OPT   Operator's Take

We've been hiring marketers for some time now, and no candidate has ever sent us a GitHub. The first one who does is going to pique our interest more than most.

Louise de Sadeleer, a growth marketer at Tella, made the case this summer that every marketer needs a GitHub, a public place to keep the skills, agents, prompts, and systems they've built. Growth Unhinged ran her longer version of the argument as a guest post. Some of the replies pushed back that marketers shouldn't have to become engineers. We think she's right, and the argument around her post points at something bigger than where a marketer keeps their work.

Eight to ten years ago, the best way for a marketer to stand out was to build a portfolio site. A resume can only claim that you know how to do marketing, but a website shows your past work, design sense, and the technical ability to put a site together. Over the years we watched it go from a candidate going above and beyond to the minimum we expect.

Then building a website became something anyone can ask a free version of ChatGPT or Claude to do. We still read a portfolio site for the writing and taste, but it no longer tells us much about whether someone can build with the tools launching today. A repository can tell us that.

For example, an email marketer's repository could hold skills for turning a brief into subject lines, preheaders, body copy, and call-to-action variants, or it could include simple tools that check an email for errors and missing links. Getting AI to do those jobs well takes setup, training, and refining. Packaging everything on a platform like GitHub shows the person understands the whole system of the work and can direct the technology to produce it and showcase it. They don't need to be a developer to get there.

Marketers aren't the only ones being asked to build. Marc Andreessen described what AI is doing inside software teams on Lenny's Podcast earlier this year. He said product managers, designers, and coders are in what he called a Mexican standoff, because each of them now believes AI lets them do the other two jobs.

We think he's partly right, and we think marketers belong in that picture too.

He's partly right because people in every one of those roles sit on a spectrum. One designer has real product insight and could cover a product manager's work, while another is a natural creative who understands product strategy less. Some engineers are pure builders with little interest in strategy. A product manager might lean toward design more than engineering. Marketers are no exception. Some skew creative, toward art direction, campaigns, copywriting, and design. Others skew technical, toward data analysis, systems integration, and lifecycle logic. It's rare to find one who does all of it well. What a person can cover with AI depends on where they already stand.

That also answers the objection that marketers are being forced to become engineers. Nobody in the standoff is being forced to turn into someone else. But the best professionals are leaning into AI to build on their strengths and let it cover their weaknesses. That is the mindset shift. AI lets you build the things you used to need someone else's skill set to make.

We used to need engineers to create software and digital tools. AI now covers much of that gap, which moves the advantage to the ideas, the consumer psychology, the design, the brand, and the taste that make a product worth using. Those are the things marketers know best.

Seth Godin argued in a recent interview that everything a company does that touches the market is marketing, from how the product is designed to your pricing strategy and how your customer support engages with its customers. "Those are all marketing decisions," he said, and a marketer who isn't touching them isn't really in charge of the marketing.

That matches how we've always understood the job. A good marketer has to understand, influence, and contribute to decisions that sit in other departments, which means being good at most things and knowing how the whole business runs. Outside of the people running the company, we'd argue nobody has more reason to know the operation from end to end. We're biased of course, but we still think that breadth is what makes a marketer a strong candidate to build in the AI era.

We've seen it firsthand. One of us on the Ghost Brief team, a marketer by trade, built an internal software platform for an operation we've been working with. It pulls customer data from several systems into one place and gives the team tools and views that no single BI or CRM product in their stack could offer. It was designed and built using AI, and now close to ten people rely on this tool for their work every day.

A personal repo is where that kind of work becomes visible. We put our own skills repo up last month so anyone weighing our work can check it for themselves.

Helping teams make this shift is the work we do at Ghost Brief. We help the brands we work with put AI to use and change how their people think about their own roles, so they can see what a small team backed by strong AI systems can accomplish.

The portfolio site went from above and beyond to expected within a few years, and the repo is on the same path. It's one sign of a period where new skills and a new mindset decide who gets ahead, in marketing and beyond.