The Two Words That Separate a Feature List From a Story: “So That”
Ask most product marketers to describe their job and you’ll get a list. Positioning. Messaging. Sales enablement. Go to market strategy. All true, all correct, and all completely forgettable to the person who actually has to sign off on your budget.
Meghan McNamara has a better answer. She leads product marketing and go to market for Deloitte’s government and public services practice, and before that she was a journalist on Capitol Hill, a creative writing graduate student, and, for a while, the person managing a wine program at a restaurant. None of that reads like a typical product marketing resume. All of it turned out to be the same job.
“There is really the role of a product marketer, is to tell a story about a product and to create that narrative,” she said on the Supercharge Marketing podcast. And the wine program taught her more about that than any campaign brief ever could.
A tasting note is not a story, and neither is a spec sheet
Pour someone a glass and hand them a list of tasting notes, and you’ve given them homework. Tell them where the grapes grew, who makes the wine, and how the sandy soil ends up tasting like minerals in the glass, and you’ve given them something they’ll actually remember. Meghan’s point isn’t really about wine. It’s about what happens when you swap the list for the story.
Product marketing works the same way, and the shortcut she keeps coming back to is two words: so that.
“So that you can” is the sentence every feature announcement is missing. Her husband runs a landscaping business built around native plants, low maintenance yards, spaces that fit the natural environment. Described that way, it’s a nice service. Described her way, it’s something else entirely: a yard that feels like an extension of your home, so that you spend less time mowing and more time actually enjoying the space you live in.
“If you can’t articulate exactly what it is that thing is going to help people do,” she said, “then why are you even talking about it?”
It sounds simple because it is. It’s also the thing most product launches skip. Product teams ship a feature, hand marketing a list of what it does, and the “so that” gets left as an exercise for the reader. Meghan’s advice is to stop leaving it out.
Speak the language of the room you’re in, not the language of your job title
Early in her time at Deloitte, Meghan spent a lot of energy explaining what product marketing was and wasn’t. Drawing the lines. Defending the territory. If you’ve ever tried to justify your own role in a meeting, you know exactly how exhausting that gets.
The shift that actually worked wasn’t a better explanation of product marketing. It was giving up on explaining it at all.
“I work in a large management consultancy and the language that they speak is strategy,” she said, “and that is what product marketing is. It is how you bring a product to market, is how you message that product, is how you position that product, and that is all strategy.”
Once she stopped translating her role into product marketing terms and started translating it into the terms the business already cared about, the buy-in came on its own. “It’s actually not that important that people understand all the ins and outs of what a product marketer does,” she said, “as long as you execute against the things that the business really cares about.”
That’s a harder lesson than it sounds. It means putting your own job title second and the stakeholder’s priorities first, every time you’re asking for something.
A strong opinion without evidence is just a guess
Meghan is opinionated, by her own admission, and she’s had to learn where a strong point of view is an asset and where it’s a liability. The difference, in her experience, comes down to one thing: whether the opinion is rooted in something real.
When she’s pitching senior stakeholders on an idea, she doesn’t lead with conviction. She leads with the case. “Here’s what I’m seeing in the market. Here’s what our buyers are saying. Here’s what our account teams are telling us they’re hearing from clients,” she said. “And then you can really bring the receipts, so that you can get people’s buy in.”
The payoff compounds. Show up with the research once and you build trust. Show up without it, and the follow-up questions you can’t answer cost you more than the meeting.
AI is a thought partner, not a ghostwriter
Meghan uses AI constantly, but not the way a lot of people default to. She doesn’t ask it to write the business case. She asks it to argue with the business case she’s already building.
Her prompt usually starts with her own thinking laid out in full: here’s the investment I want to make, here’s the ROI I think it delivers, here’s who benefits beyond just me. Then she asks the model to pressure test it. “What do you think would make this business case stronger,” she asks, and treats the answer as a gut check, not a first draft. “I’m not asking AI to go write my business case from scratch,” she said. “I’m giving it all the tools that it needs to build something that’s gonna be stronger than what I would have put forward just myself.”
The catch is hallucination, and she runs into it constantly, especially in market and competitive research. Her defense against it isn’t a better prompt. It’s staying close enough to the underlying research that she can spot when the model has quietly started making things up.
“If you are close enough to the research, you’re going to be able to find those hallucinations,” she said. “If you are not, it’s going to be very difficult to spot them.”
That closeness is what she calls earned intuition, the gut feeling that something doesn’t add up, built by actually doing the work rather than reviewing a summary of it. It’s not something a prompt can generate for you. “You have to have the experience to be able to say that doesn’t seem right,” she said. “That’s not something you’re just going to have.”
Stop guarding the boundaries of your job title
Meghan’s closing thought doubles as a hot take. Early in her career she was strict about scope, careful to draw a hard line around what counted as product marketing work and what didn’t. Today she’s far less precious about it.
A year ago she’d never opened a development environment. Now she builds tools regularly, including an internal application for market and competitive intelligence she’s currently pitching for funding. “I’m not a developer, I’m a product marketer, I’m functional, I’m not technical. Well, I am technical,” she said, “and I need to stop saying that I’m not, because it’s simply not true anymore.”
Her advice isn’t to abandon boundaries altogether. Knowing what to pick up and what to put down is still, in her words, incredibly important. It’s that the boundary shouldn’t be your job title. It should be your capacity. Being useful across product management, product strategy, competitive intelligence, and yes, a little bit of development, is quickly becoming the actual shape of the job, not a detour from it.
What to do with this
The next time you’re briefed on a new feature, don’t start with what it does. Start with the sentence Meghan builds every piece of messaging around: so that you can. If you can’t finish that sentence, you’re not ready to write the announcement yet, no matter how finished the feature is.
And the next time you sit down with AI to build a business case, try her order of operations. Write your own thinking first. Ask the model to challenge it, not replace it. Then stay close enough to your own research that you’d notice if it started making things up.
For the full conversation with Meghan McNamara, including more on storytelling, product marketing at a large consultancy, and where she draws the line with AI, listen to the episode on the Supercharge Marketing podcast, available wherever you get your podcasts.
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