Six ways to shape your marketing career going forward

Whither the marketing career?

My friend Sachin Rekhi recently posted a question on LinkedIn: "Given that all PMs will eventually have access to the same AI tools, how do I differentiate myself as a product manager?"

He laid out a concrete playbook. AI fluency. Taste. Domain expertise. Product strategy. Design skills. It was specific. It was practical. And I thought: someone should write the equivalent for marketers.

Marketers (indeed, all professions) face the same problem. Marketing has always been a field where the gap between great and mediocre is hard to measure. AI is making that gap obvious and permanent.

I wrote about this in good marketing in the AI era. In a world where all marketing output is adequate, the only way to stand out is to be immeasurably better and faster.

Here are six things to help you shape your marketing career.

1. Be AI native

The old way is gone. Filing tickets for website changes, manually building competitive analyses and battlecards, and waiting for others to deliver so you can execute campaigns. AI puts you in the driver's seat. There is no point in pretending that AI is a fad or a phase or something you can wait out. You cannot.

I use AI in my marketing workflow every single day. I built an entire agent platform to automate chunks of my work. I created agent skills for developer marketing that apply the frameworks from my book directly to real marketing problems.

If you are not using AI tools daily, start today. Learn prompt engineering. Get good at it. Then push further: learn how to build and use agents, how to use AI APIs to automate more of your work. It's hard to keep up. The tools change every month. Hell, there was a stretch during the end of February where Anthropic would ship three new things every day.

Sachin made this point about product managers and I will make it about marketers: the gap between people who can use AI well and people who cannot is only widening. I am a year and a half into this and the distance between those two groups grows every week.

2. Think like an engineer

You need to write code. Not necessarily production code that ships to customers. But the kind of code that lets you be self-sufficient. You should be able to make changes to your company's website and submit a pull request. You should be able to write a data transformation script that cleans up your CRM export. You should be able to build a simple automation that connects two tools.

Marketers who understand how software gets built are fundamentally better at their jobs. But understanding the language is step one. Step two is doing the work.

The distinction between "marketer" and "product manager" and "engineer" is getting thinner every day. Headcounts are shrinking. Engineering resources that used to be available for marketing projects are not there anymore.

Tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex mean that a marketer with basic technical literacy can do things that required a developer two years ago. But you have to put in the work. Learn by doing. Get comfortable reading error messages and fixing your own code.

3. Exhibit extraordinary judgment

Sachin called this "taste" for product managers. I think of it as judgment, and I want to push it further. AI commoditizes execution. Anyone can generate a blog post, a competitive analysis, a launch plan. Production is no longer the bottleneck. The bottleneck is knowing what to produce.

Your bandwidth needs to 10x. That sounds absurd until you realize that your tools can 10x your productivity. The question is no longer "what can I get done this quarter?" It is "given that I can now do ten times as much, what should I do?"

That is a harder question. Using AI to do the same amount of work faster is table stakes. Using AI to understand the relative impact of tasks that could be done is better. And using AI to measure and automate changes to content and project plans is next level.

But judgment is also about quality. AI makes it easy to ship. That means it is easy to ship mediocre work. Knowing what great marketing looks like has always mattered. Now it matters more, because the temptation to hit publish on something adequate instead of something excellent is constant. Your judgment has to cover both axes: what to work on, and whether the work is good enough.

4. Think strategically, act locally

You have to understand the big picture. Entire market segments are being created right now. Entire market segments are being destroyed. The marketer who sees those shifts early and translates them into action will win.

Indeed, you are strategy and tactics, all wrapped in one. You need to form hypotheses about where the market is going, test them with real work, and adjust when the data comes back.

As Sachin said, AI is terrible at product strategy. I also have tried every which way to get AI to produce a differentiated marketing strategy. It will not do it. It produces plausible-sounding frameworks that would never survive contact with a real market. It generates great checklists and mechanical project plans, but only after I have done the work and decided on a particular strategic direction or program to implement. The thinking has to come from you. The execution can be accelerated by AI. But the strategic judgment about where to play and how to win? That is still a human skill.

AI is changing every phase of the PMM job. But the phase it cannot touch is the part where you decide what to say, to whom, and why it matters more than what the competitor says. In a way, that has always been the job. Now, with most of the detritus of the job being handled by AI, you get to focus on the fun part.

5. Cross over

We have talked about thinking like an engineer. But there is a whole class of new design tools that can get you to a passable level as a designer. Paper is extraordinary. Figma's AI features, Midjourney, DALL-E, and dozens of others mean that a marketer with good taste can produce visual assets that would have required a designer two years ago.

There are also tools, prompts, and best practices that can help you identify sales opportunities and sell alongside an experienced account executive. You can analyze sales calls with AI. You can draft follow-up emails that sound like they came from someone who was on the call. You can build battle cards that update themselves. Sales enablement with AI is getting easier.

I often refer to product marketing as "the ringleaders of the circus." You need to know enough about every act to keep the show running. That has always been true. What has changed is that AI gives you the ability to actually do the acts, not just direct them.

The first marketing hire at a startup has always needed range. Now every marketer needs that same range, regardless of company size. The specialist who can only do one thing is increasingly vulnerable. The generalist who can do six things passably, with AI filling the gaps, is increasingly valuable.

6. Go deep

This sounds like it contradicts what I just said. It does not.

You need range across functions. But you also need deep expertise in marketing itself. The fundamentals have not changed just because the tools have.

Dave Kellogg, who spent nearly a decade as CMO at Business Objects as it grew from $30M to over $1B in revenue, decomposes marketing into four pillars: product marketing, demand generation, corporate communications, and sales development. He uses a scoring system where marketing leaders get rated 1 to 5 on each pillar, with a maximum of 15 total points. The constraint is the point. Almost nobody is great at all four.

But you need to be good at all four. And great at one or two.

Tim Brown at IDEO talked about T-shaped people: deep in one area, but wide because of empathy and genuine curiosity about other disciplines. The wide part of the T is not a checklist of skills. It is a disposition. Well, the era of the T-shaped marketer is here. Develop great general expertise in the discipline of marketing (my book can help with that), and use AI fluency to help you get deeper, faster in critical areas.

The new reality

Shakespeare put it better than I can. In Antony and Cleopatra, as Cleopatra watches everything fall apart around her, she catches herself wishing for the impossible and stops: "Wishes were ever fools." Three words. We can wish all day that things were different. That the old skills were still enough. That we could coast on what we knew five years ago. But wishes are not strategy. And nostalgia is not a career plan.

The marketers who learn the tools, build the skills, do the hard work of staying current, and hold themselves to a higher standard than the AI can produce on its own. Those are the ones who will still be here in five years.

If you want to level up, I can help. My book Picks and Shovels covers the marketing fundamentals in depth, from positioning to demand generation to developer relations to content strategy. I also offer one-on-one training for marketing leaders who want to build AI skills with hands-on coaching, and interview preparation for marketers heading into their next role. For a limited time, you can bundle a digital copy of my book and a one-hour skills training session. We'll take the time to understand your current AI fluency level and then work on some practical, hands-on exercises to help you level up. If you are serious about your career, this is the time to invest in it.