Why dogfooding the product mattered
Marketing copy that has not felt the product is guesswork. Especially when the product is new, the surest way to know which features deserve the lead and which are noise is to walk through the customer journey yourself. The head of marketing asked the team to spend serious time inside the product. I took the lead on both passes.
Pass 1 · Built a demo app on the Passion.io platform during onboarding
- What I built. A real, working app on the Passion.io platform, configured the same way a paying customer would configure theirs. Onboarding flow, content uploads, payment setup, branded landing page, the full pipeline.
- Why I built it. The point was not to launch publicly. The point was to feel the friction firsthand. Where did the onboarding stall? Which features required steps that the marketing was not preparing customers for? Which features were marketed less than they deserved to be?
- What it produced. Direct observations that fed into onboarding email tightening, sales-page feature hierarchy, and several FAQ answers in the Objections database. Specifically reduced the gap between what the marketing promised pre-purchase and what the user encountered post-purchase.
Pass 2 · Built my own coach account on You Ai before the launch
- The setup. The marketing leadership asked the entire team to spend time inside You Ai before the launch. I went first. Built my own coach avatar against a specific knowledge base we were given.
- What I tested. Walked through the same onboarding a customer would. Trained the avatar. Watched the first interactions to see how closely the output matched the source knowledge. Looked at the configuration steps for friction.
- The audit I produced. Compared which features the product team was emphasizing in marketing materials against which features actually carried the user experience. Some features were getting under-pitched relative to the value they delivered. Some were getting over-pitched relative to where the product actually sat in its development cycle.
- The follow-on. Other team members built their own You Ai accounts after I did. The audit fed directly into the launch messaging hierarchy and into the message I escalated about the outcome promise being misaligned with the market.
Why this counts as product marketing work
The audits closed the gap between what the marketing was saying and what the product was doing. That is the core product-marketing job. The output was specific decisions: this feature leads, that feature supports, this onboarding step needs an email, that promise needs to come down. None of those decisions could have been made from a feature spec.