"Who is still sitting and writing that positioning doc? It is still me." — Swati
The PMM Skill AI Still Can’t Automate
A few weeks ago I sat down with Swati, an AI-systems-focused product marketer who’s scaled B2B SaaS portfolios from $50M to $90M in ARR. I went into the conversation half-convinced I already knew what she’d say about AI. I didn’t.
The gathering work is gone. The judgment work isn’t.
She described what her job used to look like before agents: one human being, going through Power BI and Salesforce and email, downloading a thousand spreadsheets and trying to force them into something that made sense. “There’s only one Swati and there’s only one brain,” she said. “Every Excel requires one brain.” Now that same gathering work, pulling from Jira, from old positioning docs, from prior sales calls, gets assembled into a first draft of a battlecard in the time it used to take her just to find the right file. That part of the job, she said plainly, is automated now.
But she drew a hard line right after. Positioning itself, the actual decision about what a product means to a specific buyer, is still human centric. An agent can summarize a customer call. It can’t sit across from that customer and notice the thing they didn’t quite say out loud. That’s still on her.
Sales enablement is where PMM’s fingerprints stay visible
The part I keep coming back to is her answer to a question most PMMs quietly struggle with: how do you prove any of this is worth the money? Her answer wasn’t the website. It was sales.
In enterprise B2B SaaS, almost nobody buys off the homepage. There’s a full sales cycle, and everything inside it, down to the one-line cadence email a rep sends to a prospect, runs through product marketing. “They can’t even send an email if I don’t write it correctly,” she said, half-joking, mostly not. Content marketing and demand gen teams often end up rewriting that same positioning into blog posts that collect their own impressions and their own credit, which makes it genuinely hard to trace PMM’s fingerprints on revenue through a website. Sales enablement doesn’t have that problem. If the sales team is closing faster and closing with confidence, that’s a straight line back to the work.
What this means if you’re building a personal brand while doing all of this
The second half of our conversation had less to do with product marketing and more to do with the mindset it takes to post consistently while doing this job. Swati’s framing was simple: building in public is a mindset problem before it’s a tools problem. Everyone goes through a period where the content is genuinely bad, and the people who keep going are the ones who’ve made peace with that period, not the ones who found a better app.
One reframe she uses when she catches herself over-scrutinizing her own content: imagine a loved one posted the exact same thing. Would you be that harsh with them? Almost never. It’s a small shift. But it’s the kind of small shift that actually changes behavior, which is rarer than it should be in advice like this.
My Take
Here’s what this means for product marketers: if you’re feeling replaceable right now because an agent can draft a battlecard in ten seconds, you’re measuring yourself against the wrong part of the job. The drafting was never the moat. The judgment about what goes into that battlecard, and the relationships that make sales actually trust it, are.
Here’s how founders can actually apply this: stop asking your PMM to prove ROI through the website. Ask your sales team how fast they’re closing and how confident they sound doing it. That number was always the real scoreboard. We just kept looking at the wrong dashboard.
Curiosity Corner
If we had another hour...
* I’d ask her to walk through one specific battlecard, start to finish, and show exactly where the agent’s draft ended and her judgment took over
* I’d explore how she measures “sales confidence” in something other than a gut feeling, is there an actual signal she tracks
* I’d challenge her on whether the loved-one reframe holds up under real public criticism, not just her own self-doubt
Full conversation with Swati is up now on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. If you got something out of this, forward it to a PMM who needs to hear it.
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