4.9 Avoiding Random Acts of Marketing

Random Acts of Marketing: the little (and big) asks that just pop up, quite often from some executive conversation, that suddenly land on PMM’s desk. Nobody involved is acting in bad faith — they’re just what happens in fast-moving environments, and that’s what makes it dangerous. Good intentions and a real deadline will get a wasteful side quest funded faster than almost anything else in a company.

PMM’s structural position, in the overlap of Marketing, Sales, and Product, means every request without an obvious owner lands there, and the downflow impacts get felt broadly. That position is either the best seat in the house or a landing strip for other people’s undone thinking. It depends entirely on what you do with it.

Three questions to ask when an unplanned item lands:

1. What does this do better for us than what we’re already doing?
2. What item on the agreed priority list does this bump to the No list?
3. What impact does this have on other existing work items?

It’s an Advantage, Not Just a Burden

PMM is the one person who sees the pattern where the same thing gets asked for in multiple ways, the regularity of the asks, and the aggregated impact. That’s the vantage point that tells the difference between a real gap and a random act of marketing dressed up as urgent. This is the piece that comes before a section 4.8, “yes, but” conversation can even start — you can’t trade trade-offs you haven’t tracked.

Track It or It Didn’t Happen

If priorities live only in your head, you don’t have priorities — you have vibes with deadlines. It doesn’t need to be sophisticated; a five-line spreadsheet that survives beats an elaborate system that falls apart, because the system that survives is the one you’ll actually update. What matters is that it exists somewhere outside your skull and captures three things for every real commitment: what it is, who it’s for, and what it costs to say both yes and no to it.

That last column is the one usually skipped, and the one that matters most. A tracked, visible backlog is the only thing that turns “I’m slammed” from a feeling into a business problem someone has to solve. An untracked backlog produces no visible pain — which means no urgency to fix it.

Where AI Fits, and Where It Doesn’t

AI didn’t fix prioritization — it made saying yes cheaper. A first draft used to cost real hours, and that friction acted as a natural filter. AI deletes that friction, so saying yes feels free, so you say yes more often, and the backlog you thought AI would shrink quietly refills itself with lower-value work at a higher rate than before. Faster horses, same random acts. Judgment about what’s worth doing was never the part AI could help with, and it’s now the only thing standing between “I move faster” and “I produce more noise, faster.”

What AI can do is run the ops layer underneath that judgment: sort inbound requests by effort and impact, flag the fourth “quick competitive question” this month before you’re deep into the same underlying gap, draft the “yes, but, here’s what drops” message so the trade-off is on the table in minutes. AI can’t decide what matters. It can make the mechanics of tracking what matters cheap enough that you actually keep doing it past week two.

Three things awesome will always beat five things average. AI just changed how many things you’re tempted to say yes to before you remember that.

Full post: Avoiding Random Acts of Marketing →