A practical guide for product marketers navigating complexity
The Invisible Lever of Context
Your product demo just flopped. Again. The features are solid, the messaging is sharp, but the prospect is comparing you to the wrong competitors. Sound familiar? You’re not missing better data or a cleverer tagline. You’re missing context.
That missing piece has a name: context engineering.
💡 Why context matters:
- Context clarifies relevance by showing people why something matters in their specific situation.
- It shapes perception by surrounding your product with the right comparisons, stories, and signals.
- And positioning is simply the art of context-setting: choosing the market frame that makes your strengths impossible to ignore.
Context engineering is the practice of deliberately shaping the signals, stories, and environment around your product so people instantly understand what it is, who it’s for, and why it matters now.
As April Dunford reminds us, positioning is “context setting in the opening of a movie”—a frame that can completely change how a product is seen. When you intentionally set the context around your message, product, or strategy, you change not only how others see it but also how quickly your organization learns and adapts.
Why Context Can’t Wait
In today’s fast-moving markets, product marketers must become context engineers. Information overload is the norm. Buyers are drowning in options, and your team is scrambling to keep pace with an ever-expanding competitive landscape.
Context cuts through the noise. Done well, it helps people learn faster, makes teams more adaptable, and ensures your product story lands the way you intend. Without it, even the best products get lost in translation.
The same principles that help someone master a new skill also help a buyer grasp why your product matters. Design for context, and you make it easier for employees to absorb knowledge and for customers to absorb your message.
Learning and Buying: Two Sides of the Same Coin
Learning and buying both take scattered information and turn it into action. The contextual cues that help a learner retain knowledge are the same ones that help a buyer decide with confidence.
- For individuals: Learning sticks when tied to the right cues. Active recall and spaced repetition aren’t just drills; they’re anchors that help the brain retrieve information at the moment it’s needed. A marketing message works the same way when it connects to the buyer’s situation.
- For teams: The best 90-day onboarding plans give new hires structured context through interviews, documents, and small experiments. Customer journeys need the same consistency. Every touchpoint should reinforce the story so buyers don’t waste energy piecing it together themselves.
- For organizations: Companies that treat failure as part of the learning context adapt faster than those waiting for perfect answers. Markets work the same way. The most effective go-to-market teams run campaigns like experiments, testing and adjusting context cues until buyers respond with clarity and urgency.
Building Your Context Engine
Design Stories That Stick
A strong narrative provides the shortcut from confusion to clarity. For learners, it’s the real-world problem that makes theory meaningful. For buyers, it’s the before/after/bridge story that makes your product’s role obvious.
As Kindra Hall explains in Stories That Stick, the best stories don’t just entertain. They create a frame where the audience immediately sees themselves and the change you’re offering. Different stakeholders need the same core story, told in the context that matters to them—whether they’re users, budget holders, or compliance officers.
You’ll know a context-engineered story is working when prospects stop asking basic questions and start talking about implementation.
Draw the Map Everyone Can Use
Behind every successful context effort is a shared map that keeps everyone aligned. In education, this means prompts, schedules, and objectives. In marketing, it’s a “context graph”: mapping personas, stages, and objections so every channel and team member stays consistent.
Without this map, learners struggle to connect the dots and buyers get confused by mixed messages. With it, you guide people naturally toward the insights and decisions you want them to reach.
Make Feedback Your Fuel
Both learning systems and marketing systems thrive on quick iteration. The faster you test context cues and adjust based on response, the faster you improve outcomes. Build mechanisms to capture how your context is landing—whether through comprehension checks for learners or engagement metrics for prospects.
Watch Out for Context Traps
Context is powerful, but it comes with risks:
- Overgeneralizing: Success in one situation doesn’t always transfer. Ask: What about this worked only because of these specific circumstances?
- Overfitting: Waiting for perfect alignment leads to paralysis. Balance sensitivity to context with the momentum to act and learn.
- Crossing ethical lines: Personalization works only when it’s expected, transparent, and valuable. Use data responsibly and always show clear value for what you ask people to share.
Five Quick Wins
You don’t need a massive overhaul to start seeing results. Try one of these:
- Rewrite your top five web pages to name 2–3 alternatives and highlight your differentiator in the first paragraph. Imagine a prospect comparing you to a legacy competitor: don’t leave it to chance they’ll figure out why you’re different—make it clear right away.
- Add context-rich social proof—not just logos, but “How [Company] chose us over [Alternative] to achieve [specific outcome].”
- Create a one-page context brief for your next campaign covering audience, alternatives they’re considering, and key differentiators.
- Implement smart routing—direct “comparing us to X” traffic to tailored landing pages that address that comparison.
- Add context scoring to your CRM to track each prospect’s awareness level, considered alternatives, and primary objections so you can personalize follow-ups.
From Noise to Signal: The Context Advantage
In a world where buyers are overwhelmed with options and information, context isn’t just a marketing tactic. It’s your competitive moat. The companies that master it won’t just capture attention—they’ll accelerate understanding, shorten sales cycles, and create customers who advocate for them.
For product marketers, mastering context is more than messaging. It’s a leadership skill that helps your organization learn faster, adapt better, and win more consistently in a complex marketplace.
The question isn’t whether context matters. It’s whether you’ll engineer it or leave it to chance.
Your next move: pick one quick win from the list above and try it this week. Then come back and tell me how it changed your prospect conversations.
Master the context, and you’ll master the market.
Madam I’m Adam
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