Anum Hussain (Head of Content at Ashby) noticed that the best content marketers she knows keep drifting into product management. Not because they lost interest in content. Because the system around it was broken.
Most companies have it exactly backward. They keep hiring creators when what they actually need is a product owner.
Write, publish, move on, repeat. Leadership calls this “velocity.” It’s actually decay with a publishing schedule. Great work, published once, never restructured, never resurfaced, slowly buried under the next deadline. Not because anyone failed. Because nobody was funded to do anything other than make the next thing.
You ran a webinar last quarter. Sixty minutes of your best expert going deep on a real problem your customers have. It’s sitting in a Vimeo folder. No clips in your community. No snippets in your knowledge base. No embed in your LMS. No breadcrumb leading the customer who has that exact problem to that exact answer at the exact moment they need it.
You wrote a blog post valuable enough to put a lead banner on your corporate site. Great. But what about your community? Your docs? Your learning platform? If the content is valuable to customers, why does it only live in the one place they’re least likely to be when they actually need it?
Content doesn’t fail because it’s bad. It fails because it never finds the person it was made for.
Creation is the part that gets funded. Distribution across surfaces is not. So we overinvest in the first and barely acknowledge the second. Then we wonder why nothing compounds.
This same pattern is rotting customer experience from the inside.
Support builds a knowledge base. Product builds an in-app guide. Marketing builds a chatbot. Each team solves its own problem brilliantly. Nobody designs how the pieces talk to each other. The customer meets five different versions of your company in a single afternoon and trusts none of them.
You can’t run your way out of a maze. And no amount of effort fixes an architecture problem.
There should be someone whose job is to make the work of content marketers truly accessible and valuable — structured properly, easy to discover, continuously improved, and resurfaced at the right moments.
That instinct points to something most companies aren’t ready to hear. The problem isn’t what you’re building. It’s that nobody owns the space between what you’ve built.
They’re not leaving content. They’re leaving chaos that pretends to be a system.