Who decides what's good enough to ship?

Whoever owns the story. A piece is good enough to ship when it says what the company decided to say, to the reader the company decided to say it to, with proof behind every claim. So the person who signs off has to be the person who holds that decision. In a company with a product marketer in the seat, that's part of their job. Where there isn't one yet, it usually falls to the founder, and if nobody can name the person, the working answer is whoever pressed send.

Why is this suddenly a question?

Because making things stopped being the hard part, and deciding what to say didn't get any easier. When a deck took a designer a week and a page took an agency a month, the slowness did some of the deciding for you. Work passed through a few experienced people, and they carried a sense of what the company sounded like whether or not anyone wrote it down.

Now anyone on the team can produce a finished-looking deck, page, or email sequence before lunch. Nothing piles up, so nothing forces the question of who holds it all to one story. The question was always there. It just never had to be answered out loud.

What does "good enough" mean when nobody decided the story?

It shrinks to craft. Is it well written, does it look right, did anyone catch the typo in the second paragraph. Those are fair checks, and most teams pass them easily now because the tools are good at craft.

The check that matters more is whether the piece agrees with everything else the company says. A well-made one-pager that argues a different position than the homepage is finished work that makes the company harder to understand. You can't catch that by reading the piece on its own. You can only catch it against something, and at most companies there's nothing written down to hold it against.

That gap is what product marketing fills. Somebody decides what the company says, writes it down, and checks what ships against it.

What does a decided story look like written down?

Shorter than most people expect. One page, sometimes two, and it answers the questions every artifact is going to answer anyway, whether or not anyone decided the answers.

1. Who the product is for, named specifically enough that someone could tell you who it isn't for.

2. What it replaces, meaning what the buyer does today without you. In my experience that's more often a spreadsheet, a person, or nothing at all than a named competitor.

3. Why you win against that alternative, in two or three points, each with a piece of proof next to it and a note on what that proof can and can't show.

4. The one line you use to describe the company, written so it comes out the same way every time.

5. The proof rule. A number shows up in copy only when someone can point to where it came from.

6. The reject list, three to five specific reasons a piece gets sent back, phrased so someone two weeks into the job could apply them without asking.

The first three are positioning, and there's a longer walk-through of them in the positioning framework. The last three turn it into something you can hold work against. Voice, visuals, and formats all hang off these answers, and the page is what lets two people who have never met make pieces that sound like the same company.

Who should own the story?

One named person with the authority to say no. The name matters more than the title. A group review doesn't count, because a group mostly checks craft, and the story check needs one person who holds the whole thing in their head.

In a company with product marketing, owning the story sits at the center of the job. It has been in every product marketing seat I've held, and it's the part of the job nobody else in the building can do for you.

If nobody is in that seat yet, write down whose job it is for now. Often that's the founder. Treat it as a role you're covering, with the page as the handoff, so whoever holds it next inherits a decided story instead of your memory of one.

How do you check a piece against the story?

The owner asks three questions before anything leaves.

1. Is it written to the reader on the page, or to someone else?

2. Does it make the claim on the page, or a different one?

3. Does every number have a source someone can point to?

A no on any of them sends the piece back. Something can pass all three and still be mediocre, and ordinary craft review catches that. What the three questions catch is the piece that is well made and says something the company never decided.

Run the check on the next five things that ship, then edit the page. The first version of a decided story is a draft, and the rejections tell you what it left out. That's why it isn't worth spending a week polishing it before you use it.

What does it cost when nobody owns the story?

You pay in rework, which is visible and annoying. You pay in buyer confusion, where a prospect meets a slightly different company on the site, in the deck, and on the call, and quietly trusts all three a little less without ever telling you why.

The expensive cost is the one you can't see. When every piece says something a little different, you can't tell whether a piece underperformed because the idea was wrong or because it drifted from the idea. Results stop teaching you anything, and next quarter's plan runs on instinct again. That's the pattern I call ghost motion, marketing activity that looks real and isn't carrying a message anyone decided on.

Doesn't this slow things down?

A little, at the point where slowing down is cheap. The check adds a few minutes before a piece ships and saves the week you'd spend later reconciling four versions of the same pitch. If it feels heavy, your reject rate is high, and that tells you something useful about the page, the pieces, or both.

The version that goes wrong is the nine-person approval chain, where the cure turns into a new bottleneck. Keep it to one page, one owner, and three questions. If more people than that are in the loop, something has drifted.

One question to end on. Take the last thing your company published and name two things, the person who decided it was good enough to go out and the page they held it against.

If both come easily, you already have this and the post was a review. If they don't, that's a normal place to be. Making things got cheap fast, and deciding what to say is still a job somebody has to hold.

Once the page exists, it has two harder tests ahead of it, the sales call and the launch, and both of them come back to the same six parts.

By Eric Glass, Founder, HG Digital. HG Digital is product marketing before your first PMM hire. We do the product marketing. You build the company.