How is this portfolio organized?

By marketing function and business problem: product marketing and GTM, growth and demand, strategy/planning/function building, customer and partner marketing, brand and digital, and payments and fintech.

What does each entry show?

The business situation, the decision made, and the alternative rejected. Frameworks appear where they were used to make a call.

Where is the AI-Native work?

On AI-First GTM & Marketing, which covers how these same functions are being rebuilt for an AI-Native operating model.

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Portfolio

Marketing & GTM Portfolio

Marketing functions divide the work. The customer and the P&L still stay as one.

Fifteen-plus years of Marketing and GTM work across Fortune 500 enterprises, scaleups, and startups, organized by function and business problem: what the situation was, what call I made, and what I rejected to make it.

For how these same functions are being rebuilt for an AI-Native operating model, see AI-First GTM & Marketing

Product Marketing & GTM

Additional launch and positioning work appears under Payments & Fintech.

Launching a Technical Product End to End

Read the Case Study

Situation: A technical infrastructure product where the buyer is technical and the value is not visible in the interface.
The call: Build the launch around what the buyer had to believe before they could adopt, rather than around feature coverage.
Rejected: Treating it like a B2C or SMB launch. Technical B2B buyers evaluate differently and the proof requirements are not interchangeable.
Result: The product grew from approximately 20% of company TPV at launch to 36%, reusable playbooks reduced subsequent launch time by 80%, and the launch generated more than 70 million PR and media impressions.

Launch update diagram: four connected phases - pre-launch prep for internal readiness and technical checks, targeted warm-up engaging pilot users and partners, the May 4 marketing launch with coordinated campaigns, and scale and sustain to expand adoption and iterate post-launch. — From the technical launch case study: the phased go-to-market execution. Read the post(opens in a new tab)

Repositioning a Product Portfolio as Platform Infrastructure

Situation: A company selling individual products into a market that wanted a single API-first integration surface.
The call: Reposition the portfolio as one endpoint customers could layer onto, and build the launch narrative around delivery model rather than individual products.
Rejected: Continuing to sell products individually, which put the integration burden on the customer and slowed implementation and business outcomes.

Experience: Product Launch of Single API Infrastructure as a Commercialization Strategy(opens in a new tab)

Single API architecture diagram: a card on a pedestal at the center of a four-quadrant ring labeled SINGLE API, with callouts for Network Tokens to increase authorization rates and reduce costs, Vault to store payment data centrally, Account Updater to avoid payment disruptions, and Card Attributes to access more than 26 data points for decisioning. — From the single-API experience: four capabilities, one integration surface. Read the post(opens in a new tab)

Taking a Product to Market, Then Expanding the Story After Traction

Situation: A new infrastructure product in a category buyers did not yet have a mental model for.
The call: Lead the launch with the customer outcome rather than the mechanism. The positioning line was the promise that "you don't have to be there to bank there" - with the narrative extended into working capital, liquidity, and FX once the product had traction.
Rejected: Launching on technical capability, which would have limited the buyer set to people already looking for the mechanism.

Virtual Accounts launch graphic: global transactions like doing business next door, with eight capability cards - multi-currency in more than 25 currencies, high-value transfers, global coverage in more than 40 countries, flexible settlement, automatic reconciliation, instant liquidity, local bank transfers, and built-in FX. — From the Virtual Accounts launch: the capability set the launch narrative carried. Read the post(opens in a new tab)

Cross-border expansion graphic: the Virtual Accounts capability grid extended to working capital, liquidity, and FX for international payment risk. — From the cross-border expansion: the same accounts, a wider job to be done. Read the post(opens in a new tab)

Anchoring a Launch to a Regulatory Window

Situation: Merchants had just gained the right to steer customers toward preferred payment methods and surcharge by card type, following Durbin 2.0 and the Visa/Mastercard settlement. But tokenization had removed the card data they needed to act on it. Most card-not-present (CNP) merchants hold a PSP token, not the full PAN, and a six-digit BIN lookup no longer resolves the attributes the new rights depend on.
The call: Launch Card Attributes as the missing piece of a right merchants had just won, timed to the regulatory moment, and carrying the technical explanation of why their existing BIN logic wouldn't get them there.
Rejected: Leading with the dataset and its compliance advantages. That framing competes on coverage against every other data provider and did not give the buyer a reason to act now.

Experience: Product Launch of Card Attributes - When Richer Data is a Growth Lever for Better Business Decisions(opens in a new tab)

Payment card anatomy diagram: pointer lines label the card type, issuer name, card network digit, the six-digit BIN, the full PAN, and the card category on a sample business card. — From the Card Attributes launch: the data elements a six-digit BIN lookup cannot resolve. Read the post(opens in a new tab)

Building a Multi-Wallet Adoption Strategy With Platform Partners

Situation: Wells Fargo needed to improve adoption and habitual usage of digital payments across customers using different mobile operating systems and wallets. Customer feedback after Apple Pay reinforced the importance of serving Android and iOS users.
The call: Build an inclusive multi-wallet marketing strategy and coordinate partner-specific education, offers, lifecycle programs, and co-marketing with Apple, Google, Samsung, and other relevant wallet partners.
Tradeoff: Supporting multiple wallet ecosystems increased partnership, campaign, and customer-journey complexity, but was necessary to serve customers across platforms rather than limiting availability to a single ecosystem.
Result: Digital wallet transactions grew 13×, from approximately 630K to 8.2M, alongside $300M+ in additional mobile-payment card spend. Marketing initiatives included Apple Pay usage programs reporting 10-20% lift against a 1-3% comparison. Built the function and managed a $5M+ budget, aligning 75+ cross-functional stakeholders.

Growth & Demand

Scaling Payments-Platform Adoption Across 11 Markets

Situation: eBay's new payments experience needed to acquire approximately 23 million existing marketplace sellers onto the platform across consumer, SMB, and enterprise segments. Sellers differed in readiness, complexity, risk, and support needs.
The call: Run broad communication and education across the seller base while simultaneously using risk- and readiness-based segmentation for targeted conversion programs. Adapt messaging, channels, incentives, and support according to seller needs.
Tradeoff: Broad communications created consistent understanding at scale; targeted conversion programs required more differentiated content, channel coordination, and operational support to move sellers with different adoption barriers.
Result: Exceeded annual adoption targets by more than one million sellers. Across 35+ campaigns, achieved 99.8% reach and 94.3% engagement, with email open rates of 38% against a 25% benchmark. The broader payments platform generated $2B+ in revenue as approximately 23 million sellers were acquired onto the new experience. Led in-house and agency resources across marketing and adoption programs.

Rebuilding Growth for an Established B2C Brand

Read the Case Study

Situation: An established brand faced a 40% year-over-year acquisition decline, with conversion underperforming despite continued paid spend.
The call: Rebuild the website, messaging, collateral, and paid media together rather than optimizing isolated channels.
Rejected: An agency-led redesign because its delivery timeline extended beyond the demand window, would have left the business dependent on external implementation, and would have slowed subsequent changes.
Tradeoff: Changing several layers together limited the ability to attribute improvement to any one intervention. That was accepted in exchange for execution speed.
Result: Over seven weeks on flat daily spend, conversion increased from 0.52% to 3.82% and CPL decreased from $120 to $69 (43%). The combined results supported reallocating $10K per month from agency spend into new growth programs.

From below zero to a 7x conversion-rate lift: starting point, the AI-native GTM build across site, SEO, paid search and collateral, and the result of conversion rising from 0.52% to 3.82% on flat daily spend. — Starting point, the build, and the result. Read the post(opens in a new tab)

Diagnosing Pipeline Gaps Before Allocating Budget

The Growth Series works through how marketing earns its share of growth: diagnosing whether a revenue gap is a pipeline creation, quality, conversion, or velocity problem before the next dollar is allocated, then how each marketing function contributes to the outcome.

Growth Series #1 diagram: $18M new ARR target against $52M of pipeline, with a signpost pointing to create, qualify, convert and accelerate to find the real constraint. — From Growth Series #1: finding the real pipeline constraint before allocating budget. Read the post(opens in a new tab)

Whether an Established Product With a Working Sales Motion Should Introduce PLG

Situation: A functioning sales-led motion, and a segment with real need that cannot justify the contract size, implementation effort, or sales process.
The call: PLG as expansion, with a sales-assisted path built into it.
Rejected: PLG as replacement within a defined segment. It would have put the existing revenue base at risk and stranded the customers who still needed human involvement to buy.

Experience: PLG After SLG - Choosing PLG's Job, Designing the Journey, and Proving the Economics.(opens in a new tab)

PLG decision diagram: the chosen path is PLG as expansion with a path into sales, and success is measured on three questions - did PLG expand the market, are new PLG customers reaching and repeating value, and is PLG more efficient. — From PLG After SLG: the decision and the metrics that prove it. Read the post(opens in a new tab)

Where PLG fits in the revenue motion: choose PLG's job, design the customer progression from trial to sales-assisted relationship, and prove the economics. — From PLG After SLG: where PLG fits in the revenue motion. Read the post(opens in a new tab)

Marketing Strategy, Planning & Function Building

Choosing What the Marketing Function Should Build

Situation: An existing budget, agencies, and team, with several possible growth priorities.
The call: Start with CRM, pipeline, and cross-functional evidence to choose the commercial opportunity. Build a payments-anchored company story and vertical value propositions, then connect Product, Content, Customer, and Partner Marketing around shared commercialization goals.
Tradeoff: Consolidate fragmented work and stop activity that does not serve the commercial priority, while retaining expertise where it matters.
Result: The commercial mix shifted substantially toward payments infrastructure, with the majority of deals incorporating newer offerings such as Network Tokens or Account Updater rather than relying solely on the original Vault and PCI compliance proposition. Internal attribution reporting associated approximately 35% of new logos with content and 30% with events. Partner Marketing supported five new partners, and Marketing contributed to 7+ enterprise RFI processes.

At VGS, I connected product commercialization, vertical narratives, and Content, Partner, and Customer Marketing with Sales around the move from data security to payments infrastructure.

VGS payments content: Network Tokens for multiple processors, Card Attributes beyond BIN lookups, and single-API payments infrastructure. — From the VGS case study: payments-anchored content behind the pivot. Read the post(opens in a new tab)

Q4 vs. Q1: What Protects Revenue vs. What Builds the System

Situation: Q4 with the revenue base most exposed, and a backlog of new initiatives competing for the same period.
The call: Q4 protects and converts revenue already in motion. Q1 builds the repeatable system. New work in Q4 clears a higher bar - clear customer need, validated product experience, low operational risk, direct path to revenue.
Rejected: A blanket Q4 freeze on anything new, which forfeits demand that is already there and pushes a quarter of learning into Q1.

Buyer metrics map to business outcomes: checkout conversion to revenue from existing traffic; authorization rate and platform stability to less wasted demand; chargeback control to lower servicing friction and more predictable fees; subscription renewal to recurring revenue durability; retention to near-term cash and long-term enterprise value.

Q4 versus Q1 plan diagram: Q4 covers demand capture and market learning with eight focus areas that protect revenue and learn fast, while Q1 covers building the repeatable GTM foundation with seven sample initiatives that build systems and scale trust. — From the Q4 vs Q1 operating plan: what each quarter is actually for. Read the post(opens in a new tab)

Shaping a Marketing Team When Work No Longer Divides by Function

Situation: Customers experience one story across every surface, but marketing is organized to produce it in pieces - and messaging now moves faster than most planning cycles.
The call: Positionless coverage across product marketing, brand, demand, paid, AEO/GEO, and GTM planning - with a standards layer built underneath first.
Rejected: Only one specialist per function, which fragments the customer experience; or going positionless with nowhere for standards to live.

Skill

Makes one repeatable task consistent - drafts the launch brief, the ad variants, the monthly plan.

Digital Twin

Applies standards across the body of work - buyer value, proof behind claims, ICP fit, and priorities before the plan is built.

Perspective: Implementing "Positionless" Marketing(opens in a new tab)

From the positionless perspective: skills make tasks consistent, twins hold the standards. Read the post

Customer & Partner Marketing

Giving High-Volume Sellers a Role in Product Decisions

Situation: At eBay, high-volume sellers wanted early visibility into the roadmap, meaningful input into product development, and evidence that their feedback shaped decisions.
The call: Build a recurring Customer Advisory Board involving approximately 20-25 sellers and participants from Product, Marketing, and Customer Success. Establish a feedback loop connecting seller insights to product priorities. This followed earlier work creating American Express's first advisory board for SMB digital solutions.
Tradeoff: A meaningful advisory program required recurring coordination, prepared discussion, and feedback follow-through rather than treating customer participation as a one-time event.
Result: More than 90% of invited sellers responded and approximately 60% joined. Advisory input informed an estimated 3-5 roadmap features per quarter.

Integrating Partner Marketing Into a Payments Repositioning

Situation: VGS's move from data security toward payments infrastructure required partners to understand and represent a broader commercial proposition.
The call: Integrate Partner Marketing with Product, Customer, and Content Marketing through coordinated positioning, partner messaging, joint propositions, industry-specific materials, and enablement.
Result: Partner Marketing supported five new partners announced during tenure. An AWS partner contact described VGS as an active and responsive partner.

VGS Partner Program page: partner categories including card networks, payment enablers, cloud partners, fraud and identity, and PCI compliance providers. — From the VGS case study: the partner program. Read the post(opens in a new tab)

Turning Customer Outcomes Into Commercial Evidence

Situation: Customers achieving real outcomes, and sales unable to produce credible proof at the moments buyers needed it.
The call: Treat advocacy as commercial infrastructure rather than a content program, and build a governed layer that produces proof on demand.
Rejected: A case study calendar, which produces assets on a publishing schedule rather than at the point of buyer decision.
Result or evidence: The broader GTM engine this work contributed to produced 2× leads, 150% higher deal win rates, 335% engagement growth, and five top-tier media or analyst mentions.

Customer marketing results table: company-specific commercial impact and market credibility, plus field, operating, and team impact across multiple companies. — Results from the customer marketing case study. Read the post(opens in a new tab)

Responding to Customers at Volume Without Losing Judgment

Situation: Customer response quality degrading as volume grew, with the choice framed as headcount or templates.
The call: Build a playbook-driven response system where AI drafts and explains and humans decide when to escalate.
Rejected: Full automation, which scales tone and speed but not judgment.

Tool: Customer Response Engine

Customer Response Engine screenshot: process from customer communication through AI reasoning, organization playbook, adaptive response and human judgment to publish, with a draft-a-response form. — The live Customer Response Engine demo. Read the post(opens in a new tab)

Brand, Content & Digital

At VGS and KiwiQ, I owned both the brand and product story: one company promise, with product, vertical, and buyer messaging adapting beneath it. At VGS, that meant an integrated payments story and shared launch calendar. At KiwiQ, product pillars re-sorted beneath an AI-visibility brand pillar without rebuilding the brand architecture.

Growth Series #7: When Brand and Product Marketing Drift Apart, Growth Slows(opens in a new tab)

From Growth Series #7: brand coherence against buyer relevance. Read the post

Positioning a B2B Brand When AI Is Assumed

Read the Case Study

Situation: At KiwiQ.AI, every competitor claimed AI. The technology label stopped explaining why a buyer should choose the company, and the category had flattened.
The call: Build the brand around Human + AI, with a Branded House architecture and one recognizable company promise. When AI visibility became a brand pillar, re-sort the product pillars beneath it rather than rebuild the system.
Rejected: Generic AI capability messaging, which would have made the brand indistinguishable from the field, and an external agency route that would have slowed the work.
Result or evidence: Proposed elevating AI visibility from a marketing tactic to a brand promise. After the CEO investigated and agreed, the product roadmap changed while the existing brand architecture held.

From the KiwiQ case study: messaging pillars matured into product promises. Read the post

Holding Positioning and Messaging Hierarchy Under Compressed Time

Situation: A live showcase slot with one day of lead time, a broad audience at very different stages of need, and assets about to go to print.
The call: Resolve five decisions before anything was produced: how a conversion is defined, which single buyer state to optimize for, which message the existing paid signal supported, where the spend goes, and how success gets measured. Killed a six-foot banner already heading to print and moved the money to interaction and incentive.
Rejected: Marketing to the general audience, which weakens both messaging and offer.
What it demonstrates: The decision logic was pressure-tested afterward against a different buyer, category, and offer. It held. Since client work was confidential, published sample assets were rebuilt for a fictional company.

Experience: The Event Was Last Minute. The AI-Native Layer Made it Feasible.(opens in a new tab)

From the event case: a sample asset rebuilt for a fictional company. Read the post

Search and AI Visibility

Situation: Buyers increasingly reach a first answer inside an AI assistant rather than a results page, and the brand had no measurement of how it was represented there.
The call: Treat AI visibility as a measurable GTM surface - recommendation, mention, share of voice, citation, accuracy, average position - and build the tooling to track it.
Rejected: Extending the existing SEO program, which optimizes for ranking in a list rather than selection inside a synthesized answer.

From the AEO + SEO Build Checklist: six layers of an AI-native market engine. Read the post

Payments & Fintech

B2B, SMB, and B2C payments products scale when users, businesses, and institutions know what to trust before they adopt. Go-to-market work from Rapyd, a Series F global payments unicorn, and VGS, a Series C tokenization infrastructure company, alongside earlier payments work at eBay and Wells Fargo.

Launch and commercialization - repositioning a product portfolio as single-API infrastructure; the Virtual Accounts launch narrative and its cross-border expansion.
Vertical and account-based motions - the same infrastructure sold differently into gaming, gig platforms, marketplaces, and the partner channel, because the adoption barrier changes by segment.
Regulated and risk-sensitive markets - open banking, vendor concentration risk, and tokenization, where marketing resolves a trust gap before it can make a value argument.

Payments GTM Portfolio

FAQ

How is this portfolio organized?: By marketing function and business problem: product marketing and GTM, growth and demand, strategy/planning/function building, customer and partner marketing, brand and digital, and payments and fintech.
What does each entry show?: The business situation, the decision made, and the alternative rejected. Frameworks appear where they were used to make a call.
Where is the AI-Native work?: On AI-First GTM & Marketing, which covers how these same functions are being rebuilt for an AI-Native operating model.