Why Product Leaders Should Stay Current in Marketing, Not Just Technology
A CIM CPD renewal is easy to file under housekeeping. Ian Finn argues it's actually a case for something rarely said aloud: staying current in marketing discipline isn't a detour from product leadership, it's foundational to doing it well.
I renewed my Chartered Marketer status with CIM this week. My CPD for the year has been assessed and approved, and CFCIM stands confirmed for another twelve months.
It would be easy to file that under housekeeping. I think it's worth more than that.
There's a common assumption that product leadership and marketing discipline are adjacent but separate: one builds the right thing, the other tells people it exists. In my experience that's a false separation. The best product decisions I've made have drawn on marketing fundamentals as much as technical ones.
Personalisation isn't just a feature to ship. It's a discipline built on genuinely understanding audience segments, how their needs and wants differ, not just having the data infrastructure to act on them. Segmentation thinking, knowing precisely who you're building for and why each cohort differs from the next, shapes better roadmap prioritisation than usage analytics alone ever will. And audience understanding, the ability to read what a customer actually needs rather than what they say they want, is a marketing instinct I've relied on as often as any product framework.
Staying current in these disciplines, through CPD, through active practice, and simply by not letting the fundamentals atrophy, has made me a more effective product leader, not a distracted one. The two disciplines were never as separate as they're often treated.
Grateful to CIM for the annual discipline of reflection this renewal requires. It's a genuinely useful exercise: an honest account of a year's learning, rather than letting it pass unexamined. It's also a habit worth recommending to any product leader who assumes marketing rigour is someone else's job. The ability to segment audiences, target them with personalised propositions, and build a coherent go-to-market strategy is fundamental to doing product well.
The CIM’s CFCIM professional badge
The 'Personalisation Phases Paradigm': A Framework for Personalising at Scale
Most brands treat personalisation as one thing. It's actually three, past, present, and future, each with its own data, its own tactics, and its own payoff. Here's the framework.
-Ian Finn on Personalisation-
Personalisation is the modern day elixir. The ability for services, preferences, recommendations, gamification, and loyalty to all be tailored and individualised for the specific customer being targeted. It's the ultimate in one-to-one marketing meeting relevant experience: targeting bigger basket sizes, and supporting "retention via relevance" across the customer life cycle, all at the same time. Personalisation strategies are proven to move the needle; industry research consistently links strong personalisation to measurable gains in conversion and retention. And consumers desire such personalised experiences too: a global survey in 2024 of 23,000 consumers by BCG found that 80% of them were comfortable with personalised experiences, with most of them expecting brands to offer them.
All worthy outcomes for brands at scale to target. But how can brands truly succeed in a marketing-meets-tech discipline where, by its very nature, success hinges on cutting through the wider noise?
A framework I have developed and found to work well across sectors is to base both the inputs and outputs of a personalisation strategy on key "phases" of the customer life cycle itself, the very chain of events, and phases of data availability, that provide the fuel for a personalised strategy in the first place.
The key starting premise is segmenting the customer life cycle into three "phase views," which provide the inputs for the personalisation tactics to play out. It's an approach I call the Personalisation Phases Paradigm. Let's break it down.
To succeed in personalisation, we know it's all about being relevant, in the moment, on as individualised a basis as possible, often in as close to real time as possible. This is where the Personalisation Phases Paradigm comes into its own, because it's naturally defined by time.
The Personalisation Phases Paradigm in practice
1. Personalisation Phase P1 (the past): Personalise based on what's gone before
This phase leverages the most reliable and most available data and modelling of all, because it's about things that have already happened. That gives it the added benefit of being the phase with the highest potential for accuracy.
It's about taking what we know of an individual and applying a next best action, based on our read and interpretation of the past, to drive an outcome of value.
Examples here would include personalising based on past consumption, like Spotify's annual "Wrapped" in-app carousel, telling a one-of-a-kind story about a user's year of content consumption, or a brand's mobile app summarising which retailers or brands loyalty points were earned with.
Great for: loyalty and retention plays, brand engagement, deepening consumer interest.
2. Personalisation Phase P2 (the present): Personalise based on what's happening right now, in the moments of truth
This phase is about being as relevant and tailored to the current moment of interaction as possible. It's personalisation's biggest test of mindfulness, because it's about the right here, right now. Data systems, timeliness, and how systems interconnect and hold current-state awareness all have to be genuinely on point.
Examples of this one would include the Starbucks coffee that arrives at the end of the counter with your name already on the cup, without you needing to say "my name's Max," because it's been pre-printed from a scan of your loyalty app while paying. Another would be an ecommerce basket's "additions" recommendations, which dynamically adapt cross-sell nudges by modelling likely customer thinking as items are added or removed in real time.
Great for: brand engagement, moments of truth, building trust and deepening customer relationships, cross-sell and upsell.
3. Personalisation Phase P3 (the future): Personalise based on what's yet to be
This phase is about personalising for potential outcomes that the personalisation itself helps bring about. These tactics include overlaying algorithms or "propensity models" onto historic, verified data, to influence and change behaviours. It's about blending measured data points from the past with likely future scenarios, and leveraging both together for competitive advantage.
Because this phase relies most intensely on data leverage, signalling, propensity rules, and orchestrating touches by cohort, it's also the phase that can most usefully harness AI as a genuine force multiplier.
Examples here would include a personalised home page on a Sky TV web account, suggesting a more suitable subscription package for the household, or a tailored "next best action" nudge in a digital banking app, suggesting a switch away from paper statements when blended with data on which customer cohorts feel strongly about environmental issues.
Great for: building and growing transaction volumes and value, increasing share of wallet, and influencing customer behaviour in mutually beneficial ways.
So there you have it. A framework for personalisation across the phases of the customer life cycle, leveraging data, models, and AI progressively as more data points become available over time. I've found it highly useful in building personalisation strategies across a range of industry sectors.
Personalisation succeeds best when context, data, tools, AI, identified need, and trust all intersect. The Personalisation Phases Paradigm provides a framework to succeed at that, at scale.
> Searching for more ways to compound the benefits in your product? More in the book, ‘Product Truths: Five Principles for Building Products That Work at Scale’. Available at all major digital bookstores (Amazon Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books):
www.Books2read.com/producttruths
Insight referenced in article - BCG 2024 consumer study into personalisation preferences:
https://www.bcg.com/publications/2024/what-consumers-want-from-personalization
The ‘Personalisation Phases Paradigm’ 2026 Ian Finn. All rights reserved.
If compound interest is the 'eighth wonder' of the world, what's the ninth?
Compounding. The art of creating accruing benefits of stability, performance, resilience and impact, because your product or system simply shows up more of the time, falls over less, and bounces back quicker and more gracefully when it does fail.
- Ian Finn on Resilience -
I've always loved the idea of compound interest. Once capital is invested, even just by sitting there, value accrues by what's often called 'the eighth wonder of the world': he who understands it, earns it; he who doesn't, pays it.
It's actually very similar in product management, where there's a fundamental, under-leveraged truth, one often overlooked under the weight of 'busy work' or building the latest feature, yet arguably the one that delivers the greatest benefit of all. Compounding. The art of creating accruing benefits of stability, performance, resilience and impact, because your product or system simply shows up more of the time, falls over less, and bounces back quicker and more gracefully when it does fail. That's compounding, right there.
So how do we 'compound', and realise these benefits for the products we lead? Like many things in product, it can flow from a framework, and a framework can provide the scaffolding your product needs to win in an ever more complex and morphing world. Let's compound.
The framework I've developed in this area, applied to products I've led across four different sectors, is one I call the Four Fs.
I built this framework from watching priorities in product default to the 'highest profile thing', the 'noisiest thing', or the 'flavour of the moment'. All of this creates its own noise, and distorts what a product is primarily set up to do. (Bonus tip: leaning into your Product Vision in such moments is never a bad idea either, or even stress-testing it to check it still holds true). The cost is ignoring the baby elephant in the room, until it grows into the proverbial elephant in the room. I call that ‘inverse compounding’.
1. Front Foot Forward
I've always liked Covey's maxim, 'start with the end in mind'. This F is similar, but different. It's the foundational F, and it asks for acceptance of two continuums: continual progress, and continual improvement. That's the very definition of compounding in product, moving forward deliberately rather than reactively, before the next fire forces your hand.
Once a team accepts and aligns with that principle, the art becomes unlocking the compounding benefit. That's where the other three Fs come in.
2. Foresight Is Your Friend
This one's about thinking ahead, before you need to, or before events force you to. It's about being the devil's advocate to your own product's set-up, build and architecture, or getting others to play that role for you, if necessary.
What you're trying to baseline are three things: what could go wrong, how likely is each thing to go wrong, and what other dependencies and wider considerations affect your product performing well under pressure, peak load, unexpected events, macro factors, or attacks and threats from outside.
Use these to baseline what comes next.
3. Fire-Risk Prevention
This is the one I've seen too often overlooked, yet it's often the biggest opportunity in products at scale. The dedication and precision to take what's found in Foresight and counter those risks accordingly, so the ‘elephant’ never fully grows in the first place. Modernisation, patching, refactoring, all components of this F. But so too are more nuanced plays: test and learn rather than fail and burn, and genuinely mapping your true dependencies, have you really mapped every endpoint?
This is the richest opportunity in the Four Fs, and it sets the stage for the final one.
4. Forearmed
We all like to sleep at night, don't we? Product leaders, engineering leaders, teams building and running products, or supporting them in live.
Forearmed is more than the sum of the other three Fs, it's the defining principle. It's taking what they've developed and asking, honestly: does this range of optimisations, enhancements and preventative plays really give our users the most performant, reliable product we can provide? Or does it still fall short? If it falls short, return to the first F and work forward again. Your users, your business, and general karma will thank you for it.
Four Fs, four principles, four ways to build products for tomorrow, not just today. That's the ninth wonder: not compound interest, but compounding capability, deliberately built, ‘F by F’.
>So what's your take? How do you apply foresight and forearmed thinking to your own products? And what's the cost of not acting, if you don't?
> Searching for more ways to compound the benefits in your product? More in the book, ‘Product Truths: Five Principles for Building Products That Work at Scale’. Available at all major digital bookstores (Amazon Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books):
www.Books2read.com/producttruths
The Four Fs of compounding products. 2026 Ian Finn. All rights reserved
Your next incident won't define your system's fortunes. Your work before the storm will
Your next incident won't define your system's fortunes, your work before the storm will. Introducing the Three Ps: a framework for engineering resilience at scale.
- Ian Finn on Resilience -
One question I'm often asked: 'how do we create performant and resilient systems, at scale?' It is a sound question to ask.
But behind this query, there often sits an uncomfortable truth. Many large-scale systems morph and iterate over time, often without embedding the 'preventative and performative' elements that ensure high levels of service quality, availability and experience for the end user. This is a material risk to large-scale systems today, and systems at scale can literally live or die by it.
So important, then, that the 'real world readiness' of the system to react, adapt and bounce back at scale is built into its very core, by design.
This is why I developed the 'Three Ps' Framework, for performant systems. It's the set of guardrails and 'silent scaffolding' I apply to my products at scale, to not only ensure high levels of performance and 'non-functional' robustness when the system is live and running, but also to power its recovery and bounce-back when it goes down. All systems experience such moments, at some point or other. Best, then, to be prepared. Enter the Three Ps.
The Three Ps of Performant Systems
Plan: map out blind spots, the risk areas, the unhappy paths, and run through the key 'What If?' scenarios, to stress test your system in advance. This 'P' serves a cunning twin purpose: it helps prevent many problems from hitting the system in the first place, whilst also providing the fuel for a further 'P' to be built and readied in advance: Prepare.
Prepare: for the worst, whilst always hoping for the best (the worst will often happen anyway, so best to be ready). Your disaster management and recovery systems, your runbooks, incident and escalation paths that need to play out in real time, need to be stress tested whilst the sun is shining, not once the storm itself arrives. They need to be documented, and easily accessible too, ready for those moments of truth when they hit.
Perform: the final 10% of how you act in the moments of crisis, or when the system is tested. Even this can be dry run or rehearsed (part of 'Prepare'), to build the crisis management muscles before they're ever even needed. It's like how fire crews don't just sit idle waiting to attend the next fire or incident, they train, they rehearse, they develop new smarts to counter emerging threats. So too with resilient systems at scale. The 90% readiness comes from the first two Ps; the remaining 10% comes from how your team performs in those moments of truth.
Over to you: how do you engineer your systems at scale to be highly performant in the 'usual' times, but able to react and recover when the system is under real world stress?
>More Product Truths in the book, 'Product Truths: Five Principles for Building Products That Work at Scale'. Available at all major digital bookstores (Amazon Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books): https://books2read.com/producttruths.
The Three Ps of Performant Systems: Copyright Ian Finn, 2026