The best way to learn is to launch (and your typical onboarding process is total bullshit)
On my first day I walked into the office, enjoyed three hugs in rapid succession, and then something weird happened: I was taken straight to the engineers.
Not for an office walkaround. Not to the marketing team. Not to a meeting with my boss. Straight to an engineer to discuss a launch I just found out I’m driving. He immediately starts bouncing ideas. Not for features, but about how we can spark extra joyful moments for customers as part of the release. Then he asks me what I think we should do, like he trusts me immediately.
Normally, my first day at a new job involves simmering anxiety, awkward intros, and a stack of dusty strategy docs I’ll never read. But this time I opened Slack to find a message from my manager with a short doc outlining immediate priorities, key people, Slack channels to join, and deadlines. Two hundred words later, I knew what I was supposed to do, and I felt competent.
The problem with traditional onboarding is we’ve built processes that make people feel prepared but leave them useless. A week or two of 121 intro calls. A pile of links to outdated (and dull) documentation. Two weeks before they touch real work. But if you’re working with AI, by the time they’re “ready,” they’re already behind and the context has shifted.
What to do instead:
Give people real work from day one. Not busywork. Not planning work. Actual projects that need delivering like, now. They’ll learn faster under pressure with purpose than in a vacuum of preparation.
Provide context, not hand-holding. A tight doc with priorities, deadlines, and key people beats 40 onboarding decks. People need to know what success looks like and who to ask when they’re stuck, everything else is noise.
Trust them immediately. If you hired them, act like it. “Here’s the problem, here’s the deadline, tell me how you’d approach it” is a better day one than “here’s how we do things.”
If your product teams aren’t thinking about marketing, you should be seriously worried
Last week, a developer asked me if a new experience we’re launching could go viral. Then he politely challenged my copy: could the messaging be stronger? I nearly fell off my chair. Devs. Initiating. Marketing conversations. If you’ve been in this game long enough, you know that’s rare. But apparently, now it’s not.
Winning product teams understand that marketing isn’t a PR exercise, it’s a growth loop. If your team has forgotten this, sorry but you’ve lost your way. I’ve sat in too many meetings about new releases with product folks who haven’t mentioned product marketing once. Good luck with that approach, because now you’re competing against engineering and product teams who do.
If product teams aren’t naturally grasping this, it’s on PMMs to teach them how marketing drives impact, and empower them to do the things that get their work noticed. When builders understand distribution, magic happens. Trust me.
Moving fast isn’t about cutting corners, it’s about re-learning how to spend your time effectively
Companies stole the time we needed to actually do our jobs, and somehow we let them.
Leaders book people for hours to discuss massive documents that take other people hours to build. We get stuck in Figma, workshopping vague concepts that no one knows what to do with after.
Don’t get me wrong, I was there too. Prepping my nice slides. Making my nice FigJams.
But I haven’t made a deck for six months. Instead, I spend my time walking up to people, asking questions, exploring ideas, and getting fast thumbs ups (or downs).
Here’s the shocker: minimal recurring meetings and killing internal presentation culture means people have more time to do good work
Most companies drown in standing meetings accompanied by barely legible decks. Calendars are full but nothing’s getting decided. The default can no longer be “let’s book a meeting”. It should be: “what decision needs to be made to move forward?” followed by “how can we make this decision as fast as possible?”
Obviously you still need some meetings, but with the right tools, meeting times can be cut in half. Take data analysis and insight sessions, which have been a hugeeee time suck for me in the past. What if you focused on creating live, consolidated dashboards people actually want to read, with data they can query using plain language? That 2.5-hour slide presentation could become a 30min tactical meeting. Shocker.
Kill recurring meetings that don’t result in clear decisions or actions. Keep calendars open for ad hoc, time-sensitive conversations that actually matter. Encourage people to come talk to you. We’re still humans after all.
Committing to marketing launch dates should be standard procedure (and product teams need to get over it)
Last week a senior PM asked me one simple question: what date do you want the marketing launch so I can set a timeline for the team?
Here’s the truth: engineering and product can commit to launch dates.
Wriggling out of timelines while complaining that marketing doesn’t understand is for product teams of yesteryear. If your leadership doesn’t demand concrete launch dates, you can’t keep pace. As soon as you’ve committed to building something, you need a clear scope and a launch date. Clarity is kindness, and deadlines are the ultimate forcing function for focus.
If a launch does need to be pushed to protect quality, push it. But people need to stop being afraid of placing GTM deadlines on engineering teams. In the age of AI, velocity matters. You can’t compete with vague “Q3 promises.”
And yes, engineers will push back. Is your freaky marketing idea worth the extra lift to hit the deadline you oh-so-kindly set? Fair question. That’s a conversation worth having.
How to make this work:
Treat the date as the constant, and the scope as the variable. Make trade-offs explicit and early.
“I don’t know” is acceptable. “I’ll find out by X” is expected. Uncertainty is fine. Ambiguity without a plan isn’t.
When you miss, understand why. Learn and adjust. Don’t punish.
And things are only getting faster
But speed isn’t reckless, it’s intentional. The best companies don’t optimise for process, they optimise for momentum. They don’t wait for perfect information, they act and adjust. As our (incredible) head of marketing loves to say:
If you’re a PMM stuck in endless alignment meetings, fighting for launch dates, or wondering why engineering doesn’t care about go-to-market, this is a wake-up call for your company too. The competition isn’t waiting for 67-slide decks. They’re shipping.
Gemma x
What hard truths have you discovered recently? Plz comment and tell me I’m not alone.
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