I have been really busy at work for the past year. Changing from a conglomerate to a smaller business has made me revisit how scrappy I can get and what “hands-on” really means. Long hours, pivoting faster than OpenAI and Anthropic bring out models in the market, lots of cooks in the kitchen, and fighting for a position at the table where the decisions are made have been some of the highlights of 2025. And what I realised quite early on is that most product marketing teams deal with a backlog of wishlists. Work comes in, things get built, messaging shifts depending on who is asking or the internal hierarchy, what channel it’s for, or what the latest analyst said. It feels like progress is happening, but when you step back, nothing is really sticking.

People think they are doing product marketing, but in reality they are just marketing a product.

In a lot of B2B SaaS companies, especially the ones still scaling towards $100M ARR, things look fine from the outside. Campaigns are running, events are happening, leads are coming in. But when you look closer, you start to see where things break. Documents exist, but there is no clear source of truth. Messaging changes depending on who is presenting it. Sales stays busy, but not always in a way that compounds. It often defaults to what feels familiar, which leads to mixed results and more pressure on pipeline. Leadership may agree on direction, but that doesn’t always translate into how teams actually operate. And positioning, instead of holding steady, keeps getting pulled into execution debates.

So yes, work is happening but it doesn’t build on itself and, when things don’t land, people start pointing fingers.

I didn’t want Product Marketing to keep operating like this. I had been vocal about it since last summer, and there were times I had to challenge how the function was being perceived, even within marketing. A lot of my time was going into requests, slides, and trying to keep everyone aligned. That’s the reality of the role in many organisations, but it also limits what the function can actually do. At some point it became clear that improving individual pieces wouldn’t change much. The issue wasn’t effort, it was how everything was set up.

My “Hail Mary” idea was building a Product Marketing Centre of Excellence (aka a product marketing blueprint), but not in the way people usually think about it. It wasn’t about building a bigger team or creating more processes for the sake of it. It was about creating a system that makes decisions once and carries them through. Yes, processes have to be in place and some need to be adapted or created from scratch; and yes, maybe there will be a need for extra resources, monetary, people, and timewise. But the idea was simple: decide the story once, and make sure everyone runs with it and test it at scale. That meant treating narrative as something that is owned and governed and not like something that keeps evolving depending on hierarchy or loud voice. It meant making clear who decides what, especially in areas where there is natural overlap, like between Product and Product Marketing. And it meant reducing the number of places where “truth” could live, so that people didn’t have to guess which version to follow or do their own thing. This last part is still hard. People are not machines. But getting leadership buy-in, aligning stakeholders step by step, and actively replacing old ways of working with new ones makes adoption more likely, even if it feels uncomfortable.

So I started putting “pen to paper”, or more precisely “keyboard to Word”, to start building some sort of structure. 3 days later and 18 pages in, the product marketing blueprint v1 was complete. To be honest, it didn’t feel like overthinking. I was finally writing down what should have been obvious all along.

It covered what was missing in practice. Why Product Marketing exists, how it fits into what I call the “one story engine”, and how decisions should move when teams don’t see things the same way. That’s where most of the friction shows up. When Brand and Product Marketing see positioning differently, when a campaign goes off track, or when partners want to tell their own version of the story. Writing this down made those situations easier to handle because there was now a reference point to come back to.

Then came the actual work.

• Narrative, positioning, messaging.
• ICP definition and use cases.
• Competitive insight and win/loss.
• Customer interviews.
• Analyst relations.
• Website and conversion.
• Sales narrative and demos.
• Thought leadership.

All the things Product Marketing should be doing, but often doesn’t get the space to.

It also covered how the function runs. Cadence, governance, how success is measured, and how much work can realistically be handled without breaking the system again – and the product marketing person, too, on this occasion. If you don’t set capacity guardrails, you end up right back where you started, reacting to everything, with unclear priorities and a team that burns out quickly.

Since I am wearing multiple hats – Product Marketing, Analyst Relations, and Services Marketing -, instead of trying to juggle everything separately, it made more sense to build one operating system that could support all of it. Something stable, repeatable, that doesn’t fall apart every time the business needs to move faster. Something that creates enough structure to keep teams aligned, while still allowing flexibility where it makes sense.

It wasn’t perfect and it still isn’t, but it gave me structure that I can build a business case around, both for the value I have already delivered and for the role Product Marketing should play beyond execution. It also helped reposition how the function shows up internally, even if that shift is still ongoing. So overall, things are moving in the right direction.

Now, let’s talk about blockers. Well, there are some real things that can stall the buy-in and implementation of your blueprint.

• If your manager leaves halfway through building this.
• If a new manager comes in with a different perspective on the function.
• If external voices push different agendas that don’t fully align with the business context.
• If leadership still sees Product Marketing primarily as a content function.
• If Product expects the role to focus mainly on describing features.
• If hierarchy overrides sound judgment.
• If the organisation resists change and defaults to existing habits.
• And if some voices are consistently heard more than others, regardless of expertise.

If that is the environment you are in, progress becomes slower so you either use the blueprint to gradually shift how things work, often in small steps, or you take it somewhere that is ready for it.

“But Violet, everyone uses AI these days. Why would anyone bother with a blueprint?” And the answer is that, if the foundations are unclear, if ownership is blurry, if the story keeps changing, AI just accelerates that. This is why the blueprint matters. In a messy, scrappy environment, you need a clear view of what good looks like. Something that holds when everything around it is moving. That is what I built, and what I continue to evolve. Some days are harder than others, especially with leadership changes and shifting priorities, but step by step there is progress in clarifying ownership and aligning how teams work together.

And now I am taking it a step further. I am building AI agents around this system to support how it runs at scale. AI helps me move faster, process more information, and reduce manual work. It surfaces patterns, supports analysis, and gives me a starting point for messaging. But the direction still comes from me. AI strengthens the system that I defined.

Because consistency should not depend on whether people feel like following a process on a given day. It should be built into how the work happens.

The blueprint is still evolving, but I will share it here soon. If it helps someone else adapt faster or avoid the same friction, then it is worth putting it out there.