Nail the Story Before Building

Product marketing fit matters as much as product-market fit — and it should come before building the product, not after.

Finding product-market fit is hard, but there's something just as important and far more often skipped: product marketing fit — how you talk about the product and market it can, and should, come before building the product itself. It's the biggest lesson OpenAI product lead Tara Seshan says she learned from Sutter Hill.seshan

What you'll run into:

• The product is finished, and nobody can understand what problem it solves
• A pile of features, yet "why this is transformative" can't be said in one sentence
• Three months of building, and when it ships you can't explain it or sell it

Why narrative comes first

Most people build the product first, then figure out how to talk about it. That order is wrong — because the narrative isn't the product's manual; it's the product's foundation. How you talk about the product decides what people expect it to solve, why it deserves attention, and which category they put it in.

If you start building without a clear narrative, you'll likely build the wrong thing: you think you're building A, but the market hears and needs B. By the time you realize it, the most expensive rework isn't code — it's repositioning. Narrative-first has an extra benefit: it's the cheapest validation that exists. Telling a story takes a mouth, not code, not a prototype, not a launch.

Testing the narrative: pitch it to 100 people

How do you know the narrative is right? The method Tara learned at Sutter Hill: go pitch to 100 people, and refine your pitch relentlessly. Get the marketing narrative right — "why this is transformative" — and only then commit to "this is what the product looks like."

The pitch isn't for raising money; it's for collecting feedback. Every pitch teaches you: which line lands, which line makes eyes glaze over, which example makes someone ask "could this work for X?" Gather those signals, revise, until one sentence carries it and the listener can repeat it back. Pitch it to 100 people and you get 100 calibrations; by the time the product launches, those 100 calibrations are your starting line.

Where the narrative comes from

A good narrative isn't copywriting; it comes from two kinds of depth: deep understanding of the technology + deep understanding of the buyer's purchasing process. Understand the tech and you can say why this is only possible now and why others can't do it; understand the customer and you can say it solves the problem they care about most, not the one your tech is best at.

Missing either depth, the narrative goes hollow. Tech-only produces a feature list; customer-only produces a requirements report. Narrative is the intersection: in the customer's language, describe something only this technology makes possible now.

How the narrative reshapes the product

Once the narrative is fixed, it's not just marketing copy — it constrains the product. Whatever the narrative promises, the product must deliver: you say "log it in three seconds," the product has to actually be fast; you say "auto-categorize," the categorization has to actually be accurate. The narrative is another form of the not-doing list — it tells the team what must be done, and what's irrelevant to the narrative can be skipped.

That's also why the narrative shouldn't be decided after development. The later it's set, the more of the product is unrelated to it, and the more painful the cuts. Set it early and the team knows from day one what they're building for — and that "why" changes every feature decision.

Who owns it

A lot of people think of product marketing as "the glue between functions," the packaging that happens after the product is done. But PMM done exceptionally well is transformative for a company's outcome — it can be the key to its success. It's not an accessory to product; it's a partner in the definition phase.

In a one-person team, this role doesn't disappear — it lands on you. The thing you do during product definition — tell the story clearly, take it out to test, revise from feedback — is your own product marketing fit practice. Don't wait until it's built to figure out how to talk about it. Start talking from day one of definition.