Nicole Smayling

There are 3 AI skills that stand out to me right now, prompt engineering skills, AI quality detection and staying ahead on governance and market perception. Build your own prompt engineering library. This is an evolving space and there are a ton of creators with interesting ideas. My advice? Explore what works for you and continue iterating. Save your favorite prompts and document what you like about them. Areas where I've found this useful…  Writing improvement / message clarity Market research ...Read More

Good question! Three skills that will make you more valuable are proving business impact, building cross-functional fluency and earning allies. Business value - In my experience, the teams that grow the fastest connect their work directly to revenue even when it's not their official directive. You don't need to wait for a new project, find what's already working and amplify it. For example, if free trials consistently generate leads, then show how your messaging is driving the signups. It doesn' ...Read More

Career blockers are tricky and some are more in your control than others. Focus on what you can control, and for the rest do your best but have a backup plan.  What you CAN control:  Tie your work to revenue and share your impact. When the company budget shrinks, teams closest to measurable revenue survive. Frame your work in terms of business value like pipeline and closed deals, not marketing activities. Highlight impact through measurable value statements like "My whitepaper achieved X form f ...Read More

I think the most in-demand PMM skills right now are communication and technical fluency, especially in AI. And as the market shifts, another critical skill that's emerging is intuition. Communication is everything - You're writing and speaking constantly. Engineering wants technical accuracy. Sales wants competitive differentiation. Execs want business impact. Your job is to reimagine the story for each audience, cutting through the noise to answer the one question they all have; "What's in it f ...Read More

Having worked on both sides of the Sales-PMM fence, I've watched alignment die between good intent and Sales readiness. Most sellers won't read a full research report. They will, however, get what they need if you condense that same report into a 1-page cheatsheet focused on current pain points, needs and competitive objection handling. Once it's easy to consume you need to put it right in your seller's flow of work. Whether it's pinned in Slack or surfaced via an AI assistant, the goal is to ma ...Read More

Living near San Francisco, it's hard to find a billboard on my commute right now that isn't focused on agentic AI. Some will even make you cringe, like the one that says "Stop Hiring Humans." There are so many overclaims now that there's a term for it, "agent washing," and the SEC, DOJ, and FTC are actively evaluating whether companies' AI claims hold up. Buyers have felt this too. I interviewed Rebecca Wettemann last year and she calls it moving from FOMO to FOMU, fear of missing out to fear of ...Read More

I've noticed that a lot of AI influencers talk about this like there's one right answer, but honestly the real skill isn't picking tools, it's picking categories and having tools you know how to use in those categories. I like to start by thinking about the job to be done. There's an AI tool now for almost everything you can think of, briefs, research, slides, dashboards, video, demos, copy, etc. That's the trap. People chase the "best" tool in every category and end up with 15 tabs open and no ...Read More

Gartner said something that stuck with me recently: AI won't cause a jobs apocalypse, but starting in 2028, it will cause "jobs chaos," as millions of roles get reconfigured, redesigned, and fused each year. For Marketing at AI-forward companies, that restructuring has already started. Not the full 2028 version Gartner is describing, the technology itself is still moving too fast for that, but companies are building the muscle now for what's coming. In Marketing specifically, I'm hearing that te ...Read More

I've become an agent manager. I've built two habits that changed everything. Daily: I manage AI context and boundaries, not tasks. I use pre-configured agents like Gemini Gems with attached NotebookLMs, that already hold the context I need: browser tabs, videos, docs, sheets, transcripts, prior conversations. That context "wrapper" protects my cognitive load so I start the day on decisions that need human judgment, not flipping through 50 browser windows. I'm still refining a daily brief, eventu ...Read More

Customers built their tech stack over time to hit specific goals, with tools they already trust. So before you position anything, understand what your customer's goal actually is and what "good" looks like to them. Once you know that, you can position AI as a natural, gradual step towards their goal as opposed to a rip and replace. A few grounding principles: 1. Building on what's already thereNo one wants a more complicated system. Prove that adding AI leads to a better outcome without asking t ...Read More