By Mack McKelvey, CEO of Salient MG and The Startup Marketer
In 2023, I wrote a Fast Company article arguing that a startup’s first marketing hire should be a product marketer. Two years and a generative AI boom later, I stand by it more than ever.
Execution Is Cheap Now. Judgment Isn’t.
AI has made it absurdly easy to create content, launch campaigns, spin up websites, and automate outbound. The bottleneck used to be execution. Now it’s judgment. AI can’t tell you who your ideal customer is. It can’t decide which problem matters most, why buyers should care, or how to position your product. Those are human calls. That’s exactly why product marketers matter more than ever.
Motion Isn’t Progress
Here’s a pattern I see constantly at seed stage: a founder hires an SDR, a growth marketer, a content creator. The CRM fills up. Website traffic climbs. LinkedIn engagement ticks up.
Revenue doesn’t.
Why? Because nobody answered the foundational questions first. Who is our ideal customer? What painful problem do we actually solve? What resonates with buyers? What triggers create urgency to buy? Skip those, and every marketing dollar gets more expensive. Demand gen just amplifies assumptions. Product marketing is what validates them. The real problem isn’t a lack of activity. It’s that the company never learned enough about its market to build something customers truly need.
Product Marketing Is Organisational Intelligence
Great product marketers don’t just make things sound good. They build systems that help companies make smarter decisions. They interview customers, test positioning, and uncover buying triggers and competitive gaps. They surface objections before sales ever hears them, and help product prioritise, sales sell, and founders decide.
That’s not marketing. That’s organisational intelligence.
AI Made Product Marketers More Valuable, Not Less
Here’s the irony: AI has increased the value of experienced product marketers, not diminished it.
Execution is being commoditised. Insight is not.
Every startup now has access to roughly the same AI tools. The advantage isn’t who produces the most content. It’s who knows which questions to ask, because they understand their customers better than anyone else.
The winners won’t be the companies shipping the most content. They’ll be the companies learning the fastest.
What to Look For
The best startup product marketers are comfortable in ambiguity. They talk fluently with engineers, customers, investors, and sales, often in the same day. They spot patterns others miss, simplify complexity without dumbing it down, and have the confidence to challenge a founder when the market is saying something the roadmap isn’t.
Above all, they’re obsessed with making the company smarter every single week.
The One Question to Ask Before Your Next Hire
“Who on my team wakes up every morning thinking about the customer more than the product?”
If the answer is “no one,” you’ve found your next strategic hire. Not because you need more marketing. Because you need better learning.
The Real Competitive Advantage
In today’s startups, the biggest edge isn’t producing more content or buying more software.
It’s hiring someone who relentlessly connects the customer, the market, the product, and the business.
That’s what great product marketers do, and in an AI-powered world, that connective tissue is the one thing AI still can’t build for you.
