The CMO Isn't the Best Marketer

The biggest misconception about the CMO role is that the CMO is the best marketer at the company.

I’m certainly not the best marketer at incident.io.

I have experience and instincts that are helpful. But that doesn’t mean I’m always right. I’ve seen lots of things work and fail, but every situation is different. So the experience is a set of stories I can tell you. It isn’t a plan. What worked last time had its own product, its own market, its own timing, and I try not to pretend otherwise. I’ve been wrong enough times that the pretending isn’t worth it.

I’m good at lots of things but not the best on my team at anything (other than maybe hacking around Claude Code). I think that’s a reasonable outcome. The people doing the writing, the campaigns, the product work, they should be better at it than I am. If they aren’t, I hired poorly, and I’m probably slowing them down.

My job is really to empower all the people smarter than me to do their best work, remove roadblocks, hire great colleagues for them, and to provide advice and guidance when they ask. I’ll tell you what I’ve seen work and fail. The asking part matters, because an opinion from me can sound like a decision even when I don’t mean it that way.

Originally posted on LinkedIn.