1+1=3

“Where’s the big value?”

Leaders love to ask it. We know it’s the wrong question. It pulls teams into scatter charts of use cases and POCs that die before they ship.

We did the opposite.

We built our AI strategy around product-centricity. We start with Product Ownership. @Dana Haddad runs that practice. Every product has a named owner from concept through launch and beyond.

Then: tight definition of what the thing is. What it produces. How we run it after launch. v1 inside three months or it doesn’t ship. Roadmaps tied to real problems and real value we could defend.

The hard part wasn’t the AI. The hard part was the change required to make it work. Our business partners were exceptional. @Sarah Wind Kim co-led this with us and kept our AI organization on our toes.

Here’s the move: we picked problems in proximity to each other in the workflow. Deliberately. We knew we’d connect them later. The agentic harness we’re building right now is that connection. Remember last week’s LLM Knowledge Bases? That’s the fuel.

Each product in B2B Marketing had to be a product. Tight scope. Defined output. A “1” on its own. Campaign & Creative. Brief Creation and Execution. Lead Validation. Sales Prep & Planning. And more…

Each shipped. Each delivered. Then they started showing up in the same flow, feeding and amplifying each other.

Citizen development filled the gaps. The proverbial sand in the jar of golf balls. It amplified further. (Change management, by the way, is the water.)

That’s when 1+1 stopped equaling 2.

It started looking like 3.

One use case isn’t the endgame. The endgame is many, compounding.

Klarna’s CMO described their marketing transformation the same way recently. Product stance. Workflow decomposition. AI at every step. Even the most progressive companies build realism into the approach. (Link in comments.)

It takes experience. Patience. Leadership. Change. WILLINGNESS. Oh, yeah, the AI part is important.

It’s not the hard part.