The LinkedIn post had 4,200 likes. A well-known product marketing consultant, sharing their hot take: "Stop building personas. They're theater for stakeholders. Nobody uses them. You're wasting time creating 43-page PowerPoint decks nobody reads."
My teammate showed it to me on a Tuesday morning. "Should we kill our persona project?" she asked. We'd spent three weeks interviewing customers, synthesizing patterns, building detailed buyer profiles.
I read the post again. The comments were even more emphatic. "Personas are dead." "Focus on jobs-to-be-done instead." "Stop documenting, start shipping."
Here's what the post got right: 43-page persona decks that live in a shared drive nobody opens are absolutely useless.
Here's what it got catastrophically wrong: the solution isn't to stop building personas. It's to stop building them manually.
Six months later, that teammate had left personas behind entirely. Sales kept asking her the same questions: "Who are we selling to? What do they care about? How do I talk to different buyer types?" She'd respond with "we don't do personas anymore" and point them to a jobs-to-be-done framework that was equally unusable.
Meanwhile, I'd automated persona generation. Sales could pull up buyer profiles in 30 seconds. The information stayed current because it was based on actual deal data, not quarterly research projects. Total time investment: 5 minutes to generate, 20 minutes to refine.
Same outcome we wanted from personas. One-tenth the effort. Because I automated the process instead of eliminating the deliverable.
This pattern repeats across every "stop doing X" trend in product marketing. The advice correctly identifies that manual, slow, documentation-heavy approaches are dying. Then it makes the fatal leap to "therefore, stop doing the work entirely."
Wrong. The work still matters. The manual processes are what's obsolete.
The Persona Myth: "Stop Building Them"
The consultant's post resonated because everyone's experienced persona theater. You spend weeks creating beautiful buyer profiles. Demographics, psychographics, pain points, buying journey maps. You present them to stakeholders. Everyone nods. The deck gets filed away. Six months later, someone asks "who are we targeting again?" and the cycle repeats.
The frustration is real. The conclusion is wrong.
Sarah, a founding PMM at a 30-person startup, followed the advice. She killed her persona project entirely. "We'll just talk to customers," she said. "We don't need documentation."
Three months later, Sales was closing deals with completely different buyer types than Product was building for. Marketing was creating content for a persona that didn't exist. Customer success was onboarding people who didn't match any of the assumptions.
Everyone was "talking to customers." Nobody was synthesizing what those conversations meant.
The problem was never personas. The problem was spending three weeks building static documents that were outdated the day you finished them.
What actually works: Generate personas based on actual buyer data, update them automatically, make them accessible in 30 seconds instead of buried in slide decks.
The founding PMM who automated persona generation using customer interview transcripts, deal data, and win/loss patterns told me: "I generate a persona update every week. Takes 5 minutes. Sales actually uses them because they reflect what's happening right now, not what we researched last quarter."
Static 43-page PowerPoint personas are dead. Dynamic, auto-generated buyer profiles based on real data are more valuable than ever.
The shift isn't from personas to nothing. It's from manual documentation to automated intelligence.
For solo PMMs managing multiple deliverables without getting buried in spreadsheets, platforms that consolidate persona generation, competitive intelligence, and messaging frameworks into one system make this automation practical instead of theoretical.
The Launch Kit Myth: "Just Send Slack Messages"
The Medium article was titled "I Stopped Writing Launch Kits and Launches Got Better." The author described abandoning comprehensive launch documentation in favor of "quick Slack updates and office hours."
The post struck a chord. 2,400 claps. Comment after comment: "Launch kits are where good ideas go to die." "Nobody reads 40-page launch decks." "Slack > documentation."
Again, the diagnosis was right. Comprehensive launch kits that take weeks to write and seconds to ignore are absolute time-wasters.
The prescription was wrong.
Marcus, a PMM at a Series B company, took the advice literally. Next product launch, he skipped the launch kit entirely. Sent updates in Slack. Held office hours.
Sales showed up to the first office hours session with the same question they'd asked in three previous Slack threads: "What's the elevator pitch?"
Different reps asked the same questions. Because Slack conversations scroll away. Office hours don't scale when you have 85 sales reps across time zones. And the sales enablement team still needed reference materials to build training—materials that didn't exist because there was no launch kit.
By week two, Marcus was answering the same questions in 12 different Slack channels. The "quick updates" approach took more time than writing the original launch kit would have.
The mistake was thinking the format was the problem. The problem was the 40-page comprehensive documentation that tried to answer every possible question.
What actually works: Generate a tight 2-page launch brief in 10 minutes, not a 40-page comprehensive guide in two weeks.
The PMM who figured this out told me: "I use AI to generate the first draft of launch messaging based on product specs and our positioning framework. Takes 5 minutes. I spend 30 minutes refining it to match our voice. Sales gets a concise brief, I host office hours for edge cases, everyone's happy."
Launches still need enablement materials. They just need to be created 10x faster and focused on the 3 things that matter instead of the 47 things you think someone might ask about.
Comprehensive launch documentation is dead. Fast, focused launch briefs are essential.
The shift isn't from launch kits to Slack chaos. It's from comprehensive documentation to AI-accelerated essentials.
The Newsletter Myth: "Stop Sending Them"
The SaaS growth expert's tweet went viral: "Customer newsletters are spam. Nobody opens them. Stop batch-and-blast communication. Be event-driven instead."
The data backing up the claim was real: average B2B newsletter open rates around 18%, click rates below 3%. Most customer newsletters were indeed ignored.
The conclusion many PMMs drew: stop sending customer newsletters entirely.
Jessica, a customer marketing manager, killed her monthly newsletter program. "We'll be event-driven," she told her team. Send targeted messages triggered by customer behavior, not calendar-based blasts.
In theory, perfect. In practice, disaster.
The "event-driven" approach required integrating the email platform with product analytics, CRM, and customer success tools. IT quoted six weeks for the integration project. Meanwhile, customers weren't hearing from the company at all.
When the integration finally shipped, the triggers were too complex. Marketing ops spent hours debugging why certain customers weren't receiving messages. The "personalized" emails often fired at wrong times because the trigger logic didn't account for edge cases.
Three months in, they'd sent fewer total customer communications than they used to send in one monthly newsletter. Customer engagement with the product actually decreased.
The mistake was thinking broadcast communication was the core problem. The core problem was sending the same generic message to all customers regardless of segment, usage, or lifecycle stage.
What actually works: Segment your audience, send relevant messages, but communication still matters.
The customer marketer who solved this told me: "I still send a monthly newsletter. But I have 8 versions—segmented by customer size, product usage, and lifecycle stage. Each version has content relevant to that segment. Open rates went from 18% to 41%. Same frequency, better targeting."
Modern email tools make segmentation straightforward instead of impossible. You're not choosing between monthly blasts and complex event-driven automation. You're choosing between lazy batch-and-blast and thoughtful segmentation.
Untargeted monthly newsletters are dead. Segmented customer communication is more important than ever.
The shift isn't from scheduled communication to silence. It's from broadcast to targeted.
The Battlecard Myth: "They Don't Matter Anymore"
The competitive intelligence analyst published a LinkedIn article: "Battlecards are obsolete. By the time you update them, the competitive landscape has changed. Sales doesn't use them anyway."
The supporting evidence was damning: 65% of battlecards were outdated within 90 days. 71% of sales reps reported they "rarely or never" referenced battlecards during calls.
The conclusion gaining traction: stop investing in competitive battlecards.
David, a solo PMM, followed the logic. He stopped maintaining the battlecard library. "Sales can just ask me when they hit competitive situations," he reasoned.
Week one: 4 Slack messages asking about Competitor X. Week two: 9 messages about three different competitors. Week three: He was spending 6 hours answering the same competitive questions in different channels.
Sales wasn't checking the old battlecards because they were outdated and hard to find. Eliminating battlecards didn't solve that problem—it made David the single point of failure.
Meanwhile, deals were being lost to competitors because reps facing objections couldn't get answers fast enough. The 24-hour delay between "Sales rep encounters competitor objection" and "David answers in Slack" was killing winnable deals.
The diagnosis was right: quarterly scheduled battlecard updates are useless because competitive moves happen weekly, not quarterly.
The conclusion was wrong: battlecards don't matter anymore.
What actually works: Make battlecards instantly updatable instead of quarterly projects.
The competitive intelligence lead who solved this told me: "I set up monitoring so when a competitor launches a feature or changes pricing, I get an alert. I update the relevant battlecard in 10 minutes. Sales always has current intelligence. The update burden dropped from 'quarterly panic' to 'ongoing 10-minute fixes.'"
Quarterly scheduled battlecard updates are dead. Real-time competitive intelligence matters more than ever because markets move faster.
The shift isn't from battlecards to nothing. It's from batched quarterly updates to streaming, always-current intelligence.
For PMMs managing competitive intelligence alongside messaging, launches, and sales enablement, platforms that consolidate competitive monitoring and battlecard management prevent the tool sprawl that makes real-time updates impossible.
The "AI Makes PMM Obsolete" Myth
The most dangerous myth is the one that sounds most forward-thinking: "AI will automate PMM work. The role is evolving from execution to strategy. Manual PMM deliverables are becoming obsolete."
The first two sentences are correct. The third sentence is catastrophically wrong.
I watched this play out with Rebecca, a senior PMM who fully bought into the "AI will automate everything" narrative. She started delegating all execution work to AI tools. Personas? ChatGPT. Battlecards? Claude. Launch briefs? Jasper.
She was going to focus purely on strategy.
Three months later, her stakeholders were frustrated. The AI-generated personas were generic and unusable. The battlecards read like Wikipedia summaries. The launch briefs sounded like they were written by someone who'd never talked to a customer.
Sales came back asking for the "real" materials. Product questioned whether PMM was adding value. Marketing ignored her messaging because it didn't match the brand voice.
Rebecca had confused "AI can help with execution" with "AI eliminates the need for PMM execution." Those are completely different statements.
The mistake was thinking manual execution was obsolete. Manual execution is exactly what's obsolete. But execution still matters—it just needs to happen 10x faster.
What actually works: Use AI to accelerate execution so you spend more time on strategy, not less time on execution.
The PMM who threaded this needle told me: "AI handles my first drafts. I spend 80% less time on initial creation and 80% more time on refinement, strategy, and stakeholder alignment. I'm shipping more deliverables and doing more strategic work. Both."
AI doesn't make deliverables obsolete. It makes manual, slow creation processes obsolete.
A founding PMM using AI acceleration told me: "I can generate positioning, personas, battlecards, and launch messaging in a fraction of the time manual processes required. That doesn't mean I'm doing less work—it means I'm doing higher-quality work because I can iterate 10x faster."
Manual PMM execution is dead. Strategic PMM work backed by automated execution is the future.
The shift isn't from deliverables to pure strategy. It's from manual processes eating all your time to automated acceleration freeing you to focus on judgment, differentiation, and business impact.
What All These Myths Get Wrong
Every "stop doing X" trend in product marketing makes the same error: correctly identifying that slow, manual, documentation-heavy approaches don't work, then incorrectly concluding that the solution is elimination instead of automation.
Personas created in 3-week research projects and stored in PowerPoint are useless. Personas generated in 5 minutes based on real buyer data are essential.
Launch kits that take 2 weeks to write and nobody reads are theater. Launch briefs created in 30 minutes that actually get used are critical.
Monthly batch-and-blast newsletters are spam. Segmented customer communication is valuable.
Quarterly battlecard update projects are outdated by the time you finish. Real-time competitive intelligence wins deals.
Manual PMM execution that takes all your time is obsolete. AI-accelerated execution that frees you for strategy is the future.
The pattern: The manual, inefficient process is dying. The deliverable still matters.
The PMMs who figure this out are using consolidated platforms that handle persona generation, competitive intelligence, messaging frameworks, and launch planning in one place instead of jumping between ChatGPT, Google Docs, Notion, and scattered Slack threads.
The PMMs who don't figure it out are stuck in a false choice: spend all your time on manual processes, or eliminate deliverables entirely and watch stakeholders question your value.
There's a third option: automate the execution so you can focus on the strategy, judgment, and differentiation that actually require human expertise.
The "experts" saying PMMs should stop building personas, launch kits, newsletters, battlecards, and deliverables are solving for 2015's problem—too much documentation, too little impact.
The actual 2025 problem is different: you need to ship all those deliverables 10x faster so you have time to do the strategic work that makes them actually matter.
Automation isn't about doing less PMM work. It's about doing better PMM work in a fraction of the time.
The consultants missed that nuance. Don't make the same mistake.