Yep. I’m asking the question every CMO has been thinking for the last year.
You’ve read the LinkedIn pundits, the media darlings, the AI-native CEOs cutting the role and collapsing marketing under revenue, sales, and product. PLG darlings and AI-native startups are folding brand into product. And their reasoning makes sense on the surface: if the product is the marketing, why pay for a CMO?
Here’s what I actually think is happening. Companies haven’t outgrown the need for brand leadership. What’s grown is the number of leadership teams who no longer understand what brand actually does, and they’re making structural decisions based on that misunderstanding at exactly the wrong moment.
The Thing Everyone Keeps Getting Wrong
Product adoption and market perception are not the same problem. They don’t share a timeline. They don’t share success metrics. And they don’t reward the same instincts in the people responsible for them. Product teams optimize for adoption, usability, and velocity. Does it work? Do people use it? How fast can we ship? That’s the muscle they build, and it’s a good muscle.
Brand teams work on something different. Perception. Trust. Position. What do people believe about this company? How does it sit against competitors? Do customers trust it enough to put their money and time behind it?
Those are different jobs. A product can be excellent and still be completely misunderstood. It can feel interchangeable with everything else in the market. It can lose the trust battle to a worse product with a clearer story. No amount of shipping speed fixes a confusing narrative.
When you fold brand into product, the incentives no longer line up. Product leaders get rewarded for what they ship, not for telling a clear and consistent story. So brand calls end up in the hands of people whose performance review doesn’t depend on getting them right. Positioning drifts. Differentiation slowly dissolves. “We shipped it” replaces “here’s why that matters.”
None of this shows up immediately. It shows up six months later, when a competitor’s weaker product has a stronger market position, and no one can explain why.
Why Now is the Worst Time to Make This Mistake
PLG culture rewards what’s measurable. Activation. Self-serve conversion. Time to value. All of that lives close to the product itself. Brand work doesn’t. Its effects are slower and more qualitative, which makes it easy to deprioritize in a culture that’s impatient with anything it can’t tie to a quarterly number.
AI compounds this. When shipping gets faster and cheaper, it reinforces the belief that product is the whole game. If you can ship your way to differentiation, why fund a function whose ROI isn’t shipping?
The irony is brutal. AI commoditizing product capability is what’s making brand the actual differentiator. If every competitor can match a feature within a release cycle, the claim that you have the better product becomes indefensible. That gap closes fast for everyone.
What doesn’t commoditize as easily? Trust. The sense of who you are. Brand is hard to copy because it isn’t a feature. And companies are gutting that advantage exactly when they need it most.
The Misdiagnosis
When a company eliminates marketing leadership, it usually reads as proof that brand strategy wasn’t working. But if you look closer, a different story tends to emerge. The failure is operational, not structural. If product velocity outran marketing’s ability to keep messaging coherent, that’s an execution gap. Not proof the function is obsolete.
You don’t solve a speed problem by removing the runner.
The mismatch between how fast product moves and how fast marketing can respond doesn’t disappear when you eliminate the role responsible for managing it. It just goes unmanaged.
And here’s the thing that worries me most: every board that decides they don’t need a CMO becomes a data point other boards cite. Whether or not they’ve done the work to confirm it applies to them. That’s how a misdiagnosis becomes widespread. One company’s bad call turns into an industry assumption.
What to Do Instead
Better integration and resourcing. That’s the answer, and it’s less exciting than the structural move, but it’s the right one.
Give brand a seat in initial product strategy instead of treating it as an afterthought. Make sure your messaging keeps pace with what you’re actually shipping. Treat brand leadership as a function that works hand in hand with product, but with its own mandate. Those are different jobs. Let them be different.
You don’t future-proof a company by removing the function responsible for trust right as AI makes products easier than ever to copy.
The CMO isn’t a leftover. Trust is the differentiator. It’s always been the differentiator. And building it has always been a human job.
Don’t give that up.
Kyle Lacey is a seasoned marketing executive with nearly two decades of experience leading high-growth software companies through scaling, transformation, and acquisition. As Chief Marketing Officer at Docebo, Kyle drives global brand strategy, demand generation, and go-to-market execution to accelerate the company’s growth and market leadership. Before joining Docebo, Kyle served as CMO at Jellyfish, leading marketing strategy for the market-leading engineering management platform. He was also Senior Vice President of Marketing at Seismic and played a pivotal role in acquiring Lessonly, a company he helped build before its $300M acquisition by Seismic in 2021. His career also includes leadership roles at OpenView, Salesforce, and ExactTarget, where he helped shape and scale marketing functions for some of the most recognized brands in SaaS.
