The Rise of the Full Stack Marketer

How AI is changing the modern marketing playbook, and the new role that's emerging as a result.

AI isn’t just changing how Customer Service teams operate. Other disciplines like Engineering, Design, and Marketing are also going through their own big transformations. Here our CPO and Marketing leader Paul Adams discusses how we’re changing our approach to Marketing.

We’re two years into the AI technology cycle, and we can already see that it’s changing how we build software. It’s also changing how we market software. The classic go-to-market playbooks will not work for the next decade. They’re already not working.

Channels shift quickly, competitors copy quickly, customers move quickly. It asks every marketing team a simple question: what kind of people can thrive in a world that moves this quickly?

As we’ve been experimenting with new ways of marketing Fin, one pattern has shown up again and again: the work now favours generalists. My view is that a new archetype is emerging inside modern marketing teams, the full stack marketer.

The problem with specialization

AI is a convergent force and it collapses the boundaries between roles. This is a huge deal. For the last twenty years, roles within marketing and technology companies have become increasingly specialized.

This made sense. Digital channels increased. They became fragmented. MarTech stacks exploded. Every function needed to prove its ROI. And to manage that complexity, teams built deep specialists for every channel, every stage of the funnel, every metric.

That led to hyper specialization. An obsession with attribution and ROI led to demand teams having a lot more influence than brand teams in many companies.

As teams increased in size, coordination costs compounded. For example, adding a fifth person to a team is no big deal, right? But in fact, by adding a fifth person, you’re adding four additional relationships to the team. Add sixth person, you’re adding five more additional relationships, etc..

With so much planning and so many handoffs, each relationship becomes more operational maintenance. Progress becomes slow, and sometimes grinds to a halt.

The AI market does not reward this way of working.

Speed and brand matter more now than ever, for two reasons:

1. This is a new market. Moving at speed is more important than precision and attributing ROI. What matters most is how fast you can learn in public.

2. The market is hyper competitive. Companies can quickly replicate each other’s differentiating features, and therefore, the only true differentiator is brand.

This is why we believe we need a new way for marketing in the AI age.

In an attempt to pioneer this new way of working, we’ve been trying lots of ideas in how we market Fin and seeing what works. We’ve learned that the fundamentals are still the fundamentals.

What hasn’t changed

Things that have existed for decades don’t change.

Positioning. Still the strongest lever. The best book on it was written in the 1950s and continues to be the best book on it.

Communication. The fundamentals of strong writing persist. Human psychology doesn’t evolve anywhere near as quickly as our tools do.

Creativity. Ogilvy’s lessons still hold. Creativity doesn’t change.

Fundamentals don’t change, but many things we’ve invented over the past 10 years will and should change. They’re not the fundamentals, they were once-new stuff of the SaaS area, and now we need new ideas for the AI era.

The rise of the full-stack marketer

We believe the marketing teams of the future are going to be filled with generalists, and we call them full stack marketers.

These are people who are builders and makers by default. People who can create and ship across any part of the marketing work. There are three reasons why generalist full stack marketers are going to become really common:

Reason 1: Speed will win. Increases in quality through specialization are not worth the slowness that comes from big teams.

Reason 2: AI is a convergent force. AI tools give generalists specialized knowledge and skills. An AI-empowered generalist can now, for the first time, significantly close the quality gap. A marketer using an agent trained on your strategy, positioning, messaging, and brand voice can generate PMM-level content. Maybe not 100%, but 80%, and in a fraction of the time.

Reason 3: Great marketing comes from universal skills. The traits that define exceptional marketers carry across every format and channel. They deeply understand the customer and the market, deeply understand the product. They’re excellent at synthesizing patterns across both. They have clarity of thought and strong writing skills to turn that synthesis into high-quality content.

These things don’t change, they’re the toolkit of a full-stack marketer.

We’re hiring full stack marketers, and we think you should too

We’re designing roles around the full-stack marketer archetype and building systems that give them real leverage.

It’s early. We’re trying things, learning from them, refining as we go. Some ideas work immediately. Some need rewiring. That’s part of the fun. This is a new role, in a new era, and we’re building it in the open.

Our Full Stack Marketer job listing is live, and we’d love to get applications from anyone else that sees the exciting new opportunity here.

If you’re building a marketing team right now, it’s worth exploring this path. It already feels like the shape of what’s coming.

I’d love to hear your questions, thoughts, and challenges.