Is your product marketing drowning in features your customers never asked for?

In this episode of Connect To Market, host Casey Cheshire sits down with Beth Barach, VP of Product Marketing at Brinqa and a cybersecurity marketing leader, to explore how marketers can connect to their market by escaping the "inside-out" trap of messaging that leads with features instead of customer problems. Beth explains why this trap persists: engineering teams are measured on feature-release velocity, and faster cycles and AI-assisted development only pour more fuel on the fire. Her antidote is to "knit the sweater" by deciding what to market, to whom, and translating technical value into business value.

Beth shares her playbook for ruthless prioritization, making the case that not every feature should be marketed to everyone. She walks through structured customer listening techniques, including in-room prioritization exercises with red, yellow, and green sticky notes that force real tradeoffs and surface true customer needs. The conversation also covers the growing backlash against "AI slop" in content, how Beth uses AI as an assist for competitive intelligence and organizing notes rather than replacing human judgment, and her non-linear career path from English literature into technology marketing.

In this episode, we cover:

• Why "inside-out" messaging persists and how engineering incentives drive feature bloat in the AI era
• How to "knit the sweater" by choosing what to market, to whom, and translating technical value into business value
• Structured customer listening techniques, including sticky-note prioritization exercises that force tradeoffs and reveal true needs
• Using AI as an assist for competitive intelligence and note organization while avoiding "AI slop" in your content

If you're a marketing leader watching feature-packed messaging fall flat with buyers, Beth's framework for prioritized, customer-first product marketing is one worth stealing.

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Connect with Beth:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bethbarach/
• Brinqa: https://www.brinqa.com

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Connect To Market is produced and sponsored by Ringmaster, on a mission to create connections through branded podcasts. Learn more at https://ringmaster.com/