Product-Marketing

A fair warning before we start. This article has an expiration date. Not the principle. The principle is permanent: marketing copy should sound like someone with conviction wrote it. But the specific tells I catalog here reflect LLM-generated text I’ve seen from 2024 to 2026. AI writing patterns will evolve. Signals will shift. A year from now, some of these tells will be less common and new ones will replace them. Treat the examples as a snapshot. ...

Here’s a common scene product and technical marketers have lived through. You write a value prop. You’ve done the work. You talked to product. You understand the feature. You describe what it does for the customer. You feel good about it. Then someone reads it and says, “So what?” Not because it’s wrong. Because it stopped too soon. The copy describes the direct effect of the feature. The direct effect is real. It is good. But it is not the reason someone buys. The reason they buy is one level above: the business outcome the direct effect makes possible. ...

I came into product marketing from a technical background. Programming, hardware, IT, databases, support — I’ve done it all. Years of thinking in systems, logic trees, and structured problem-solving. When I started building messaging documents, I did what any technical person would do. I organized the information. I categorized the features. I mapped capabilities to outcomes in clean, logical structures. The documents were thorough. They were accurate. And they persuaded nobody. ...