Can you tell me a little bit about yourself, what you're working on right now? And how did you end up there?

I have had my consulting practice, The Start-up Marketer, since about 2018, although I've really been doing consulting work for most of my career in some capacity. There was always someone who was like, Oh, I'm starting this new photography business and I could use someone who writes to help me with copy on my website. So I've always been helping people building their business, and kept that as a bit of a side hustle. 

But what prompted me to lean into the current version of my business as I know it today was leaving a software company back in 2022 that I had helped start five year prior. I had been responsible for building their brand from scratch, seeing them through series A funding, approaching series B. And as I was looking at what I [wanted to do] next, you know, I'm in the tech world. And the tech space in 2022 and into ’23 was really facing some strange times. We were just coming out of COVID where there had been this hiring boom in tech, arguably an overhiring of people during that time. Then the industry experienced a bit of a correction. And then, of course, with all these layoffs, companies are getting worried. Marketing is often viewed as a nice-to-have, or it can be consolidated. [People can fail] to recognize that marketing has so many subspecialties within it and just expect one person to do all of it. I saw a lot of that going on, and after doing a very thorough and extensive job search, what kept falling into my lap were consulting projects. 

Now I'm building my business, and that's a super exciting prospect. I've been doing this for just over 20 years and I've seen a lot of toxic leadership, and I know there is a better way to do things. Bigger isn't always better, faster isn't always better, more isn't always better. These are capitalistic ideals that I think have really permeated modern business culture. But with a younger generation of people entering the workforce, fundamental things are being questioned. I want to celebrate ideals of egalitarianism, and I want to build a business where [everyone contributes] expertise. We're all adults, we're all professionals, and we can really benefit from the knowledge that the other parties around the table have and not flex these hierarchical muscles that I've just seen so much of over the past two decades. I want to do something really different.

What are some of the things that you're working on right now?

I am working with a client that does solar energy. I’m also working with a county in New Jersey doing tourism for them, which is such a change, I’m really enjoying that more consumer-facing side. And then I'm working with an AI software company that has some really, really cool technology to help companies leverage AI for customer support. 

Where does product marketing fit into your consulting work?

I do product marketing for customers or for clients when it makes sense. So for this AI software company, that's where we started. You cannot create a single marketing asset without having that foundational understanding of: Who are we? Who are we selling to? What are their pain points? What is this solution that we're offering, and how does it address these pain points? How does it provide a better business experience? What does that sort of transformational ideal look like? I look at product marketing as that foundational layer that supports everything else. Without it, you get a very Frankenstein approach to marketing, and that's when you run into trouble and get very confusing messaging. 

I look at product marketing as that foundational layer that supports everything else. Without it, you get a very Frankenstein approach to marketing.

How has your thinking about product marketing changed over the years?

When I came into it, I feel like product marketing was very, very technical as a discipline. Where now product marketing has become more integrated into general marketing with an understanding that product marketers own the product message and the go to market strategy. As with a lot of areas in business, I think it's become a little more humanized.

Do you push in that direction in your own work with your clients?

Yeah, I was very influenced by Donald Miller's book Building a Storybrand. This book is all about how our brains connect to story, and that that is how we synthesize information. When I'm looking at something highly technical, what I want to know is, How do I tell the story of this product in a way that instantly connects to my audience? 

Miller writes about expending mental calories, and I think this is only more and more [important] as we are bombarded with more and more sources of information. Our brains are incredibly adept at assessing a message very quickly and deciding if it makes sense or not. And if it doesn't, we're onto the next thing. 

What was your first encounter with AI? 

I think the first time I really started dealing with AI in business was probably back in about 2018 or 2019 with Malbek. They were working on AI components of their contract management software. So I really got to dive more deeply into, What's NLP? What's machine learning? How is that different from AI? These terms tend to get confused and used interchangeably. I’m sure you’ve heard a lot like, AI’s taking away our jobs, blah blah blah. But did the steam engine take away people’s jobs? Well, yes and no. It actually created new types of jobs. Humans are always going to have jobs, don't worry about it. Some of the stuff that we're either not very good at or is really tedious and not fun to work on, AI is super good at that. So we can rely on technology to enable us to be more efficient and good at what humans aren’t as good at. 

Did the steam engine take away people’s jobs? Well, yes and no. It actually created new types of jobs.

Do you use AI in your work? Are there ways that you're using it to do those tedious things and free yourself up for the human innovation?

I love to use AI as a jumping off point for brainstorming and ideation. I find that it very quickly aggregates fairly high quality information that I can then use for creating new content. AI is not capable of creating anything net new. It is drawing from information that already exists and putting it together in a way that is meaningful according to the parameters that you set, it's not going to be creative. But when you've been working on ten projects and now you need to come up with a clever subject line for an email blast that needs to go out—it can be the jumping off point. If you're feeling particularly blocked, or if you need to set up your social media calendar for the coming month and you have some parameters, it will come up with a bunch of great topic ideas for you. I will even occasionally use it for some writing, but I look at it as more of an outline. To me it's always a jumping off point, and then I have to come in and bring the human element. 

Do you see it now or in the future impacting product marketing?

I think it's going to impact every area of marketing, without a doubt. I think that the things that humans are good at, though, making connections and decisions and developing hypotheses and testing them and then synthesizing the results, that is going to be almost impossible for AI to do. How do you teach a machine judgment? How do you teach a machine discernment and nuance? 

AI is really good at two things: combing through reams of data, and surfacing that data in an organizational structure. There is this holy grail of marketing that no marketer has ever figured out, which is: How does all this stuff that we do actually produce any results? That would be something AI could potentially do. But right now, I think most product marketers’ jobs are just going to be made easier. They're not going to be taken away.