PMM

Still convinced agents are going to be incredibly useful for development and brainstorming, but they don’t understand nuance for visuals, feels, or vibes. If you ask an LLM what “washed out” means, it will spit out directionally correct text, but won’t be able to translate that into actionable outputs. The same as asking your neighbor or spouse, they’ll feel an image, potentially agree with you, but won’t have an actionable way of making something less or more washed out. Any attempt will be futile.

Which brings me to the point I keep coming back to: strategy (accountability), marketing, product marketing especially, and brand designers are not getting replaced by AI anytime soon. I already see a massive demand for designers who have real product marketing chops, and that’s only going to grow. The taste and feeling.. that bringing to life magical process has to come from within. A human!

This afternoon I’m chatting with two teams who want to start experimenting with AI. Earlier this morning I got some time to play with a few different models, running due diligence on designer portfolios and design assets. Interesting exercise. Basically how or why I wrote the blurb above.

After a super rainy and snowy week, the sun is out and it’s marvelous… shining bright like a diamond. House bombs are on in the background and summer is coming, baby. Trumpets and all

Now: back to the newsletter that has to ship in the next few hours

Claude utilization on my Max 20 plan increased from 4% per day to around 6% over the last few days. Let’s see how that trends for the rest of month.

Are admin dashboards dead? After 45 minutes refining and redesigning for a new mini app, I realized that moving forward, all report requests will be automated daily, potentially include a genAI UI report, and be accessed via command line or Slack. Duh. What am i even doing?

The second realization: AI sucks at PMM. I’ll make the claim rn, no model will ever fully get there. It’s storytelling and craft maxxing. It might generate word salad, but they’re empty greens. PMM is foreplay for beautiful product.

And with that, I’ll start PMM’ing this website. Whenever I roll up my sleeves and pace my hallway relentlessly, the positioning, perceptions, and idea maze balloon… both the product marketing and the product get stronger. New ideas. They feed into each other. Iterations, a/b, technical debt, pruning features.

imho, the best product minds use PMM as the gateway, a middle layer after v1 of the product. Amazon talks about starting with the press release, and that works for larger, established companies. In the 0 to 1 startup phase, I believe the dance is product → PMM → product → PR → then PMM again.

good night