Though I did end up writing on the blog, what surprised me was how much of everything else I did, and what I ended up enjoying the most about the job. I got super into Google Analytics, calculating subscriber lifetime value projections, and — honestly — I didn't mind packing the orders when required. It felt real; I was fully involved in the day to day and the big picture stuff. I loved it.
Early careers and building your moat
A lot has changed in the past 7 years. I'm not even sure that intern role would exist. For one thing, at least half of the stuff I was doing day to day, learning as I went, could be done in a few minutes with AI.
Even for things like writing an article, I remember there being so much "background knowledge" to learn. Subject lines perform best under 50 characters. Our blog had to be written in html, and I learned the hard way that html tags are far less forgiving than university professors when it came to typing errors.
None of this was glamorous knowledge, but it compounded into a set of things I could do that made me somewhat useful. Over time, like everyone does as they shape a career, I built this into something of a moat, a mix of specific knowledge and skills that I could apply to different roles.
Today, this type of knowledge is less valuable.
I've seen this firsthand. After wrapping a successful Product Marketing consultancy stint with a client company, I fully expected to work with them again in a couple of months. When they went dark, I reached out to the PM I'd been working with — a former colleague. He told me straight up that as a PM, he was able to handle a lot of the stuff he'd wanted to do with me. He'd filled his marketing knowledge gap with AI as a sparring partner.
That one stung. Not because he was wrong, but because I could see what he meant. He showed me some examples, conversions he'd had in chats that fleshed out product position and go to market strategy. For sure, there were missing nuances, and I'm not sure what the end product looked like. But I remember feeling like the writing was on the wall, at least for my consultancy work.
After years of learning by doing, from digital marketing through to product development, I've found myself asking this question more and more. If knowledge is no longer the main currency, what does the future of work look like for me?
The first attempt: Using AI to fill knowledge gaps
Before this happened, I'd already been working on the gaps in my knowledge. My career had taken me away from more typical marketing towards product, I was working closely with design, development, and data functions. I wanted to continue going deeper in the product direction, and with Sonnet 3.5 + Claude's projects feature, I felt I was better placed than ever to try learning the things I wanted to.
I set up a learning schedule, worked through some Figma, SQL, and JavaScript courses. I'd paste error messages into Claude at midnight, ask it to explain database joins like I was five, work through concepts that didn't make sense on the first pass.
I got a lot out of this approach, don't get me wrong. It helped me learn the basics of databases and helped me to finally make sense of Figma autolayout.
But I was still thinking in the old way. Looking for knowledge, rather than new ways to work.
The change — building Pulss
It was only when I started working on Pulss that things started to change.
We were building a startup (a brand analytics product) and I had more data than I knew what to do with. We were sketching out charts, trying to fit data to models to the visuals we had shown to customers on demo calls. Then I stumbled across a way to connect AI (again, Claude in this case) directly to our database. It took me ages to set up. But when it worked, I could suddenly ask questions of the data and get answers. Not only that, but I could uncover trends and insights that I hadn't even thought about.
I still remember this feeling like a big change, like a cheat code I'd stumbled upon by accident. It felt like I'd unlocked skills I didn't have before. In reality, I was about to discover an entirely new way to work.
This was the start of my mentality changing. For sure, there's a lot of stuff I've done in the past that no longer feels defensible. But the flip side of that is that a lot more is possible. It's easier to do things that felt out of reach before.
Learning to think differently
It would be crude to distill this all down to just 'fuck it and find out'. But honestly, it's not that far off.
In recent months I've stopped myself from thinking about what I don't know, what I've yet to learn, or even what AI can do better than me. I've leaned into it. Every challenge is something to work through, every knowledge gap something to explore through practice.
I've built tools and workflows for my personal and professional life that I would have never thought possible before. I've moved fast, broken many, many things, but I'm genuinely proud of the work. And, happily, I can say that I've learned more by doing than ever before. Knowledge may not be as valuable, but it definitely still pays to know enough to go with the flow.
I'm writing this because most people I talk to are stuck where I was. They're exposed to the daily noise of new models and next big things, but they've never gone beyond asking ChatGPT a couple of questions. For most people, AI is a buzzword. It's confusing, if not outright scary.
But in my experience, there's a whole exciting side of things to explore. Every day there are new posts about tools like Claude Code doing incredible things — and if you're not already in that world, it's hard to know where to begin. I didn't either. But I figured it out by doing, and I want to show you how.
Starting with the hard part
It's funny — despite starting as a marketer and building stories for plenty of products and brands, this kind of self-promotion has always been hard for me. Part of the reason I'm starting this newsletter is to push myself past it. To show, using my own experience, successes and failures, that anyone can do really cool things.
This is the first post. Next, I'll dive into the projects — starting with a meal planner I built for me and my wife. If you want to follow along, sign up below.
More posts coming soon.