AMA: Fivetran Director, Product Marketing, Dayna Shoemaker on AI and Product Marketing

I don't think AI fundamentally changes the product marketing career path, but I do think it changes how and where PMMs spend their time and which skills will become the most valuable. Today, AI is already helping PMMs automate work such as: High-level market research and synthesis Competitive intelligence frameworks Campaign and project planning Workflow automation, from meeting notes to automatically creating Jira tasks and tracking dependencies PMMs still need these skills though to identify w ...Read More

Honestly? We don't lead with AI capabilities — we lead with customer outcomes. We start with the business problems our customers are actually trying to solve and work backward. Our customers care less about the latest feature and more about reducing costs, increasing trust, avoiding lock-in, and getting to AI outcomes faster. So that's the story we tell. The best product narratives translate technical innovation into tangible business value. That's especially important in AI, where the technolog ...Read More

I work at Fivetran, a data-driven company, so we're incredibly fortunate to have sophisticated AI capabilities already available to us so we can: Query our own product, sales, marketing, and customer data using natural language. Automate administrative work like meeting notes, summaries, and workflow triggers. Conduct high-level market research using pre-built skills that improve consistency and save time. These capabilities eliminate a lot of manual work and allow PMMs to focus on more strategi ...Read More

I think about AI the same way I thought about Wikipedia in university — a great starting point, but never the final answer. AI is genuinely useful for quickly building broad understanding:  a new market common buyer pain points a first-pass competitive landscape themes across customer calls But the real PMM work starts after that. You have to validate what AI gives you, pressure-test it, and make it specific to your business and market position. Two mistakes I see: people treat all LLMs as inter ...Read More

If by "deep thinking" you mean complex thought patterns, genuinely, not really, or at least not yet. AI is great for gathering information, summarizing inputs, and helping structure a piece of work. But I haven't seen it consistently deliver the kind of strategic thinking that PMMs are expected to provide. AI is great for gathering information, summarizing inputs, and helping structure a piece of work. But I haven't seen it consistently deliver the kind of strategic thinking PMMs are expected to ...Read More

My honest take: pick the best tool for the job rather than forcing everything through one platform. Through a lot of trial and error, I've landed on a mix that works for me. Claude is often my preferred choice for business proposals, strategic thinking, and larger research projects. Gemini works particularly well in our Google environment. It is embedded directly into the tools I use, allowing me to summarize Google folder contents or analyze data in situ when working in Google Sheets make it su ...Read More