Hey all,
Happy Sunday from beautiful NYC.
Marketers are in demand af right now because startups are shipping products fast.
My favorite marketing roles are also the hardest to hire for:
Growth
Product Marketing / Education
Marketing Eng (designing systems with AI for marketers to use)
My first real role in marketing was in Product Marketing. I had just built my first piece of software (CLASHD) and had good junior experience writing brand books and product guides on how to use our platform.
Product marketing plays a critical role.
If users get stuck in your flow, then your product is a failure. It doesn’t matter how many eng resources you’ve wasted or money you’ve raised. If a user cannot make it through your product (or understand what it does + retain it), you’ve failed.
For this reason, many startups are hiring today for product marketers (referenced throughout this newsletter as “PMM”).
Special shoutout to Tyler, who is hiring for a critical senior PMM role at my favorite place in the world, beehiiv. They are a portco at Knight Vision (coming up on 1 year in a few short months!!) and are my fav fav fav ppl. If you know someone who is incredible at:
Synthesizing information into a 3rd-grade level
Can make dope videos explaining the product (in an educational type of way)
Can guide users through flows and motivate user actions
Plz reach out, and I’ll plug. +1 because we will get to work together!!! /
Related past newsletters:
Show customers their wins (March 2026)
Here’s my framework for evaluating what a strong product marketer looks like & the ultimate product marketing take-home test you can use today:
What is product marketing?
We all build and ship software products. It’s critical that these products are “dressed” in the right way: colors, user flows, terminology, positioning, education.
Let’s use a button as an example. A product marketer will own:
Where is a button placed?
What does the button say?
What is the shape? Does it pulse or hover? When a user taps it does some effect happen, like a vibration or a burst of emojis?
What do you call this feature?
Product marketing is quite literally an always-on education of how people understand and move through your product. It’s all about the experience and ease.
What makes a fire product marketer?
Writes in 1 to 5 word sentences and makes them land
Can look at a funnel and immediately see what's broken
Knows the difference between what a good product sounds/looks like vs. AI-slop (we don’t want your product to sound like slop; it’s so obvious still)
Has actually shipped something, even if it was a vibe-coded prototype as an intern
The role maximises the convergence of education, conversion optimization, and taste. The best product marketers are obsessed with reducing friction and can explain your most complex feature to a 5-year-old in under 30s.
The ULTIMATE Product Marketing Exam:
Use this take-home test on product marketing candidates and forward it to friends who are hiring. Built by someone (me) who was once a product marketer and has built/shipped thousands of product versions, education hubs, updates, emails, etc for products that have millions of users.
📌PART 1: Strategy & funnel (How you think about growth + gaps)
Name your top 5 product marketing experiments you'd ship in your first 30 days. Rank them by priority.
Strong answers will cover funnel-level thinking (not just top of funnel), include at least one conversion/revenue optimization test, and at least one in-product education experiment, like a user study to test whether people can recall what a feature actually does.
Based on what you know about us, where do you think users are dropping off? What would you test first to close that gap?
Research our product before answering and go thru the user journey. We want to see your instincts.
You need to build a pricing page. Walk us through your process: what do you build, who do you work with, and how do you know if it's working?
Have you ever built or shipped a paywall? Describe the decision framework you used. If not, walk us through how you'd approach it.
Paywalls happen in onboarding and throughout the product. For B2B, this looks like pop-ups that tell users they have hit their limits (like an API call limit or token limit) and will prompt the user to upgrade.
📌PART 2: Copy & direction (How you write + guide)
Choose the right button label for each of these three moments. Explain your reasoning in one sentence each.
The moments:
(a) A user just completed onboarding and sees the dashboard for the first time
(b) A free user hits a feature gate mid-session
(c) A user is 3 steps into a 5-step setup flow
Button options: Try free · Next · Get started · Unlock · Continue
Below are two versions of the same product tooltip. Identify which was written by AI and which by a human. Explain how you can tell.
Version A:
"This feature allows you to efficiently manage and organize your content pipeline by providing streamlined access to key publishing workflows, enabling you to optimize your editorial process and maximize productivity."
Version B:
"Your content queue. Drag, reorder, and schedule everything in one place. Hit publish when ready."
Where would you set up and host an education hub for our product? What format would it be in, and what's your content priority for month one?
I love education hubs on YouTube. Every company should have a YouTube page with Loom style videos that walk users through how to do everything in the product. This is the fastest way to avoid support tickets and build a reliable PLG motion.
Pull one example of an education hub you love and why.
Can be from SaaS, consumer or anything. It just has to be strong and you need to articulate its strengths.
A user just deleted something they can’t recover. Write the modal copy.
Should be very straightforward.
📌PART 3: Cross-functional (Everyone thinks they can do marketing; they can’t)
Here are common situations for PMMs:
Does your CEO know best?
The CEO just rewrote the homepage headline themselves and told the team it's final. You think it's wrong. It buries the value prop and leads with a word your customers don’t use. Do you say something? If yes, exactly how?
A PMM can’t be scared of a CEO. They need to have confidence and the skills to riff. If anything, they can call for an A/B test.
Someone has an opionion with no data!
Everyone’s least favorite but most common situation because everyone thinks they can do marketing (spoiler, they can’t). A PM tells you your onboarding copy “seems off”. He doesn’t have research or user quotes to back this up. How do you respond?
There’s a gentle way to negotiate that your copy ships. Own your territory and be open to riffing and hearing ppl out.
The launch that doesn’t need to be announced in 50 places
Your team wants to announce a new feature with a beehiiv post, a press release, an in-app banner, a Product Hunt launch, and a LinkedIn video of your founders. All in the same week. How do you map this out and ship the right materials accordingly?
📌PART 3: Let’s build (Ship something, then 10x it)
This is the most important section for us to see how you build, test, and distinguish between human and AI copy.
STEP 1: VIBE CODE A PRODUCT
Use Cursor, Bolt, Lovable, or any AI tool of your choice. Build a simple onboarding flow for a fictional product you make up. We are looking more at flow and copy vs. functionality. It’s ok if it doesn’t function as long as we understand the intention.
STEP 2: TEST IT ON A REAL PERSON
Ask a friend to demo your vibe-coded product and take 5 notes of feedback. Examples: What did they get confused by? What did they click that you didn't expect? What was their first and last question?
STEP 3: REBUILD IT
Take the V1 made with AI and rewrite it yourself (just the copy). Submit both versions side by side. We want to see where the original didn’t meet your expectations, what you fixed and why. Keep what you think makes sense and adjust what’s needed.
Well, How’d I Do?
If I were in B2B right now, I’d pull a PMM from a consumer company that has worked on a product in the same vertical.
For example, if you’re selling to hospitality, pull from a consumer hospitality company (I have a portco via Thrive Cap that is filling a PMM role!! HMU if you know someone and I’ll connect you with Krithika at Thrive).
Consumer PMMs are incredible at user funnels, experimenting and copy. B2B should tap this market for talent ASAP.
I hope you have an incredible and productive week until we speak again on Sunday!
Julia
