What I Keep Coming Back To as a Marketing Leader

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. Part of it is that leadership transitions have predictable dynamics regardless of context. But I think the bigger reason is that certain marketing fundamentals just don't move. The tactics, channels and pace have changed. But what you actually need to get right doesn't change all that much.

What's different now is AI. And what AI does, more than anything, is accelerate execution. Which is useful when the foundation is solid. When it isn't, you produce more of the wrong things faster. The margin for error on the fundamentals has gotten smaller, not larger.

Messaging first, always

Both times, the first real work was the same: get clear on how we talk about what we do. Not just tightening copy or refreshing the website but actually going back to first principles. Who are we serving? What problem do we solve for them? Why are we the right answer, specifically, and not just a reasonable option?

That work is harder than it sounds. There's always something more urgent. But if the messaging isn't grounded, everything downstream drifts. Campaigns don't land. Sales and marketing tell different stories. You produce a lot of content that doesn't deliver any results.

In 2019, the problem was a market that was still defining itself. In 2025, it was noise — lots of competitors and content talking to buyers who were more skeptical than ever. The surface-level challenges were different. The underlying work was identical.

Real alignment with product

Early in both roles, I had to establish genuine trust with the product team. Going beyond a good working relationship this was the kind of trust where they want marketing in the room before decisions are made. Yes, I literally want to be in 'the room where it happened' in the product world.

Gain you blame me? When marketing sits downstream of product — receiving finished things and figuring out how to talk about them — you always end of reactive or worse on defense. If the positioning is set before you could shape it then the launch story gets built around what was built rather than what the market needs to hear. You end up explaining decisions you weren't part of.

Getting close to the roadmap, having a real point of view on how to bring things to market, being someone product wants in the room early — that changes the quality of everything that follows.

Brand is infrastructure

Every role I've stepped into, brand has been underinvested relative to what the business actually needed. It always loses to demand generation in budget conversations because the metrics are harder to defend in a quarterly review.

But a weak brand makes everything else more expensive. You pay more for paid acquisition when nobody recognizes you. Sales cycles get longer and content has to work harder to earn credibility that a stronger brand would have provided for free.

I've stopped treating brand as a nice-to-have that gets funded when there's room. It's infrastructure. Build it early or spend more fixing everything downstream later.

What AI changes, and what it doesn't

The capabilities available now are genuinely remarkable compared to what I was working with in 2019. The speed of execution has changed and some things that used to take days take hours.

What hasn't changed is what you need to know before you use any of it. You still have to understand the customer, know how to position, and able to recognize a weak message when you see one. And if you nail those foundations, there's not telling what you'll accomplish.