Inspired by Elliot Smith's "Build SaaS with Strong Opinions"
Elliot Smith wrote this week that the future of SaaS belongs to products with strong opinions — tools that force you into best practice instead of letting you configure your way there. He's right. And the same indictment applies to the people marketing those products.
There's no product marketing more at risk of irrelevance than the kind that tries to work for everyone.
The configure-it-yourself trap
You know this messaging when you see it. Flexible enough for any team. Customizable to fit your workflow. Works however you work.
It reads like inclusion. It's actually an absence of conviction.
For a long time, this was defensible. B2B buyers were skeptical of vendors with strong opinions about how their business should run. PMMs responded rationally — sanding down every sharp edge, hedging every claim, adding enough qualifiers that the copy could describe almost any product in the category. The goal was to avoid losing deals on positioning.
The side effect was messaging that couldn't win them either.
Now AI has collapsed the value of generic information entirely. A buyer with a capable AI assistant can synthesize surface-level best practices in minutes. What they can't get from a chatbot is your actual point of view — earned through time in the market, in deals, in customer conversations, in the post-mortems where things didn't work.
That's what buyers are actually paying for now. And most product marketing still isn't selling it.
What "configurable" looks like in PMM
Here's the tell. Count how many times your homepage or your pitch deck uses any of these:
"Flexible"
"Customizable"
"Works for teams of any size"
"Meets you where you are"
"Built for your workflow"
Every one of those is a place where a real opinion should live. When you say "works for any team," what you're actually saying is: we haven't done the hard work of figuring out who this is really for.
Buyers read that signal. They may not name it, but they feel it as a lack of conviction. And conviction — the sense that this team has genuinely figured something out — is increasingly what moves enterprise deals.
Where strong opinions come from
This is the part that can't be faked.
The competitive research that actually drives good positioning doesn't come from reading competitor homepages. It comes from triangulating what competitors say with what customers report and what practitioners complain about at 11pm on Reddit. Those three sources rarely agree. The gap between them is where the real insight lives.
The same is true for the opinions that make your messaging sharp. They don't come from internal brainstorming sessions or messaging workshops where everyone agrees in a conference room. They come from:
Win/loss interviews where customers tell you why they almost picked someone else
Sales calls where the objection you hear in deal number fifteen is different from the one in deal number three
Customer conversations where someone describes their problem in a way that reframes how you've been talking about your product
The pattern you finally notice after reviewing enough data that the thing you've been positioning as a feature is actually the whole reason people buy
Strong opinions are earned. That's what makes them defensible — and what makes them useful.
What this looks like in practice
Strong PMM opinions aren't loud. They're specific.
They look like a positioning statement that would make at least one competitor uncomfortable. They look like a homepage that couldn't be copy-pasted with a find-and-replace. They look like launch messaging that tells a customer clearly: this is not for you if X, and here's exactly why it's for you if Y.
The hardest and most valuable thing a PMM can do is define who the product isn't for. Not because exclusion is the goal, but because clarity about the fit sharpens everything downstream — the messaging, the sales motion, the content, the customer success playbook. "Works for everyone" is a positioning choice that makes every subsequent choice harder.
The PMMs I've seen do this well share a trait: they've spent enough time close to the customer problem — in calls, in reviews, in the field — that they've developed genuine conviction about what good looks like. Not a hypothesis. Not a positioning workshop output. An actual view, one they'd defend if pushed.
The credibility problem
You can't write opinionated messaging from the outside of a problem.
Elliot makes this point about SaaS products: you can't sell best practice to an industry you haven't lived in. The same constraint applies to PMM. Generic positioning is usually diagnostic — it tells you that the team hasn't gotten close enough to the customer to have a real point of view yet.
This is why the "do more customer research" advice is chronically underrated. Not research that confirms your existing messaging. Research designed to surface where your current understanding is wrong — the complaint that doesn't fit your narrative, the reason a customer almost churned that you didn't expect, the competitor strength you've been minimizing because it's uncomfortable to acknowledge.
That's the raw material for strong opinions. And it's not replicable by AI, by competitors, or by a messaging consultant brought in for a quarter.
It has to be earned by the team that's in the market.
The shift that's happening
Buyers are getting better at filtering out generic. Not because they've read a blog post about positioning, but because they're interacting with more AI-generated content than ever — and they've developed a fast intuition for prose that doesn't actually say anything.
The PMMs who win from here are the ones willing to do the slow, sometimes uncomfortable work of forming real opinions — about their category, their customer, their product, and what "good" actually looks like — and then saying them out loud.
That's not a content strategy. It's a credibility strategy.
And right now, most of the field has left it wide open.