The actual tools I use for product marketing, competitive intelligence, positioning research, and writing. Updated periodically. No affiliate links — just what I actually use.
My main tool for positioning work, messaging iteration, and long-form writing assistance. I use it for drafting positioning documents, stress-testing value propositions, and restructuring arguments. Better than GPT-4 for nuanced B2B writing tasks — it understands the difference between what's technically accurate and what's actually persuasive.
I use Perplexity for real-time competitive research — tracking what competitors are saying, finding recent analyst commentary, and synthesising news fast. Better than Google for research tasks that need synthesis rather than a list of links. I run competitive landscape updates through Perplexity before every major positioning review.
ChatGPT's Deep Research mode is genuinely useful for analyst report synthesis — pulling together Gartner, Forrester, IDC coverage on a topic into a structured briefing. I use it to prep for analyst interactions and to understand the state of a market before building positioning. Takes 5 minutes to do something that used to take half a day.
I upload customer call transcripts, analyst reports, and competitive intelligence documents and use NotebookLM to find patterns and answer specific questions across all of them. Particularly useful for win/loss analysis — synthesising themes from 30+ call transcripts in minutes instead of days.
Perplexity for real-time tracking. Claude for synthesising competitive signals into positioning implications. ChatGPT Deep Research for quarterly landscape reviews.
Claude for first drafts and iteration. I write the core argument, Claude pressure-tests it and rewrites alternatives. I decide. Never Claude decides.
NotebookLM for synthesising call transcripts and survey data. I upload the sources, ask specific questions, and use the answers to identify patterns I'd have missed reading linearly.
I write the first draft. Claude edits for structure and clarity, not for voice. If I can't tell the difference between my draft and the AI edit, the AI edit is wrong.
ChatGPT Deep Research to build the analyst's current view before a briefing. Perplexity to find their most recent published positions. Claude to structure my counter-narrative.
Strategic judgment. Understanding what a customer actually fears versus what they say they fear. The conversation that changes a CIO's mind. AI makes me faster at the craft. It can't replace the insight.
I write everything in plain text first. No formatting, no structure — just the argument in the order I'm thinking about it. Then I read it, find the real opening (almost always the second paragraph), and restructure from there.
The essays on this site are genuinely mine — the ideas, the specific stories, the arguments. I use Claude to stress-test structure and catch where the logic has gaps. The voice is mine because I've found that AI-edited writing without strong authorial control reads like AI-edited writing, which is not a compliment.
The test I use: if I read a sentence and I'm not sure whether I wrote it or the AI wrote it, I rewrite it until I'm sure it's mine.