“We teach what we know. We transmit who we are.”

Isn’t that a banger quote? Shoutout to Dr. Michael Brabant of Candor & Coherence, who has been helping me work through my head trash and all the little voices. He dropped that little nugget in a session we had this last week.

Yep. That got me. Because it’s not really about teaching at all. It’s about the big damn hole in between the two things. You can teach a framework, a process, a playbook, and still transmit something totally different. Wild right?

Your team doesn’t just learn what you say. They pick up who you ACTUALLY are. That’s either a comforting through or a terrifying one. FWIW: I experienced both extremes.

So that’s been really rattling me this week. Meanwhile, a few other things have popped up this and I thought I would write about them today.

1. Welcome to the Super IC. I keep having the same conversation with people in the market who think they want a promotion when what they actually want is recognition, which brings me to something I'm calling the Super IC

2. Back to Twitter. I got back on X/Twitter after a year away and have some thoughts. Some of them are even useful. Well maybe not useful, just funny.

3. Is Marketing Irrelevant? I've been watching CMOs get folded into revenue and product orgs like it's a pattern now, because it is, and I go back further than most takes on this to figure out why we did this to ourselves.

Enjoy!

♥️ kyle

Welcome to the Super IC

Your next step for a promotion is probably NOT managing people. I've had a few conversations like this with plenty of people currently in the market.

I mean, I understand. Someone wants the next title. We start talking about what that title actually means, and it turns out that, hey, they don't want to manage people (really); they want recognition for their growth as an IC.

We've done this to ourselves. The career ladder has always pointed to the one rung that mattered: individual contributor to manager. Do great work, get promoted, start managing people, grow your territory, etc.

I don't think that's true anymore, and I know others agree.

I'm not going to blame AI. I believe it's a symptom of a broader issue facing companies and leaders today: we never built a real path for people who are great at the work to stay great at it. Management became the only reward we knew how to give.

So we took it. OFC we did! Even the ones who really didn't want a team. Even the ones who were better at doing the work than running a meeting about it.

What's valuable has never changed. How we manage the value has.

Someone who owns an outcome, moves fast, and has an ever-evolving body of work doesn't need three direct reports to prove they've leveled up. They need a track record. Call it the Super IC.

A skill set of doing is more future-proof than a skill set of managing. Managing people scales your output through other people. Doing the work, actually building the skill, adapting it, staying sharp, scales through you. THAT's a story worth telling. THAT's a narrative worthy of a powerful personal brand.

I felt this shift firsthand reading Adam Ferrari's piece on the "Great Flattening" in engineering (Entry 42)... the same thing happening in product marketing is happening everywhere. AI is eating the busywork, the status updates, the first-draft grind, and it's making one strong individual look like three. That's not a threat to the Super IC. That's the whole case for them. The flattening isn't about needing fewer people. It's about needing fewer managers and more people who can just... do the thing, well, without a layer of translation in between.

Drew Brucker said something in our conversation back in Entry 37: "Brand is a controllable moat. Features can be copied. Ads can be outbid. But brand? It's how you get remembered." He wasn't talking about corporate brand. He was talking about his own. That's the Super IC thesis in one sentence. If you can't be replaced by a title change, build the thing that can't be copied.

Companies that figure out how to pay and promote that person without shoving them into a title they never really wanted will win.

So if you're staring down "what's next," ask the real question first. Do you want the team, or do you want the recognition?

Only one of those requires you to manage people.

And the second question: is your company proactively recognizing your skills and contributions as an individual contributor in a meaningful way?

If the answer is no, first flag the problem, and if nothing changes, move on.

LinkedIn’s Algo is Sh*t. I’m Trying Twitter Again.

It's been over a year since I've actively used X/Twitter, but I jumped back on yesterday. Folks, it is 100x better and will pull more of my attention away from this site. 8 (because I couldn't think of ten) reasons why:

1. The algorithm is actually showing me things I want to see and read. Like, seriously, I'm interacting with content I care about. Holy hell.

2. Nobody's selling me a course or fractional work. I've been engaged and scrolling over the last 24 hours and didn't get pitched a single "DM me for FRAMEWORK to unlock your 8-figure Personal brand DYNASTY."

3. The humor is actually funny... not some LinkedIn guy in a blazer (or neat little polo) saying "Unpopular opinion" before sharing the most popular opinion in the industry.

4. Nobody's humbled and honored. Every third post here reads like an award acceptance speech. I can type this because I've done it... It's still annoying.

5. It's fast, and the conversations are meaningful. I forgot how much I loved the just-in-time messages instead of the 5-week-later comment because the LinkedIn algo decided it was important to some random person I've never interacted with.

6. I'm seeing fewer "my dog died," "my dad died," my mom died," "I died" posts. Not that I don't appreciate it, because I do. I have some EQ. But I don't need it every other post.

7. Less AI slop. Less AI slop. Less AI slop. Less AI slop. Less AI slop.

8. Nobody is turning their wedding, kid's soccer game, or church outing into a leadership lesson. I don't think Debbie's prayer chain will help the community as a whole.

I still love this site, and I'm not planning on disappearing, but I'll be straight with you... LinkedIn should take notice and try to adapt. Or don't, and watch some users disappear.

Is Marketing Becoming Irrelevant?

Over the last few months, I keep seeing the same content playing out over my social and community feeds. A CMO whose org just got folded into revenue. Another one is now reporting through the product org. I’m fearful this is becoming a pattern, and I don’t think enough of us are screaming about it, because we should be.

So let me go back further than most takes on this go, because the roots matter.

The first time I realized I needed to care deeply about measuring something was at ExactTarget around 2012/2013. My first software job. I was running the new content marketing team, and we were publishing constantly. Thought leadership, podcasts, videocasts, speaking at conferences, launching digital experiences, etc. 

And it didn’t really matter because my team and the content was too removed from the sales process. Sure the content was good fodder for digital marketing/ads/traffic, but it wasn’t being used in the sales process. 

That was the first time it clicked for me. Big-idea, brand-oriented marketing only gets airtime when it's carrying a direct attribution number to pipeline. And yah, it makes complete sense. Sales cares about quota coverage. They care about closing enough to make a paycheck and not get fired. 

Nobody in revenue generating orgs truly has the time to care about your brand manifesto if it doesn’t show up in their number. 

I wasn’t in an exec seat yet, but I could still feel it because the lack of “caring” was keeping my “amazing” content from the market. And then I felt it like a SLAP in the face in my first VP role at Lessonly. I figured out fast that I needed to tell the marketing story in a way a CFO or a board member could actually comprehend or I’d get sidelined. That lesson was continually reinforced every time I got a bigger job and more responsibility. 

And over the last 10-15 years, marketing has made itself relevant by owning the pipeline number. It worked. It got us a seat at the table which comes with a budget number. YAY. 

It also planted the bomb going off right now, and it’s blowing our faces off from two directions. 

First: AI and data analysis can do a lot of what makes "pipeline-owning marketing" feel indispensable. Revenue teams are taking more of that responsibility themselves, and honestly, why wouldn't they. 

Second: the same story we told to justify our seat at the table is exactly why boards find it so easy to fold marketing into revenue or product now. We taught them we were a pipeline function. So they believed us. Can't really be mad about that one.

Which means it's time to embrace what made marketing relevant in the first place. Narrative. Story. Brand. Taste. Because it’s hard to replicate, and it can’t be automated away by a dashboard. 

And here’s where it gets difficult. :) 

Brand and taste have never been easy to measure. I've known that since I started in this job. So for years, the safer move was to lean into pipeline, because if you hit the number, nobody asks about your brand spend. Nobody questions the 20% you can't fully attribute if the other 80% of our budget is covering the revenue. That's the 80/20 rule I've written about before.

No product leader is walking into a boardroom to fight 50/50 for marketing's side. 

No revenue leader is either, unless they came up through marketing themselves, and I can count those exceptions on one hand. 

So this change we are seeing is usually a marketing leader who couldn't translate the work into biz impact, so leadership stopped caring and moved forward.

For some reason, marketers are bad at this on average and it’s not because we’re not smart. Really, we are smart! :) It’s because the personality type that's great at creative, narrative work is usually not who thrives fighting for a budget in a room full of finance people.

Attribution doesn't save you here either. If your model says outbound drove 80% of pipeline, that doesn't mean the PR hit and the event and the direct mail piece did nothing. It means your model can't see them. A model that tracks everything is usually too much data for too little payoff.

Okay… enough of the preamble Kyle. What would you actually do? Well, it depends on where you’re sitting right now. 

Living the good life. If it hasn't happened yet.

• Build your board fluency before you need it. I wrote a whole translation guide for this a while back (Entry 18). If you're still saying "we're increasing brand awareness" in a room full of finance people, you're doing it to yourself.

• Use the 80/20 budget rule (Entry 16). 80% tied to revenue, 20% for brand and experimentation. Hit your number with the 80, and you earn the right to defend the 20 without apologizing for it.

• Get on the weekly and bi-weekly cadence with revenue. A pipeline weather report (Entry 67), a pipeline council, whatever you call it. If you're not in that room voluntarily, you'll be summoned to it eventually, and by then it's not your meeting.

• Start building a body of work that isn't tied to your title. Thought leadership, a POV, something with your name on it that survives an org chart change.

If you've already been moved under sales. Sorry.

• Don't waste the seat feeling sorry for yourself. You now have the closest possible view of quota pressure amd deal mechanics/ Most marketers never get that view. Take it in.

• Fight to keep narrative and brand in your job description. Reporting into revenue doesn't mean you stop owning the story. It means you have to defend it in a room that cares less about it by default.

• Pick a few high-profile accounts with good AEs to build a brand campaign: personalized direct mail, OOH, big creative bet. Make an impact on a couple of deals to show the power of tasteful/personalized marketing.  

• Watch the 80/20 career rule here closer than usual (Entry 33). If 80% of your job still energizes you, stay and build the muscle. If you feel buried by quota and revenue and the brand/story is gone, that’s your signal to move on. 

• Don't let attribution be the only language you speak now. You're in the room to add what the model can't see, not to become a quasi-revops leader.

If you've already been moved under product

• Get genuinely fluent in the roadmap. You can't tell a category story you don't actually understand at the feature level.

• Protect the narrative work. Product orgs are good at documentation and bad at story by default. See? You still matter. :) 

• Don't let yourself become a content monkey for release notes. 

• Same rule as above. Brand is a controllable moat, as my buddy Drew put it in a conversation I featured a while back (Entry 37). Features get copied. Ad spend gets outbid. Story is the thing that's actually yours. Keep making that case even from inside product.

I don't think this is the death of marketing. I think it's marketing's test. The teams that can talk brand meaningfully in a board meeting are the ones that survive this round. The rest get absorbed and forgotten inside someone else's function.