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.

Founders are the lifeblood of new organizations; the people who create vision, wrestle with ambiguity, and carry risk when others won’t. Their drive is often what gets a company off the ground. But as companies grow, the style of leadership that helps in early stages can quietly become a bottleneck, slowing not just progress, but the company’s ability to evolve, scale, and thrive.

Most business failures aren’t caused by a lack of data. They’re caused by a lack of listening. Across industries and decades, the same pattern shows up again and again. Companies have access to customer signals—research, feedback, behavior, even internal warnings—but they discount, delay, or misinterpret what those signals are telling them. Not because the data isn’t there, but because it conflicts with existing incentives, beliefs, or success models.

One of the most persistent tensions in growing companies isn’t strategy or funding. It’s hiring. Specifically, who you hire when speed matters, resources are tight, and the future feels just close enough to plan for—but not close enough to see clearly. One theme surfaces repeatedly across leaders and stages: the most durable teams weren’t built by choosing between scrappy or scaled talent. They were built by understanding what the moment actually demanded.