2023 Expectations vs Reality — mid-year roundup
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Is it just me or are the cycles steeper and faster? I’ve been working on Olivine since 2018 and lately, the highs feel higher, and the lows feel lower. And the space between them is shrinking.
In case you forgot, here’s all the sh*t that has happened so far this year:
February: Continued inflation (6%) & interest rate hikes (4.57%)
March: Silicon Valley Bank run & Balaji’s Bitcoin wager
April: Meta announced it will lay off 10,000 jobs in the coming months. This is on top of the 11,000 jobs that were cut in November.
June: a literal cage fight is planned between two tech tycoons.
😑
And I’m not the only one feeling it:
I tapped some friends to do a mid-year reality check so I can sharpen my prediction skills in three categories: 💵 economy, 🤖 technology, and 📣 marketing.
💵 Economy
Mike’s Expectation: The bottom of the tech job market is behind us
Reality: Pshhh not even close. More layoffs from companies large and small continued to hit the market well into 2023. For a while, it felt like I saw one LinkedIn post a day from a fellow Product Marketer looking for a new gig. Hopefully, we’ve finally reached the bottom.
How I’m adapting: Freelancers in general have had to tread carefully with budgets being slashed left and right. At Olivine, we’ve started targeting a new market segment with more tailored offerings to expand our target market. On the personal side, I’ve started learning new skills - taking a Coursera course on AI and downloading an app to learn code.
— Michael Greene, Product Marketing Consultant at Olivine
Brandon’s Expectation: The housing market will collapse
Reality: The Great Housing Crisis of 2023.... that never happened. Why? Well, it's the 2017-2021 tsunami of residential refinancing that is beating back the recession. No forced sellers, because who would let go of ~2% 30 yr. mortgage? While home values have changed downward, it's all taking place in equity that is not being marked to market. Yes, some spec builders and folks that got over-levered will hurt, but the capitalism toilet will flush that through the system. Instead, the cracks are coming from a different vertical in real estate: commercial/office.
How I’m adapting: Because I buy land, lots, and broken-down houses, we are buying on the way down too— the price trades both ways. Are we stopping buying, no? This is where the vintages of valuable trades are made. Are we being more choosy, yes. We use lots of data to triangulate future demand, and we will continue to find and use more. The opportunities in front of us are exciting!
— Brandon Willin, aka @texaslandguy, Real estate development in Austin, TX
Francis’ Expectation: Venture funding for Series A will rebound
Reality: I thought valuations for Series A and later companies would rebound but they're still in the dumps. Meanwhile, we're busy repeating in AI the same mistakes we made in crypto — massive rounds in companies w/ no paying customers.
How I’m adapting: I'm trying to avoid hype and back solid businesses with real revenue and solid fundamentals.
— Francis Santora, Angel investor based in NYC
🤖 Technology
Ryan’s Expectation: AI & LLMs will be powerful, but difficult to use
With old-school deep learning models, you had to write a lot of glue-code to do stuff like entity extraction, text classification, etc.
Reality: Actually no, you ask the model nicely…(e.g. “Can you please read the following paragraph and extract all of the entities mentioned and describe their relation to one another? {PARAGRAPH1, PARAGRAPH 2, …} ”) Building entity graphs is a big deal when reading law/contracts/tax-codes. The ability to do this by using plain language is insane.
How I’m adapting: Two tools: Github Copilot & ChatGPT.
I began using Github Copilot circa 2020. At first, it seemed like turbocharged autocomplete. Then I saw a flash of code take over my screen while I was typing. Copilot wrote an entire set of functions inside of a class and was aware of the functions already available in my code to accomplish the task. Incredible.
When ChatGPT became available I became a 1X programmer in a language I was a 0X programmer in. It enabled me to contribute to a codebase that is using the T3 stack (nextjs, prisma, react, tRPC, etc). I thought this would result in less learning, but it’s completely the opposite. If I ask ChatGPT to “write me some code that does X”, it’s true the code is being written for me but I get to ask contextual questions (e.g. why do people choose to write this code this way usually?), something I could never get from Stackoverflow and frankly even from a mentor, at this level of speed/convenience.
— Ryan Lambert, Data Scientist (and Rae’s husband)
Rae’s Expectation: More real-world use cases for Web3
Reality: At first I thought I was just too old or too dumb to understand the hype of Web3. But now I think similar to blockchain, the concept is powerful, but finding actually useful things to do with it on a large scale is still being explored. Early days of the iPhone app store, there were a lot of useless widgets before life-changing applications were built (ie mobile banking, navigation, translation, health monitoring).
How I’m adapting: I’m mostly trying to ignore the noise and not let myself waste time going down the rabbit hole until I see something really compelling. One company has caught my eye: Toki uses QR codes to connect customers to brands both in-person and online (scan a QR code on a billboard for a special discount or in a store to read product reviews and drop them into a campaign) and I’m curious to see how marketers use it for growth.
— Raechel Lambert, Co-founder of Olivine
📣 Marketing
Arielle’s Expectation: AI marketing tools will take all our jobs
Reality: AI marketing tools are taking a lot of the “busy work” off our hands and will continue to do so. Stuff like repetitive sales enablement, writing, and other tasks that felt more like “a job to be done” (couldn’t resist a PMM pun #sorrynotsorry) rather than “thinking”. That may mean it eats some marketers’ jobs. The serious strategy work still belongs to humans (for now 😜).
How I’m adapting: Leaning into ChatGPT and other ai tools to jog our thinking, spark our creativity, and enhance our output. Adapting means getting familiar af with how to get as much juice as possible out of this AI orange.
— Arielle Shnaidman, Product Marketing at Olivine & Executive Coach
Sheena’s Expectation: SEO will be dead, personal brands & dark social will reign
Reality: 80% of our inbound still lists “Google search” or “online search” as how they found us, so I don’t see high-intent searches going away anytime soon. But personal brands and dark social are becoming more important than ever. With increasing deep fakes and mediocre AI content being churned out from faceless brands, people are seeking authenticity from new channels: directly from the people they trust.
How we’re adapting: Less blog keyword research and more customer case studies, sharing our real experiences online, and being as helpful as we possibly can.
— Sheena Vega, Director of Product Marketing at Olivine
Yi Lin’s Expectation: PMMs will be in hot demand as the importance of the role is more broadly understood
Reality: Unfortunately, that did not turn out to be true. With increasing rounds of layoffs, more product marketers are out of jobs as companies cut budgets across all departments. What has been especially interesting is to see product marketers with startup experience are fairing better in the job search process when compared to product marketers from big tech. Since more startups are hiring, they prefer candidates who have prior startup experience - essentially flipping the traditional dynamic of big tech marketers driving demand.
How to adapt: My recommendation to job-seeking product marketers is to target companies where you have a unique competitive advantage and where you can confidently answer "why you are the best candidate for the job."
— Yi Lin Pei, PMM Career Coach
