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04 May 2026 | Issue #124

In this issue:

• The Marketing Engineer
• Project Management for Freelancers and Consultants
• 8 Tips to Cut Your Claude Token Usage
• Oscars Addresses New AI Eligibility Rules
• Institutional AI vs. Individual AI
• Review of The Visual Marketer
• Design Quote of the Week

Going from T-Shaped to V-Shaped with AI

Five years ago, I gave a talk at Keene State College about whether it's better to be a specialist or a generalist. My answer: it depends on where you are in your career and what you want from it. Specialists go deep, own their lane, and command a premium. Generalists go wide, absorb more responsibility, and often end up in leadership because they understand enough of the whole to guide a team through it.

I'd give the same answer today. But the foundation has changed.

The Agile Generalist

Pega's CTO, Don Schuerman, made a point recently that I keep coming back to. For years, specialized knowledge was a real career moat. Deep expertise in a platform, a channel, a discipline took years to develop and justified a premium because most people couldn't access it without putting in the same time.

AI changes that equation. Skills that once required a specialist are now within reach for anyone willing to work the tools. Don's conclusion is worth taking seriously: the strongest people going forward will be those who can straddle multiple disciplines, pivot fast, and match their skills to what the business needs. He calls it the agile generalist.

It's a framework worth building on, because not all agility is equal.

Taste is the Variable

Anyone can learn how to use a CRM (not to denigrate those who do). With enough time and tutorials, most people can set up automation, build a report, or run a basic paid campaign. AI makes that even more accessible. The science of marketing, the tools, the platforms, the data, is increasingly learnable by anyone.

The art of marketing works differently. It takes years to develop the instinct for what to say and how to say it, to understand why a headline lands or why a layout is working against the conversion. AI can produce a competent first draft, but it can't explain why the message is off. That distinction matters when you're thinking about what makes a generalist genuinely valuable, and not just fast.

What a Marketing Engineer Actually is

The term "marketing engineer" has been circulating lately, and it usually gets framed around the technical side: someone who can build in HubSpot, read a GA4 dashboard, optimize for Core Web Vitals. That's part of it, but the framing leaves out what makes the role rare.

A marketing engineer also understands visual hierarchy, can write copy that converts, and knows enough about design to fix a page when the layout is undermining the message. They can concept a campaign, build it, set up the automation, and interpret the data afterward, bringing judgment to every stage of the process, not just the creative ones.

The goal is someone who can move from brief to build to analysis without handing off to four different people in between. The value comes from the judgment they carry through each step.

And they're most likely using AI to help them do all of this.

The Chief Business Officer for Unstoppable Domains, Sandy Carter, gave a talk at SXSW about her AI Teammates. She has a series of agents that help her with her job.

You Might Already be This Person

Most people who've spent real time in creative marketing haven't stayed in one lane. The job keeps asking you to learn adjacent things.

You might have started in design and ended up managing the website because nobody else could. Content people get pulled into the email program, then into the automation behind it. Someone who's been in social long enough often becomes the de facto brand voice, the analytics person, and the one who fixes the template when it breaks.

That story is common among people who stayed curious and kept saying yes. What used to look like a scattered background now has a name, and increasingly a market.

The Bottleneck was Always Time

Knowing how to do something and having time to do it are two different problems.

You might already have the range to run a campaign end-to-end, but in practice something slips when one person tries to cover that much ground. The constraint was almost always capacity.

AI cuts the friction around execution without replacing the thinking behind it. First drafts come faster, research happens in parallel, and the repetitive parts of a build stop eating your best hours. This matters most for people who already have creative range. If you can do seven things but only had time for three, now you can do five or six.

The array of skills you spent years building finally gets used. And the judgment behind it, knowing what to say and why it matters to a specific audience, still belongs to the person with the trained eye.

Sponsored:

Have you checked out Reclaim.ai? They have an interesting comparison between Reclaim and Google Gemini

PROJECT MANAGEMENT FOR FREELANCERS

I have been quite because I've been working on a new tool to help freelancers. Project management, time tracking, reporting, and invoicing, all wrapped into one app.

If you'd like to try it out, reply to this email and I can set you up with a link.

Full announcement coming soon.

NEWS

​8 Tips to Cut Your Claude Token Usage​

​Oscars Addresses New AI Eligibility Rules​

​Institutional AI vs. Individual AI​

​Review of The Visual Marketer​

DESIGN QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“Everything is design. Everything!” - Paul Rand

My AI disclaimer: I wrote this week's article and Claude helped me with edits.

Midjourney image prompt: a single marketer is surrounded by different skills that she has mastered. A vibrant, high-contrast illustration using flat vector-style shading with neon and duotone color blocking. The characters are stylized with exaggerated lighting in yellow and cyan tones, set against a magenta background. There’s a strong use of shadow and highlight to create depth without using gradients. It uses clean lines and a minimal background to keep focus on the figures and objects. --ar 16:9
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Thanks for reading,

–Jim

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