Founders, chief product officers (CPOs), and chief marketing officers (CMOs) spend a lot of time talking with and listening to customers. As they should. And, by and large, they do it well. But there's one common mistake that many smart, strong-willed, and vision-driven leaders make. Surprisingly,
We're in the middle of an AI boom. Capital is abundant, expectations are high, and nearly every company is trying to position itself as a winner in the coming transformation. Amid all the excitement, a basic challenge remains: separating what exists today from what might exist tomorrow. Customers,
I spend a lot of time thinking about go-to-market efficiency — how companies decide where to invest their marketing dollars, how they measure what's working, and how they improve over time. For years, much of marketing measurement has revolved around attribution — trying to determine which programs, campaigns,
We’ve decided, after 122 episodes, to put The Metrics Brothers podcast on hiatus. Let me explain how I think about that decision. On October 20, 1974, the Grateful Dead played what was then billed as their final show before an indefinite hiatus. The band was burned out. The touring
The first time I read Obviously Awesome by April Dunford, I breathed a sigh of relief. Someone had finally written the positioning book that desperately needed to exist — and one that I had long suspected I might someday need to write myself. My reaction came not from the material — which
Saying you want a strategic discussion and walking into a board meeting with a 45-slide operations review deck is like saying you want to eat healthy and driving to Baskin Robbins. The intention and the action are in direct contradiction. And — hint — the action wins every time. If you
I think we are in the brute-force era of AI. By that I mean that progress is coming less from fundamentally new ideas and more from applying massive amounts of data and compute to existing architectures. Larger pretraining corpora, longer context windows, more GPUs — more of everything. And to
A few years ago I wrote a post called The Decomposition of Marketing. The argument was that startup CEOs were increasingly breaking marketing apart — moving product marketing under product and moving demandgen under sales — in order to get strong leadership in both product marketing and demandgen without having to find
Just a quick post to highlight that Exit Five has published the audio from my presentation at their recent leadership retreat. The presentation was entitled How To Be the CMO Everyone Wants To Work With, and the audio is about an hour long. Exit Five founder Dave Gerhardt published it
There's a question I've been mulling for a while now, and I think it's time to write it down: when is it okay to use generative AI in a given business context, and when does it cross a line? I'll focus on
I recently read The Magic Box Paradigm by Ezra Roizen. It's self-published, was first released in 2016 [1] , and you won't find it on most startup reading lists. The writing is uneven and inconsistent. The metaphors are weird. There are too many TLAs (three-letter
I'm a big fan of Dave Gerhardt and the Exit Five marketing community he has built. While I have always liked the idea of peer-networking communities, I think they change from vitamin to painkiller in times of rapid change. Why? Because the playbooks haven't been