For about two years, I maintained a Confluence repository that I'm fairly certain no one ever read. I was working in Rev Ops at the time, which meant I was responsible for turning the chaotic behavior of a few dozen sales reps into something… less chaotic. It felt kind of like trying to renovate a house while people are actively living in it and also resent you for being there.

I spent a lot of time writing SOPs (Standard Operating Processes, for the uninitiated), covering things like how to log a discovery call in Salesforce, how to move a deal through stages, what counts as a qualified lead. I organized them carefully and kept them current, always excited for the opportunity to put a new “Last Updated” date at the top of a page.

I had a lot of pride wrapped up in this work, maybe more than was warranted. Here I was, this hardworking, organized, ambitious young person doing a thankless job in a world where slacker salespeople were always going rogue. Looking back, I think I was playing the martyr a little. The documentation existed partly because it needed to exist, and partly because creating it made me feel like I was doing something real in a job where my impact was hard to see.

Regardless of the impact I was (or wasn’t) having at the time, I’m grateful for the opportunity to build good habits around process design and documentation. These are skills I’ve carried into my career as a marketer. The first person I hired at Sydecar wasn't a marketer or a salesperson. It was a generalist with a data and ops background, because I wanted to build the tracking infrastructure before we needed it rather than after we wished we'd had it. This is not a particularly glamorous hiring decision, but it’s one that I stand by.

Every year, in the quiet stretch between Christmas and New Year's, I write a long document about the year behind and the year ahead. Most of the company is out and nothing urgent is happening, so I use this time to pull data, revisit decisions, and get honest with myself about what worked and what didn’t in the previous 12 months. The resulting document is usually long, so much so that I typically know while I’m writing it that it will never be read in full by anyone else. When I eventually share the strategy with my team, I turn it into a deck with a few bullets per slide, because I know a conversation will land better than a wall of text.

I used to think that the documents I created were just for prep, and the real deliverable was the deck, the presentation to leadership, or even the actual execution of a strategy over the subsequent months. I’m not sure that’s right anymore.

AI has changed so much about how we operate as marketers. I will spare you from the exclamations of “the company blog is dead” or “Did you know that Reddit is the number one cited source by LLMs?!” What I’m more interested in, as I think about how AI has changed the role of a marketer, is the increasing importance of context. It’s truly the most valuable thing you can give a model. When I say context, I’m referring to the accumulated logic of how you think, what you've tried, what constraints you're operating under, what words you do and don't use, what your north star is and why. In the absence of this context, AI will act like a 2010s management consultant and spit out generic playbooks or overplayed tactics (I need an entire article to talk about my hatred for playbooks).

As a remote employee, so much of who I am as a marketer is formed somewhere between my brain and the keys of my computer. That means I am constantly documenting context (across a wide variety of sources, including email, Slack, and Zoom calls) on business decisions, strategy, direction, projects, learnings, etc. Creating context documentation is both easier and more important than ever.

This feels like a meaningful inversion of how we've thought about documentation. For most of my career, the context doc was the thing you did before the real work. Now I'm not sure the real work is ever the output. If the model is producing the first draft, whoever shapes the context it works from is doing something more consequential than editing copy.

I've started to notice that the people best positioned for this shift aren't necessarily the career marketers; rather, it’s the people who are good at articulating context. People who can write down not just what they want but why, what's been tried, what the constraints are, why it matters. I don't know if this is a hot take, but I'd bet on the ops person before I'd bet on the creative. They’re the ones who were maintaining documentation long before anyone was going to read it.

And the good news is, models don't get tired of reading. They don't skim, and they don't show up to your strategy document having already formed an opinion. They consume everything you give them and they apply it, which means the quality of what you give them actually matters.