Product Messaging Agency

‍Why most messaging work in B2B SaaS is just noise—and what to do instead.

Let’s face it: most messaging work in B2B SaaS isn’t strategic. It’s busywork.

You create another Notion doc. A new Miro board. Run customer interviews that go nowhere. Rewrite a landing page for the tenth time, just to say something’s moving.

But is it really?

Busywork disguises itself as progress. But it rarely solves a real business problem. Most of it exists to make teams feel like they’re maintaining momentum, even if they’re stuck.

Yes, maintenance is necessary. When you're launching a major product update or your homepage copy confuses prospects—fix it. But too often, “maintenance” becomes a trap. It keeps us reacting instead of asking, “What would actually make a difference?”

What Does Move the Needle?

Testable, reality-based levers.

A messaging lever is a small but intentional experiment—grounded in your company’s reality—that has the potential to drive outsized impact. These aren’t random tactics. They’re thoughtful actions based on hypotheses, designed to test and learn.

Levers can be process changes or direct actions. For example:

• Reframing your messaging from ICP personas to situational triggers
• Mapping internal stakeholders better for complex deals
• Tailoring your messaging for the full buying committee, not just end users
• Overhauling your website’s information architecture
• Testing new feature placement or hierarchy on navigation
• Validating a new value prop based on user behavior patterns

It doesn’t matter whether it’s high effort or low effort—as long as it’s a thoughtful, testable intervention.

How to Identify Your Messaging Levers

Here’s a simple, repeatable approach:

1️⃣ Map and segment your messaging processes
Understand what you’re saying, who it’s for, and where it’s being used.

2️⃣ Analyze what’s working—and what’s failing
Use a mix of light-touch stats and qualitative insight.
Tip: Be ready to discover that your biggest assumptions are wrong.

3️⃣ Spot the areas of intervention
These become your high-potential levers.

4️⃣ Connect effort to outcomes with metric trees
Link operational changes to actual business metrics. This is what proves impact.

5️⃣ Design the experiment
Choose between:

• Experimental: A/B tests, where sample size is large and controlled
• Observational: Baseline comparisons, ideal for smaller or slower-moving data

6️⃣ Repeat
Strategy isn’t static. What works today may not work tomorrow. Keep iterating.

But Wait—Let’s Talk About Strategy

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: strategy isn’t science. It’s not “the one true path” backed by data and a few customer calls.

Strategy is an informed opinion on how to win.
That’s it.

And often, there are multiple good strategies for a given challenge. Anyone who insists theirs is the answer—because it’s “data-backed” or “customer-validated”—is oversimplifying at best, or misleading you at worst.

Data helps, but it needs context. Customers are helpful, but they’re human—biased, led, misinformed, or unsure. Strategy isn’t just input gathering. It’s pattern recognition. It’s asking obvious questions no one else bothers to ask. It’s digging into root causes. It’s exhausting ideas until only the strongest remain.

That takes time. And yes, we have AI and automation and analytics dashboards. But strategy is still a creative exercise. And creativity isn’t a faucet you turn on when you’re ready. It takes thinking, space, iteration, and reflection.

The Bottom Line

If your messaging isn’t moving the business forward, it’s not because you’re not working hard enough. It’s because you’re not working on the right levers.

Stop filling in checklists. Start pulling levers that create momentum.

Use strategy as a process of exploration, not a fixed deliverable.

And remember: just because something looks productive, doesn’t mean it’s helping you win.

The Broken Loop: Why B2B Product and Marketing Are Out of Sync (and How to Fix It)

If you're in B2B marketing or product, the scenario above probably hits uncomfortably close to home. It's a tale as old as time, or at least as old as modern B2B organizations:

• Product teams, often guided by senior leadership, build. They build with conviction, with code, and with countless hours of effort.
• Once something's "ready," it's tossed over the fence to marketing, often with a polite (or not-so-polite) request to "help us promote this!"
• Marketing then scrambles, working backward to decipher the value proposition, understand the problem it solves, and, more often than not, figure out why it was even built in the first place.
• A rushed launch ensues, and when the market yawns, guess who takes the blame? Marketing, of course.

The kicker? Sometimes, the product shouldn't have been built at all.

Sound familiar? Because it's almost a universal truth in the B2B landscape. I hear this exact story from marketers and product professionals across the industry. The core issue? There's little to no incentive for product and marketing to align from the outset. Collaboration happens far too late in the game, if it happens meaningfully at all.

The Missing Piece: Early Market Intelligence

In my humble opinion, product teams shouldn't even begin building until they've worked hand-in-hand with marketing to gather crucial market intelligence. Marketing isn't just about pretty brochures and catchy taglines; it's about understanding the market, the customer, their pain points, and what truly resonates. This isn't groundbreaking insight; it's Marketing 101. Yet, for some reason, it's rarely how things play out in practice.

Marketing's Seat at the Table

Marketing deserves just as much influence on the product roadmap as any other department. Why? Because marketing is often the direct conduit to the customer. We hear their frustrations, understand their aspirations, and see the gaps in the market. This direct feedback is invaluable for informing what products to build, what features to prioritize, and how to position them for success.

When marketing is brought in at the ideation stage, they can:

• Validate market need: Is there a genuine problem this product solves? Is the market large enough?
• Identify competitive differentiation: How will this product stand out? What's our unique selling proposition?
• Inform messaging from day one: Understanding the target audience and their needs early on allows for more effective and authentic messaging.
• Prevent wasted resources: Building something nobody wants is perhaps the most expensive mistake a company can make. Early collaboration mitigates this risk significantly.

Breaking the Cycle

So, how do we fix this perpetually broken relationship? It starts with a fundamental shift in mindset and process:

1. Integrate Marketing into Product Strategy: Marketing shouldn't just be an execution arm; it should be a strategic partner. Include marketing leaders in product strategy sessions, roadmap planning, and initial concept discussions.
2. Establish Shared Goals: Align product and marketing KPIs. When both teams are measured on the same outcomes (e.g., product adoption, customer satisfaction, revenue generated from new products), incentives naturally align.
3. Regular Cross-Functional Syncs: Beyond formal meetings, encourage informal, frequent communication. Product and marketing teams should feel comfortable sharing ideas, feedback, and market insights regularly.
4. Embrace Customer-Centricity: Both teams need to put the customer at the center of every decision. This shared focus naturally bridges the gap between building and selling.
5. Data-Driven Decisions: Leverage market research, customer feedback, and sales data to inform both product development and marketing strategy.

The success of a B2B product hinges not just on its technical brilliance, but on its market fit and how effectively its value is communicated. It's time we stopped treating product development and marketing as separate entities and instead fostered a truly collaborative ecosystem. The alternative is a continued cycle of wasted effort, missed opportunities, and the never-ending blame game. Let's build together, with the market in mind, from the very beginning.