AMA: Intuit Group Product Marketing Manager, Vertical Solutions, Brittany Sudlow on Stakeholder Management

I'm a big fan of both, so I'm glad people are thinking about them — though I'll admit I call it a "prep" before and a "retro" after, just to keep things a bit lighter than "postmortem" suggests. The real work happens in how you structure these conversations with stakeholders. At its core, you're trying to align with senior leadership, and that requires truly understanding three things upfront: your audience, the specific topic, and what decision actually needs to be made. Then you ruthlessly sim ...Read More

The most important thing I've learned is that the head of sales needs to be genuinely bought in on new messaging — ideally, it feels like their idea, not marketing pushing something down their throat. You have to agree on what problem you're trying to solve, and you have to agree that it matters. Once you're aligned there, build the pitch deck hand in hand with sales. Don't go off and create it in a vacuum. That collaboration is where the real buy-in happens. From there, the magic is in the foll ...Read More

Of course, the classic answer is sales, marketing, and product — and that's always true. But the nuance is that every organization is different, and you need to figure out where your actual bottlenecks are. If you're constantly running into data inconsistencies or hitting technical limitations, get closer to engineering. If your sales function is still relatively new, build a real relationship with sales ops — they'll unblock you faster than anyone. And if you're in an organization with a decent ...Read More

Customer and market evidence is exactly what you need to drive a narrative. It can't come from your brain or anecdotal evidence — it has to be created from actual customer problems you've researched. Ideally, you're testing the messaging with a survey tool to validate it lands, though I know that's not always possible for speed or budget reasons. But it absolutely has to be grounded in real customer pains you've identified and backed by proven solutions. Case studies with ROI that validate this ...Read More