I’ve spent the last 18 years of my career building and leading marketing teams across nearly every stage and shape of business, from Series A, “a few engineers in the founder’s garage” startups to multi-billion-dollar public companies. Along the way, I’ve had the pleasure and privilege of building, leading, and learning from exceptional teams while helping organizations navigate the messy work of finding market fits, launching products, creating (or disrupting) categories, and turning ambitious ideas into actual growth that will even please the board and shareholders.

I’ve led four startups to grow into and beyond the $50M, $100M, and $250M ARR clubs, and seen all four of those journeys through to successful acquisitions. All told, I’ve launched more than two dozen products, an increasingly uncountable number of major features, and more battlecards, pitch decks, positioning strategies, and go-to-market plans than I care to think about. My work has driven more than $1.5 billion in revenue, and I’ve had the opportunity to lead, develop, and grow more than 150 professionals across multiple organizations and disciplines.

I got my start with tech companies and SaaS almost by accident, working for an agency attempting to create standardized processes around emerging disciplines like content marketing, social media, and SEO. We were figuring out a new playbook in real time and, quite frankly, failing spectacularly at a fair amount of it. This was back during the days when a product launch was basically a landing page and a hundred bucks in an Adwords budget.

What that experience did for me was make me deeply curious about what separates the companies and products who find success versus those who crash and burn. The conventional wisdom was that if you wanted to succeed you simply had to do things “the right way” and follow “the best practices” but part of me always knew that wasn’t the whole story.

The further I moved into startups, private equity, and public enterprises, the more obvious it became that great businesses rarely succeed because they are universally right. Plenty of smart strategies fail. Plenty of exceptional products disappear. And plenty of companies doing seemingly irrational things win anyway.

What separates them is often something more complicated: their position relative to the world around them.

Over time, that observation crystallized into a belief that has become foundational to how I approach marketing and business strategy: winning is less about discovering some objectively correct answer and more about becoming exceptionally well-positioned at the convergence of time, place, and resource.

Markets move. Technology changes. Competitors react. Customers mature. Organizations accumulate capabilities, constraints, advantages, and liabilities. A strategy that is brilliant today may have been impossible three years ago and irrelevant three years from now. The job of a strategist isn’t simply to know what should be done. It’s to understand what can be done, what the environment is ready for, and when to act.

That systematic approach to marketing and business strategy, grounded in agency, positioning, timing, and opportunity, has shaped the way I’ve built teams, launched products, entered markets, and advised organizations throughout my career.

It’s also what I try to bring to every company and every team I work with: not another collection of best practices, but a clearer understanding of the game being played, the conditions surrounding it, and where the opportunity to win actually exists.

“The Positioning” is a distillation of that cumulative knowledge and experience. This site and its syndicated platforms is an attempt to bring structured thought to the ever-changing landscape of marketing and business strategy that cuts to the fundamental ways of thinking that underpin success organizations and products.