The big picture: why narrative matters now
For a company on the path from fast-growing to generational, the right narrative is how you bridge the gap between where you are today and where you want to be.
Three things make this moment unusual:
- Companies building with AI have consequential stories to tell, because they are rewriting how work gets done.
- There’s no playbook for telling the story of a company that is itself rewriting the playbook.
- Communications is undergoing its own parallel shift. AI is transforming what it means to write well, and navigating that shift is central to the role.
It’s also something I’m actively working through. I’m developing Write Like a Human: A Practitioner’s Guide to Writing Well in the Age of AI, exploring how to work with AI to produce writing that is sharper, more human and more dynamic than what either a person or a machine could produce alone. Being the best at your craft in 2024 is not the same as being the best in 2026. That’s as true for communications as it is for engineering.
Days 0–30: Understand the product, the moment and the vision
The first 30 days are about laying the groundwork while hitting the ground running, both at once.
- Founder and leadership alignment: one-on-ones with the founders and team to understand how they’d describe the company in their own words, their communications priorities, and their perspectives on AI and wider industry themes.
- Product immersion: time with the product and engineering teams to understand what the product actually does today, where it’s differentiated, and what’s still evolving.
- Audience mapping: identify core audiences and the best channels to reach them, often with an immediate focus on top technical talent, and longer-term on customers, investors and media.
- Narrative audit and foundational documents: review existing writing, decks, site copy, investor-facing language and other owned platforms, and build on their strengths to develop a narrative and messaging document (the source of truth for how the company talks about itself) alongside a thought leadership calendar.
Days 31–60: Pressure-test, sharpen and operationalize the narrative
The goal is to refine the narrative in real time and make it usable across the company, without slowing velocity.
- Narrative stress-testing: use AI personas to pressure-test early narrative and messaging against likely media responses, talent conversations and broader AI discourse, identifying where the narrative clicks and what needs sharpening.
- Sharpen the point of view: clarify where the company agrees, and disagrees, with dominant AI narratives, so its voice feels distinct rather than interchangeable with peers.
- Operationalize internally: translate the narrative into tools teams can actually use across hiring, partnerships, sales and customer-facing conversations.
- Scale thought leadership: establish clear themes, a consistent cadence, repeatable formats, and distribution beyond owned channels (select newsletters, podcasts and more).
Days 61–90: Put the company and its leaders at the forefront of the conversation
With narrative foundations built and battle-tested, the final phase is about external presence and compounding visibility.
- Founder visibility: prepare the founders for increased external visibility as builders and thinkers, starting with podcasts and long-form conversations, which allow for nuance, reach technical audiences authentically, and typically offer the chance to review content before it goes live.
- Amplification: be intentional about where the company shows up, with selective amplification on LinkedIn and X, engagement with credible voices in the space, and sharing content into relevant communities.
- Track, learn, iterate: use real-world response to refine the narrative further. Which questions keep coming up, which framing clicks fastest, where do audiences want more depth? Feed what we learn back into messaging, the hiring narrative and future content planning.
This is a starting point, not a prescription. I’d expect it to evolve quickly once I’m in the room.