Product Marketing · Developer Tools · Infrastructure
Your engineers can explain the product perfectly.
Just not to anyone who buys it.
I do positioning and go-to-market for developer tools and infrastructure companies, and I am the rare marketer whose messaging engineers actually believe, because I used to be one.
I came up running about 500 production Linux servers, spent five years as a Solutions Architect at Red Hat and GitLab sitting across from technical buyers, then owned technical product marketing for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and for TuxCare's Linux security portfolio. Most technical marketers are marketers who picked up some tech. I am an operator who learned marketing. That order is the whole difference.
The problem I solve
The credibility gap
Technical companies keep hitting the same wall. The engineers can explain the product beautifully to other engineers and to nobody else. The marketing team cannot read the docs well enough to help. What comes out the other side is messaging that engineers find embarrassing and buyers find meaningless, and everyone quietly agrees to stop talking about it.
That gap is expensive. It shows up as deals lost to worse products with clearer stories, as a homepage nobody can defend, as sales reps improvising their own pitch, and as a launch that lands with a thud. It is also very hard to hire for, which is why you have probably already written "must be more technical than the average product marketer" into a job description and then failed to find that person.
I sit in that gap. I can get the real story out of your engineering team without slowing them down, and then turn it into something your buyer acts on.
How to work with me
Four ways in
Prices are listed because you should be able to figure out whether this is worth a conversation without having one.
Positioning Teardown
One week · fixed scope
I go through your site, your docs, your sales deck, and your three closest competitors, then tell you what your positioning actually says to a reader, which is usually a little different from what you meant.
- The line where an engineer stops believing you
- The line where the person signing loses the thread
- Where you actually sit against the competitors you named, plus the one you left off the list
- Three changes ranked by what they would move
Positioning & Messaging Sprint
Four to five weeks
The full job. I interview your customers and your team, dig through wins and losses, work the competitive landscape, and rebuild the story from the foundation up.
- Positioning statement and messaging architecture, split by audience: practitioner, champion, economic buyer
- Category narrative
- Competitive battlecards
- Rewritten homepage narrative and sales-deck story
- Enablement session so the team can actually use it
Fractional Product Marketing
Two to three days a week · three-month minimum
I am your PMM. I am in your Slack, in your launch calendar, and on your sales calls, and I do the work myself.
- Launches, positioning, and messaging
- Sales enablement and competitive
- Content direction and technical review
- Customer and community insight fed back to product
- Standing time with you and your product lead
Launch Package
Scoped to your date
I own the launch end to end, brief through post-launch retro, including the unglamorous part where somebody has to get product, engineering, and sales to agree on one story and one date.
- Launch narrative and messaging
- Collateral and sales enablement
- Launch content and sequencing
- Cross-functional wrangling to actually hit the date
- Post-launch retro with what to keep
Why me and not someone cheaper
The receipts
Technical Release Captain, RHEL 9
I owned the messaging, positioning, and competitive framework the entire go-to-market organization ran on for one of the largest enterprise Linux launches there is. It contributed to a 25% lift in B2B lead engagement.
A repositioning that changed the buyer
TuxCare was positioned as patching, which dropped it into a feature fight against tools that cost nothing, and every call collapsed into "we already patch." I rebuilt it around uninterrupted security posture and the operational cost of the reboot window. Different conversation, different buyer.
Built the function from zero, twice
The go-to-market playbook at TuxCare did not exist before me. Neither did the developer relations practice at CIQ, which I built from scratch for Rocky Linux, including the loop that carried practitioner feedback back into product.
I am credible in public, not just on a resume
I host The IT Guy Show and the Fedora Project Podcast, produced Red Hat's RHEL Presents series, and teach Linux administration as an adjunct professor. If you want to know whether engineers trust me, you can go listen.
Before you email me
Who this is for
Good fit
- Developer tools, infrastructure, security, or open source
- Seed through Series B, roughly ten to eighty people
- You have a product engineers like and a story nobody can repeat
- You have no PMM, or one who is drowning
- You are willing to change the words on the homepage
Not a fit
- Consumer, e-commerce, or local services
- You want social media management or SEO content volume
- You want someone to run ads
- You want the messaging validated, not examined
- You are looking for the cheapest option, which is a real and legitimate need and is not me
One more thing worth saying out loud: sponsorship on my podcasts is a separate conversation with its own rate card. You cannot buy coverage as part of a strategy engagement, and I would not want to work with you if you tried. The credibility is the product.
Tell me what is not landing
Send me your site and one sentence about the deal you keep losing. If I am not the right person I will tell you that, and I will usually know who is.
Book some time