Everything is exciting and overwhelming
Okay, now that I’m back to being a full-time Product Marketer I can’t stop thinking of a few things. First, how exciting it is to be a marketer now when everything is changing rapidly. Secondly, how in the world should we reach people, people like us, who are overtired and overstimulated, with all the new things we are all building? Things that are important, that do simplify someone’s work, that are cool… most of the time.
I was thinking about this before my career break. Back when there was no AI (at least not in the way it is today), no agents, or it all was just getting started. I remember sitting in meetings thinking: everyone is just extremely tired of all these new updates. Everyone is just extremely tired.
That was 2023. People were already exhausted (or I was??)
Now it’s 2026, and with AI and everyone being extremely productive (or sometimes counterproductive), it’s a whole new story. Features ship faster than anyone can process them. PMMs are drowning in release velocity. But the playbook we’ve been using for years, I personally think is completely broken or will be completely broken soon.
The question I keep asking myself and everyone around me at this point is: How should we even deal with this?
The problem was always there
Before I take a swing at an answer, let me be clear about something. The feature fatigue problem didn’t start with AI. It started years ago, when the number of features shipped began outpacing the attention span available to process them.
I read somewhere something like no one cares about your launch as much as you do (and your manager?? And your KPIs?? And your job??) Customers are juggling dozens of tools, each with constant updates. You can spend months preparing only to find that even your most exciting features go completely unnoticed.
Why do we keep doing it? Well because that’s the way everyone does it. Because if you don’t do it you will be considered a bad marketer, and then when you lose a job, how will you answer all those questions about walking through your release process in interviews. And try telling them you are not doing 10 emails, calls, in-product updates, and whatnot.
AI Era
But here’s what’s different now: the feature volume has become impossible to keep up with.
With AI, product teams ship faster, engineering ships faster, cool cool, thanks guys, PMMs are happy now! But jokes aside, products ship features on a weekly or even daily cadence. Your competitors are shipping, you’re shipping, everyone is shipping. And I feel like the communication infrastructure (email, in-app banners, release notes, sales enablement) was designed for quarterly or monthly launches, not constant change.
Even if you’re incredibly efficient, you can’t:
- Research and position every feature
- Create launch assets for every change
- Enable the sales team on every update
- Communicate effectively to customers about every release
And then you try anyway because with the AI you can, but everything becomes noise. The important announcements get lost, your sales team can’t keep up, your customers stop reading your emails because there are too many of them and they’ve learned that most don’t matter anyway. Or maybe they matter but realistically how much time do we all have?
Current reality
I joined a new company and got accounts in different tools, some I used before and some are brand new to me. I would love to get quick intro-tours to refresh my memory or gain new knowledge. Instead, I get 10 emails per day from those CSMs asking if I want to jump on a call. NO, I DON’T HAVE TIME FOR THIS, SORRY. I don’t even have time to read your emails, my brain is melting from learning a new product and the domain, I can’t invest time in talking to all of you :(. I need to learn my tool so that I can send those emails to my customers (haha, kidding.. AM I???)
So what do we actually do?
Here’s where I get stuck, and I think most PMMs are stuck in the exact same place.
The instinct is to solve this with better messaging. Make the announcements clearer or more outcome-focused, more value-based. All those things we learn from the best PMMs out there.
But I feel like the real problem isn’t that our messaging is wrong, the problem is everyone is exhausted and doesn’t have time for anything (is it just me, a millennial speaking?). While people are generally excited about new features, they are not excited about every feature.
I feel that at some point lots of us are already using a tiering system and thinking about whether a specific update needs to be announced at all. But then if the update is not important, why did we build it? Someone was asking for it? Then it’s important???
I feel that we should really choose only tier 1-3 features to promote and use in-product messaging most of the times. It has existed for years but we’ve never treated it as the primary channel for feature adoption. It’s always been secondary to email, to PR, to paid campaigns. I honestly don’t know why. Growth teams have been doing this with onboarding for years (and I loved working on onboarding when I had an opportunity).
The hard part
This requires product and marketing to be aligned in a way most companies aren’t. Right now, in lots of organizations, PMM doesn’t control the in-product experience. But if the primary way a feature reaches a customer is contextual and in-product, then PMM has to own the behavioral logic including the triggers and messaging. It means, though, that PMM becomes less about marketing campaigns and more about designing communication systems that live inside the product experience itself. I personally love this idea and always supported it. Many of you will say “I’ve already been doing it”. But how much time do you spend on in-product experience vs writing emails and doing all that other classical marketing stuff?
What I think (for now)
But also to be fair I don’t have a complete answer. I guess some features still deserve campaigns, some customers still want emails, others hate in-product updates. And most likely we all will keep doing what we’ve been doing :D
Will see, I guess.
P.S. I am really happy to think about those things again, I truly missed working at a company. Although it’s extra hard now that I’m a mom and I don’t have time for anything. Took me a month to publish this post. And I really woke up at 5 am and couldn’t go back to sleep because of all these thoughts.
Thanks for reading!
Very Excited Customer