My take on marketing, leadership, and AI

As a marketer I write for a living. Ebooks, white papers, website copy, sales decks — I've written more of those than I can count. So when I started working on a book, I figured the main challenge would be logistics. Finding the time and managing the output alongside everything else.The writing itself, I assumed, would feel familiar. Boy was I was wrong about that. More wrong than I ever expected.

I've made the move from head of product marketing to head of marketing twice. Once in 2019, once in 2025. Different companies, different categories, different teams. The tools available in 2025 would have been almost unrecognizable to me six years earlier.And yet both times, I walked in and found myself dealing with the same things, in roughly the same order. I've thought a lot about why that is.

Budget season has a way of turning into a negotiation exercise. Teams submit requests. Numbers get trimmed. Spreadsheets get passed around until everyone's moderately unhappy, and the result gets called a plan. I've been in those rooms. And what I've noticed is that most marketing budgets don't actually reflect a strategy. They reflect what people asked for. That's a problem worth fixing, because the way you build and present your budget shows how strategic your thinking is.

I've made my share of mistakes in executive communication. Emails that were too long. Updates that buried what actually mattered. Meetings where I walked in with a problem and nothing else. Most of it I figured out the hard way. Here's what I'd tell someone earlier in their career.

I've worked with some exceptional content creators over the years. I've also watched companies hire them expecting something different, and seen both sides left frustrated as a result. Not because anyone did anything wrong — but because the roles ask for genuinely different things, and treating them as interchangeable tends to shortchange both. It's worth being clear about the distinction.