I’m thinking of buying a sign. It’s one of those cool neon ones. Dramatic, glowy, future-forward.

Or maybe it’s something hand painted. Artistic, personal, classy.

Either way, the sign’s going to be hanging behind my office chair, telling people what I’m all about.

The team at OpenAI had a sign like that on their wall, way back in the 2016 early days. Theirs was hand-painted script.

“Man has a large capacity for effort,” it began, “but it is so much greater than we think it is, that few ever reach this capacity. We should value the faculty of knowing what we ought to do and having the will to do it. But understanding is easy. It is the doing that is difficult. The critical issue is not what we know but what we do with what we know. The great end of life is not knowledge but action.”

Now that’s a lot of sign.

But it does say something. Purpose. Qualification for investor dollars. A quote by Admiral Hyman Rickover – which I hope they mean well by, over at OpenAI.

My sign would be quite a bit punchier, though. Create Confidence. That’s it.

The main O to the KRs

The job of a Product Marketing Manager (PMM) is a bit of a confidence creation game. We don’t much talk about it in those terms but for me, that’s the heart of the work. It's the "action" in Adm. Rickover language.

We want sales, marketing, shareholders and buyers to be confident in the product and/or service. Make the value so obvious that buying it (and selling it) is also obvious. Achieve that, and the functional value of a PMM is undeniable.

But I worry the common job description of PMMs is, at once, overly reaching and also shortsighted for the Create Confidence game. That PMM definition basically proposes to do the job of a product manager plus a slew of sales and marketing functions while never mentioning the design work and visual storycrafting that brings it all together. It’s a big miss.

In my experience, the aesthetic qualities and overall composition of most go-to-market assets is inseparable from the messaging, word-choice and whatever else the PMMs are doing. Design is how real-world people actually experience the perfected positioning that many PMMs focus on.

Show, don’t tell. Surprise, create memorable moments, signal real quality and distill. Create confidence.

To make the case, let’s consider a company famous for design and quality signaling; Apple.

Apple’s second CEO, Mike Markkula, once penned Apple’s Marketing Philosophy. This was a set of rules that represented the original vision of Steve Jobs.

Here’s the important bit:

“The third and equally important principle, awkwardly named, was impute. It emphasized that people form an opinion about a company or product based on the signals that it conveys. “People DO judge a book by its cover,” [Jobs] wrote. “We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities.”

At Apple “impute” means first impressions. One area, where this is famously emphasized at Apple, is in the packaging of their phones, pods, laptops, software, etc. It's hard to throw that box away.

In fact, right now here in Austin, Apple has an open role for a “Product Packaging Design Engineer” which must coordinate across design, manufacturing, marketing and more to do their work.

Here’s the opening of the JD:

“When was the last time you enjoyed a box as much as the product inside? At Apple, every customer interaction is an opportunity for surprise and delight! This philosophy extends beyond the product to its packaging, where every detail is thoughtfully considered.”

I think it’s the same for good PMMs. No sales deck, no brochure or case study, no product demo video or sales training document or even GTM plan is sufficient with “slipshod” packaging.

I hear you already, "PMMs aren't designers!"

Now, please don’t get me wrong.

PMMs shouldn’t be lead designers or take from the work of design teams. They should elevate the work of those specialists–working with them, knowledgeable that designers typically must work within the constraints of the copy and vision that they (the PMM) provide.

To achieve this elevation, design must be within the Product Marketing Manager skillset. Throughout my career in the space, this has been true.

A good PMM should be comfortable with tools like Figma, Canva, Illustrator, and Photoshop (shout out Photopea), and even video editing tools like Descript.

They should consider design as they lead the creation of those assets that will Create Confidence around the company's products. In the best case, they work with designers to polish the ideas and concepts that they, themselves, largely first conceived.

In practical terms, those ideas which PMMs can not fully outsource to design may apply to:

• Iconography
• Graphic design
• Chart formats
• Font weighting and sizing
• Layout and asset composition
• Photo selection and treatments
• Use of white space
• Use of color
• And so much more

Done right, it's a balanced role that makes high-quality asset production more straightforward and effective. That means higher output of good material with more room to iterate on stakeholder feedback. Ideal.

It’s notable that there are many successful firms out there focused on presentation design and similar deliverables. For example, GhostRanch is an actual partner of the Product Marketing Alliance (PMA) positioned largely as presentation specialists. There are many more. Slides.Agency, for example, I found while prepping for this and I love their big bold tone and client portfolio.

Perhaps these firms would happily do all of the work of PMMs but there’s a distinction, to me, between the two.

• PMMs are grounded in the company, deeply connected to customers and stakeholder needs and knowledgeable about the products and services they represent – including their changes over time.
  
• The agencies are wonderful storytellers and design leaders. Their work on the highest-visibility presentations results in some of the highest-quality decks the company might have.

The good PMM should, in some way, think like the agencies as they do the day-to-day assets and configurations for real on-the-ground sales and marketing channel needs.

Do the work

As I close out, I want to talk about the practical market-facing outputs (‘deliverables’) of a PMM; after all, when you combine the design and the copy, the result should be the asset.

In the PMA’s definition of Product Marketing and their associated “Product Marketing Framework”, the only two obvious market-facing outputs of their 35+ listed job functions are “sales assets” and “case studies.”

The role is just so full of implied research, planning, coordination and documentation – much of which is, in actuality, often the charge of other teams – that it gets a bit disconnected from practical deliverables. This might be part of why the design bit is missed. It's a frustrating amount of administrative toil that doesn't clearly land in execution.

This impacts the job description and expectations of PMMs, the skills improvement that many PMMs pursue and how they're perceived within the company as well.

If the PMM community can focus more on the full-scope of shipping useful things, their jobs will be more practical and understood by wider teams. They’re confidence creators; driving core market-ready material that just, simply, works.

When I sat down to write this essay, my first working title was “The Product Packaging Lead.” Yep, I was tempted to name yet another new skill/role but decided that wasn’t how I want this ongoing blog to be. But this is kind of a new spin on PMMs and I hope it’s one you’ll consider.

In my experience, this ‘full package’ is what made some of the most inspiring PMMs and executives that I’ve worked with so amazing. They artfully showcase a value proposition and do not shirk design as part of that storytelling – they often actually led with it.

I’ll leave you with this; Google once found that we decide our opinions on a website in just the first half second of a visit.

Was it the messaging framework, the headlines or the body copy that made that happen?

Like many families in the 90s, Tim Allen was a popular guy in our household.

Between Toy Story, The Santa Clause and nearly ten years of Home Improvement, we got a lot of Tim. The lovable klutz, a man of practical skill, he learned more than he taught (usually through backfired ideas) but he was, and always will be, "The Toolman."

Full disclosure, I always thought that was a made up word.

I’ve only ever really heard the term used for “Tim the Toolman Taylor,” and it feels like almost too exact of a word for that use-case. Tim’s “Tool Time” character literally is a Toolman. He explores tools, tests them, has an opinion on them, wields them to his advantage and teaches others to do the same.

Home Improvement tools, that is.

Well, shocker to me, Toolman is a real word. Toolmen and Toolwomen exist. The Toolpeople.

But the phrase isn’t actually specific to hammers and screwdrivers. Toolpersoning is really just a way of being. It’s about using and making tools (in the general sense) as a character trait.

Weird word, yes, but it gives a good frame for a core career skill that is becoming more and more (and more) important today – the knack for fluidly adopting new trade tools and making them too.

Let’s get into it.

Note: The below deals mostly with white collar jobs.

Layoffs, cost cutting, automation, robotics, focus on the bottom line, ChatGPT-written cover letters; there’s a lot happening right that’s affecting the workforce. And while it’s not totally true that employers are only keeping the best … that’s kind of the idea.

In this new world where teams get smaller and value creation accelerates, a certain type of talent will set the bar for the best. I’d argue (and anecdotally, this rings true) that it’s not the specialists that win, it’s the generalists.

Even today, job descriptions often list comically boilerplate requirements like “Google Workspace Suite” or “Excel.” Has this ever swayed somebody to not apply?

In the new world of versatile competency and comfort with adopting new ways of work actively, these tired platform experience requirements are making less and less sense. It's proof of a person’s ability to leverage their own intelligence alongside niche tools to problem solve and execute. That’s what matters.

This skill needs a better name though.
We can’t be going around calling each other, “Toolpeople.”

Let's call the skill "Stacking." Basically, the capability to build and refine your own tool stack for work. That'll sound nice on a profile.

A key thing about Stackers is that part of their tool wielding skill is their ability to bridge discipline gaps. They get more of the job done, semi-autonomously and nimbly. They democratize functional execution to solve bigger problems within their teams.

Now, I'm not suggesting that zero specialization is required. Consider these hybrid Stackers....

• Great design minds capable of wielding front-end code creation tools to build better prototypes.
• Marketers who can rapidly spin up BI dashboards and video-based KPI reports to align leadership.
• Polyglot programmers, who can also build a nice presentation.
• Sales executives who can craft data-rich custom thought leadership for contacts, merging market insight and client context, with a nice webpage to host it.

In all cases, the specialty matters but it's future-useless without the generalized ability to use the latest tools, real-time, to outperform expectations. Ignore Stacking at your own risk.

This concept is obviously not entirely new. Multi-hat competency is something people have said for many years. The modern 'renaissance man.' What's distinct here is the emphasis on emersion in the latest tech to do the work. And that might take new behaviors on the employer side to enable, too.

How employers might enable Stackers ("Toolpersons").

The most important thing is tinkering. Let people tinker. Give time for it. Mandate it even. Request periodic reports on tinkering and share findings. Make tinkering cultural and remove blockers where possible.

Tinkering is something that side-hustlers and entrepreneurial thinkers do well; people who have ideas that they want to bring to the world and seek out solutions to create them. These people tend to find new tools and ideas habitually, driven by near-FOMO in their trial signups.

Thankfully, there are more and more of these types out there. The system is self-correcting. With the 2010s rise of gig work, indie hacking and even influencers (the modern "personal brand"), there is now a massive community of people subscribed to daily "AI newsletters", demoing the latest capabilities live on X and Reels, debating strengths and weaknesses on Hacker News and making Small Bets off of their side projects.

And, yes, employers, this is good. These are the people you want.

Couple that hunger for creating solutions with some degree of career specialization and you have a learner, a knowledge center, a champion for doing better work and Stacker in your ranks.

Enable it and celebrate it.

Looking ahead, things get interesting in the world of these Stackers.

I once took an "Excel Skill Assessment" for some vanity badge on my LinkedIn. They've since retired that feature btw... they see where the tide's going.

Maybe we'll see new assessments, trainings and certifications for this more fluid tool-filled world. How can we measure and track a person's aptitude for leveraging tools and curiosity to try the next one? TBD.

One interesting near-term outcome might be IP becoming part of the candidate package. Imagine a world where resumes list bespoke tooling, built by the candidate, that comes as part of their ability to execute in their function.

What a world. Keep curious.

-CG