user experiences “powered by AI’s capabilities”, and (iii) AI-enhanced PMs who leverage AI in their “own existing workflows” to improve productivity.

2 / A successful AI product has 3 core components - “(i) product health metrics: engagement, user satisfaction, adoption, conversion, retention, (ii) system health metrics: uptime & latency, scalability, error rate, and (iii) AI proxy metrics: model quality (ex: accuracy, precision, sensitivity), objective functions (model’s performance during training), confusion matrices (algorithm performance - ex: true positive, true negative, false positive, false negative) .”

3 / The “human input” in the AI product development lifecycle - “(i) PM puts requirements together, (ii) AI researcher trains the model, (iii) AI model generates output, (iv) Annotator confirms/corrects, (v) Engineer puts the experience together, and (vi) PM confirms/refines the experience.”

🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES

1 / My first essay of 2026 - Product Listening: How to turn raw feedback into real product influence

2 / Building an AI/ML Platform 0 to 1: A playbook for building from scratch, in an Enterprise environment (and measuring what matters)

3 / AI makes interfaces disposable

4 / The Trust Recession: When every signal is cheap, what’s left?

5 / Dreams of Stability: Tech’s New Corporate & the status in safety nets.

1 / For AI products: Try RITE testing for an iterative, less expensive, and more quickly actionable approach to user testing.

Greg Nudelman (Author: UX for AI) from Snowball Sprint reimagines user testing via the Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation (RITE) methodology. The 3 key modifications come from (i) smaller participant groups: opt for 3-4 people per round for 3-4 rounds, (ii) real-time iteration: update prototype between rounds, and (iii) building as you go: don’t test a finished prototype, but rather build out iteratively what users need, want, and are willing to buy.

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2 / Positioning vs. Category Leader: Avoid leading with how you’re better, but show how you’re different, how you build differently, and create unique value.

Claude’s Super Bowl ads poke fun at OpenAI’s choice to include ads within their product. A clear choice by OpenAI to find a path to profitability. In doing so, Claude highlights a “conflict of interest” in OpenAI’s business model that undermines its users’ trust.

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3 / For AI products: Review the value you create by asking these 2 questions and pick a pricing metric that customers already understand and buy.

Dealops’ founder recommends looking at your product’s value through these lenses - “(i) What metric are you actually moving? (ii) What financial outcome does that metric create?” Furthermore, in the early stages, it’s better to pick an easy-to-understand AI-relevant metric (think: seats, credits, API calls) as the foundation of your pricing model.

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4 / Optimize for the 3Ps (people, programming, place) and replace traditional “low ROI” trade shows with executive dinners.

Sheena from RevAura suggests exec dinners as your channel for intelligence, positioning ideas, brand, and community building. Besides selecting people from prospective accounts, also ensure you’re using the dinner to promote your company’s specific POV.

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📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS

“Money Stories: Communicating the Value of Product Work” by Rich Mironov

1 / What is a money story? A simple shorthand for how a product or project might make money for your company. These stories broadly fall into the following categories: upsell, boosting volume, churn reduction, new customer acquisition, market entry, and operational cost savings. The general formula to calculate the impact of a money story: “size of relevant audience” * “value per unit” * “guess on impact %.”

2 / Consider an R&D mix similar to an investment portfolio - (i) big, visible revenue drivers: 50%, (ii) care & feeding, technical investments, existing features: 35-40%, (iii) validation, discovery, technical research: 5-10%, and (iv) unplanned/deal driven work: 5%.

3 / Calculate your product’s “earning our keep” ratio - It’s the total revenue of the product divided by its total cost. This cost is entirely people costs in software (for example, avg. cost per employee * entire maker organization). A product needs to at least bring in ~$6 for every $1 spent on it to earn its keep.

🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES

1 / The 2026 SaaS Crash: It’s Not What You Think

2 / The top UX design trends in 2026 (and how to leverage them)

3 / The hidden cost of only choosing short-term wins

4 / The Invisible Scale: What “not bad” actually costs when AI starts reading your performance reviews

5 / How to Build An AI Native PM Operating System

1 / Explore TRUST as your growth lever with these trust-building activities to counter rising product expectations and collapsing distribution channels.

The Head of Growth at Lovable emphasizes that we need to rethink our current growth models in an AI-first world where traditional SEO, paid search, and corporate social don’t work as effectively anymore. When users see AI commoditizing product capabilities, they expect your product to build a certain level of trust with them that you’ll continue to deliver better outcomes over time. Entertain transparent roadmap sharing, thoughtful lifetime comms, monetization aligned with outcomes, ‘WOW’ moments, as a first step in building that trust.

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2 / For agentic products: Consider switching from monthly to quarterly billing to buy time for the learning curve and reduce customer churn.

AiSDR switched to quarterly billing to account for the commitment required from any customer, given the company’s hands-on support during the upfront setup. The quarterly billing serves as a filter to secure customer commitment and avoid quick churns before AiSDR can show value.

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3 / Position your product around a repeatable human behavior and continue to reinforce it until your brand becomes the default expression of that behavior.

“I’ll Venmo you” is commonly heard around restaurant tables after dinner with friends, colleagues, or acquaintances. Venmo took the awkwardness out of asking for your own money back by turning it into a peer-to-peer interaction with a social layer, complete with emojis, gifs, influencer campaigns, and all.

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4 / Study the conflicts between the ‘to-do list’ and the ‘calendar’ of your customers to discover product opportunities.

Rob Snyder (a fellow at Harvard Innovation Labs) proposes the PULL hypothesis to get at the heart of a product or feature idea. For a customer: (i) What’s the project on their to-do list that’s blocked? (ii) Why is it urgent or unavoidable now? (iii) What is the list of options they’d consider or try? (iv) What are the limitations of their existing options?

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📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS

“High Output Management” by Andy Grove

1 / You can increase the productivity of a manager in 3 ways - (i) increase the rate at which they perform their activities, (ii) increase the leverage of their activities, (iii) shift the mix of manager activities from lower to higher leverage.

2 / A manager should maintain an inventory of projects that don’t need to be finished right away (“discretionary projects”). These are projects to increase the group’s long-term productivity.

3 / There are 3 Ls to keep in mind when delivering a review - (i) level, (ii) listen, and (iii) leave yourself out.

🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES

1 / The 26 Most Important Ideas For 2026: Modern trends and history lessons across culture, politics, AI, economics, science, and the long story of progress.

2 / Everything I know about running UX Audits

3 / The Line Between AI-First and AI Theater: Letting product ownership be your guide

4 / Skill gives you power. Taste decides how you use it.

5 / 17 PMM Ways to Move Faster: Practical ways to compress timelines without compromising on quality

1 / Try a reverse demo during your sales call to spark excitement about your product among your prospects.

Clay initially struggled to help their ICP (outbound salespeople) find an “aha” moment with the product. To counter that, instead of leading a demo, the team would let the prospect share their screen and guide them via Zoom’s annotation features. Clay got a ton of UX feedback, while the prospect learnt to use their product!

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2 / Reframe your product through the lens of “Who does it help me become?” to identify the part that drives word of mouth.

Gamma’s CEO suggests getting beyond just capturing tasks and pain points during discovery. You have to figure out the self-image your product reinforces. Most products compete on features, but the ones that win compete on feelings.

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3 / For new startups: Be wary of offering an AI ‘open’ text box as the first stop to your user, and instead opt for guided flows.

Upwork asks new users to enter what they want in an ‘open’ text box right after signing up. While the company may benefit from brand recognition, new startups trying to do the same may hurt themselves by assuming that users know what they want. Help users understand what’s available.

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4 / On B2B influencers: Adopt a B2C mentality by weaving creators into your strategy as “co-architects” and not just promoters.

Bumble avoided any script and let comedian Amelia Dimoldenberg lean into her humor and voice. The takeaway for B2B is to co-create a narrative with creators, aligning on tone and story to reach the audience, rather than offering a finished brief.

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📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS

“This Is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn to See” by Seth Godin

1 / Think of marketing in 5 steps - (i) invent something with a story worth telling, (ii) design and build it in a way that a few people care about, (iii) tell a story that matches the built-in narrative of that tiny group of people (”smallest viable market”), (iv) spread the word, and (v) show up regularly, consistently, and generously for years and years.

2 / A bet you’d be better off making - “When in doubt, assume that people will act according to their current irrational urges, ignoring information that runs counter to their beliefs, trading long-term for short-term benefits, and most of all, being influenced by the culture they identify with.”

3 / “Effective marketers have the courage to create tension” to move people with paralyzing fear over the chasm to the other side. If you care about a change you want to make, care generously to create tension on behalf of that change.

🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES

1 / A new navigation paradigm: Is AI truly eliminating navigation, or is it simply shifting its agent and form?

2 / How The AI Bubble Will Burst: It’s Because of Finance, Again

3 / How to Build a GTM Dashboard That Doesn’t Fail

4 / Your Career Needs A Breaking Change: Forget resolutions. Change your defaults.

5 / How to choose which startup to join: A framework and system for making a better decision

1 / Consider solving more problems for the same customer to expand your product offerings, rather than simply diversifying.

Samsara follows an 80/20 rule: they build something if 80% of their customers ask for it! This rule led them to build safety products after the initial success of their telematics solutions.

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2 / Diagnose the effectiveness of your GTM using this simple 4-part pyramid to turn your marketing into calculated bets vs. expensive guesses.

Klear B2B suggests finding the ‘leak’ in your GTM in a linear way (specific order). Look at (i) The Market (The Foundation) - ex: ICP, JTBD, buying committee, (ii) The Message (The “So What?”) - ex: positioning, narrative, POV, (iii) Assets (The Tools to Move Buyers) - ex: case studies, sales deck, landing pages, and (iv) Action (The Plays) - warmup, activation, and nurture.

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3 / Experiment with your product’s cancellation experience by listing the features the user was actually using to limit churn.

Canva’s cancellation flow doesn’t simply list all the features the user will lose. They instead focus on the specifics (ex: features) of what the user was actually using, along with their usage volume.

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4 / Exploit your competitor’s moments of crisis with a playbook that makes it easy for their existing customers to switch to your plans.

Ahrefs pounced on Adobe’s announcement of acquiring Ahrefs’ key competitor: Semrush. Their playbook included a colorful landing page to lure Semrush’s existing customers with the 6-month free offer.

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📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS

“Product Delight: How to Make Your Product Stand Out with Emotional Connection” by Dr. Nesrine Changuel

1 / 3 essential elements to create product delight - (i) Address Pain Points: remove their friction and do so seamlessly, (ii) Anticipate Needs: predict and serve before users ask for it, (iii) Exceed Expectations: surprise by going a step further in value, joy, or quality.

2 / 3 types of delight play a role in shaping our user experiences - (i) Low Delight: helps users accomplish something but can’t create an emotional connection - ex: skip feature in Spotify, (ii) Surface Delight: purely visual or interactive but doesn’t help users accomplish goals, (iii) Deep Delight: satisfies functional and emotional needs to deliver the most impactful user experiences - ex: smart compose in Gmail.

3 / Identify opportunities effectively by writing 2 types of statements - (i) Motivation Statements: [user characteristic] wants to [motivation] because [underlying insight]. (ii) Opportunity (or ‘How Might We’) Statements: how might we [intended action] to/for [targeted users] in order to [benefits, gains, or results we’d like to see].

🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES

1 / How to Future-Proof Your Career in 2026: 5 GTM superpowers that will be mission-critical in 2026

2 / Tech predictions for 2026 and beyond

3 / 21 Lessons from 14 Years at Google: On code, careers, and the human side of engineering

4 / This thing is killing your creative momentum

5 / Companies Are Desperately Seeking ‘Storytellers’

1 / Explore ‘voice’ as a creative moat alongside your core marketing strategies.

Morning Brew offers a 5-min rundown of business news every day. One of their first editorial choices was on the writing itself. They asked, “What if we wrote business news the way people actually talk about business news?”

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2 / Build and track metrics on visibility, comprehension, and conversion to assess success in the new world of AEO.

To dominate AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), Webflow follows (i) how often it’s cited in AI search results across ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc., (ii) how accurately those models describe Webflow, and (iii) how many signups and conversions originate from LLM-driven traffic.

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3 / For AI Startups: Pay attention to the ‘four horsemen of AI’ to deduce if your revenue traction is for real or not.

Intercom‘s cofounder suggests that every AI company should have all 4 of these factors for durable revenue - “(i) revenue backed by usage, (ii) usage tied to business impact, (iii) deep, differentiated AI, and (iv) positive unit margins.”

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4 / Employ hybrid pricing for products with ‘embedded AI’ to give customers some level of predictability in their spending.

Flat-rate AI pricing can be great for customer adoption, but it can put you on a death spiral as power users rack up heavy compute costs (think a SaaS version of MoviePass back in the day). Hybrid pricing models (ex: $X/month + Y credits) allow you to reflect the variable costs of AI in pricing.

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📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS

“Better Onboarding: Effective Strategies for Guiding New Users” by Krystal Higgins

1 / For Onboarding: Research new users, existing users, and audiences you want to scale to using these questions - “(i) How and why did they find your product? (ii) What are their expectations? (iii) How have they approached trying other new products? (iv) What’s worked or hasn’t worked with other new products? (v) What common routines do established users lean on in and outside of your product that new users need to be guided to doing? (vi) What workarounds have your existing users developed?”

2 / Ask these questions to narrow down to the most critical actions where your users need guidance - “Which actions reduce abandonment or failure? Which actions are required to perform other key actions? Which actions are useful for many different entry situations? Which actions can you realistically support?”

3 / You can break onboarding actions into 3 parts - “(i) prompt to take action at the beginning (ex: prompt to identify vehicle to find matching parts), (ii) work in the middle of the action (ex: user specifies year, make, and model), and (iii) follow-up at the end of the action (ex: confirmation message for the saved vehicle for future access).”

🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES

1 / What’s in a Name? A Lot, Actually. Here’s How to Pick the Right One For Your Company

2 / The Gospel of Product Management

3 / Prototyping everything: On rough drafts, sacrificial concepts, and designing your way through uncertainty

4 / Product Purgatory: When they love it but still don’t buy

5 / When Differentiation Matters: Working out the right time to invest in this tricky part of the positioning process

📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES

1 / Communicate your product sunset process from the customer’s perspective with an eye for their new experience and expectations.

Linktree acquired Fingertip in November 2025 and plans to shut it down in May 2026 (a 6-month notice). Fingertip’s homepage shows an FAQ on the “acquisition, products & functionality, and upcoming process.”

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2 / Figure out these 4 items: product flow, user action, value indicator, and opt-ins before you launch your AI feature.

Zoom’s AI Companion onboarding flow can seem like a maze of opt-ins: see video here. Avoid this error for your product by figuring out (i) how AI fits into your current product experience, (ii) what concrete action you want your user to take, (iii) how to show value immediately, and (iv) how to decrease the number of “yes’s” to try your feature!

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3 / Answer these 3 questions to discover and lean into your product marketing edge.

Alicia Carney highlights how her unique blend of internal trust, customer empathy, and needs whisperer propelled her to successful launches at Deliveroo. Find your edge by asking (i) what energizes me (”the work you lose time in”), (ii) what others trust me for (”what people ask for without you offering), and (iii) where you create momentum (”moments where things just click”).

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4 / Build a free, small tool for an idea that serves your audience well, and launch it to drive awareness of your core product.

Shopify generated massive awareness long before a sales pitch by launching dozens of free tools for entrepreneurs: “logo maker, business name generator, invoice creator, privacy policy generator, and more.” The logo generator became one of their top funnel sources.

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📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS

“Onboarding Matters: How Successful Companies Transform New Customers Into Loyal Champions” by Donna Weber

1 / Orchestrated Onboarding Framework - 6 stages to guide your customers through onboarding. (i) Embark: Sell the value of your onboarding program before deal close. (ii) Handoff: One for internal teams and another for customers. (iii) Kickoff: Detail everything for the product to go live. (iv) Adopt: Implementation of your product that may take weeks or months. (v) Review: Verify progress with customers as onboarding wraps up. (vi) Expand: Go on to tackle new users and help others adopt new features and products.

2 / Start working on your success plan as early as possible to let your sales teams include any necessary consulting services and training in the deal.

3 / Don’t try to show the value of your product all at once, even if it can provide a high ROI. Aim to deliver quick wins by phasing out your deployment. Show the first value in days or weeks instead of months.

🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES

1 / Post-social media: It’s time to rethink what the feed is for.

2 / The Product-Market Fit Treadmill: Why every AI company is sprinting just to stay in place

3 / When Algorithms Curate Culture, What Do We Lose?

4 / To Free or Not To Free. A clear framework on how to choose between freemium, free trial, or paid-only.

5 / Writing the onboarding experience. How to help a product introduce itself.

1 / Your pricing page needs these 4 sections to reduce ambiguity with every scroll.

They’re as follows: (i) hero: where you state your pricing philosophy, (ii) pricing menu: summarize the key elements, (iii) feature comparison table: highlight granular feature category details, and (iv) FAQ: answer 95% of the questions. Livestorm starts its pricing page with the key pricing differentiator vs. direct competitors.

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2 / Create high-effort content to go big and stand out from AI slop feeds.

The FinOps platform Ramp brought on Kevin from The Office (US) as its CFO and livestreamed his first day from a “glass-box office in the middle of NYC.” The campaign generated over 112MM views across platforms!

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3 / Reframe pilots as a ‘buying tool’ for enterprises and choose the pilot route after evaluating these 2 conditions.

The COO of Crowdbotics recommends pilots based on the product’s maturity. Pilot more often if your product is early-stage, new to market, or if it helps boost buyer confidence. Avoid it when the implementation is complex or when you don’t have a committed buyer!

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4 / Start optimizing for what AI talks about (think: AEO) and not what Google ranks.

The Ahrefs team spent 6 months figuring out Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). Measure how often AI chatbots mention your brand, boost your presence on domains AI trusts (ex: UGC-heavy platforms like Reddit, Quora), and ensure your own site is crystal clear about what you do.

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🙌 PMA is recognizing top PMM voices this year. If my work has been useful or sparked an idea for you, I’d love your support. You can nominate me here.

📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS

“Eureka: The Product Onboarding Playbook for B2B Companies” by Ramli John

1 / You can break down B2B user friction into 3 levels - (i) emotional: psychological barriers preventing users from adopting a new solution, (ii) social: organizational and personal barriers that pop up during product adoption, and (iii) functional: fundamental usability and technical barriers when users try to use your product.

2 / Set your interactive demos to match key aha moments or moments of delight in the product. Show users the ideal end state to excite them about your product and continue through onboarding.

3 / Answer these 3 questions to guide your customers through a great onboarding experience - “(i) What actions have they already taken? (ii) What are the next steps they need to take to move them along the onboarding journey? (iii) What’s the most effective way to guide them to those next steps?”

🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES

1 / The 2025 State of B2B GTM: What’s Actually Working

2 / Only 100 Metrics Matter. These 100 metrics explain 90% of what’s happening in your business and product.

3 / AI interfaces and the role of good writing. Why clear, strategic writing is more critical than ever.

4 / The Ultimate PR Guide for Startups. How to land TechCrunch, build credibility, and avoid common traps.

5 / How to Build Product Marketing AI Workflows That Actually Work