# Erik MacKinnon

Erik MacKinnon writes about B2B SaaS product marketing, including validating buyer demand before building features and measuring brand performance. MacKinnon's posts also discuss Wynter’s buyer-research services.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/erik-mackinnon/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikmackinnon
- LinkedIn followers: 15,932
- Based on 18 dated posts, latest 2026-10-06

## Summary

Erik MacKinnon is most useful for practical product marketing sessions on validating buyer demand before build and measuring brand.

- Best for: A B2B SaaS product and product marketing team wanting early validation before feature commitment.
- Not for: Finance teams seeking independent benchmark data or a vendor-neutral brand measurement review.
- Check first: Confirm audience demographics, engagement, sponsorship terms, and Wynter disclosure before contacting them.

### Takeaways

- 65% of surveyed product marketers said features ship without evidence customers want them.
- 55% traced an underperforming launch to missing problem, demand, ICP, or market validation.
- 49% said product marketing gets involved late or downstream.

## Main ideas

- **Validate demand before code makes the decision irreversible**: MacKinnon's central claim is that most weak feature launches are not launch problems at all. They are validation problems that become visible at launch. In a survey of 100 B2B SaaS product marketers, they report that 65% said features ship without evidence customers want them, and 55% of answers about an underperforming launch pointed to missing problem, demand, ICP, or market validation before the build. The argument is that evidence has to arrive while it can still stop or reshape a build, not just prompt more research at launch. Their sharpest formulation is that research after commitment is feedback, not validation.
- **Product marketing's late involvement is an upstream design flaw**: MacKinnon argues that the familiar complaint that product marketing is brought in too late is not a staffing complaint. It signals that product decisions, customer validation, and internal communication are already breaking upstream. In the reported survey, 49% said product marketing gets involved late or downstream, 44% described communication or documentation breakdowns, 36% described weak or post-commitment customer validation, 33% dealt with roadmap, timing, or scope churn, and 26% pointed to unclear ownership or launch processes. They reframe that list as product and validation problems that only become visible at launch.
- **Customer evidence is not target-market evidence**: MacKinnon does not dismiss customer calls, interviews, sales calls, or support tickets. Their argument is that those inputs usually come from people already inside the company's orbit: current customers, active opportunities, design partners, and accounts with loud problems. That creates selection bias when a team needs to know how widespread a problem is, which segment feels it most, or whether prospects care as much as existing customers. In the reported survey, 69% mentioned direct customer or prospect conversations, 46% mentioned feedback through sales, customer success, or support, and only 13% mentioned surveys or quantitative research.
- **More releases do not create more market impact**: MacKinnon argues that high release volume creates a product marketing tax: research, positioning, messaging, naming, enablement, launch content, proof, adoption, coordination, and measurement for every release. Among respondents at companies with 50 to 999 employees, they report that 85% of high-volume teams said they were overloaded by launches versus 38% of moderate- or low-volume teams; 50% of high-volume respondents said release volume was diluting core positioning versus 12% of the lower-volume group. The conclusion is not that companies should stop shipping, but that they should put a higher burden of proof on what gets built and what earns a full launch.
- **Brand is the unmeasured multiplier behind performance**: MacKinnon argues that B2B SaaS teams measure funnel metrics closely while leaving brand performance largely unmeasured. The post cites figures that 83% of B2B SaaS companies have little or no regular insight into brand performance and 52% do not measure brand impact at all. Their case is that brand awareness affects the performance metrics finance already reviews, citing claims that brand awareness can increase performance-marketing conversion up to 2.86 times and that branded search can deliver 19 times higher return on ad spend than non-branded search. They recommend measuring unaided recall and consideration among the target ICP monthly or quarterly and comparing movement with performance metrics.
- **Revenue operations need versioned, testable workflows before agents can run them**: MacKinnon's argument about AI agents is operational rather than speculative. If qualification logic lives half in the CRM, objection handling lives in a Notion document, renewal risk lives in a Slack thread, and enterprise routing lives in one person's head, an agent will inherit the mess. They propose a revenue repository with playbooks, prompts, skills, examples, tools, evaluations, approvals, and a changelog. The test is whether a workflow can be written clearly enough for a smart junior hire to follow; if not, an agent will struggle too.

## Work to read

- [“Your current customers are not the same thing as your target market”](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/erikmackinnon_your-current-customers-are-not-the-same-thing-activity-7485388788286840832-Ssow)
- [“49% of product marketers get involved too late”](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/erikmackinnon_49-of-product-marketers-get-involved-too-activity-7485752788740636672-jFf6)
- [“Most common thing product marketers say after a bad feature launch”](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/erikmackinnon_most-common-thing-product-marketers-say-after-activity-7483882183670018048-FgZp)
- [“Product teams are shipping first and looking for evidence later”](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/erikmackinnon_product-teams-are-shipping-first-and-looking-activity-7483860587400167424-5BZ-)
- [“Every new release comes with a product marketing tax”](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/erikmackinnon_every-new-release-comes-with-a-product-marketing-activity-7484272284137005056-vSjd)
- [“We measure everything in B2B SaaS” — except brand](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/erikmackinnon_we-measure-everything-in-b2b-saas-except-activity-7379659377286250496-BnuQ)
- [“If your B2B brand tracking study needs a blank check, the process is broken”](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/erikmackinnon_if-your-b2b-brand-tracking-study-needs-a-activity-7486947969225629697-7EUv)
- [“Every revenue team needs a repo”](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/erikmackinnon_the-more-i-work-to-speed-up-wynters-gtm-activity-7453873692603744256-5JTD)

## Brand relationships

- **Wynter** (disclosed_partnership)

## Partnerships

MacKinnon promotes Wynter, the buyer-research product they say they work on. Posts about demand validation, brand tracking, and launch timing close with a direct wynter.com link or an invitation to DM them for a product demo. These calls to action target product marketing and GTM teams; they don’t document creator sponsorship inventory. Ask MacKinnon directly about sponsored posts, newsletter or event placements, disclosure practice, lead times, rates, and partnership terms.

## Alternatives

- Peep Laja: Choose Peep Laja when the room is marketing leadership and the goal is to show that most marketing decisions are still gut calls, and that teams need evidence from buyers who are not already customers. Two posts report a survey of 100 B2B marketing leaders: 87% said target buyers were not the main input to their last big marketing decision, 92% pull insights from sales calls, 85% interview customers, and 53% research the target market once a year or less or never. A second post shows the gap between claimed and actual non-customer research: 76% said they research buyers who are not customers, but only 32% described doing so for their last attempt. That makes this a sharper fit for a keynote or executive session on why pre-commitment market evidence matters than for a hands-on product-marketing process workshop.
- Seena Mojahedi: Choose Seena Mojahedi only if the buyer's task shifts from product-marketing demand validation to fixing a Workday or HRIS environment. The posts describe a Director of HRIS who spent months on governance instead of new features, and a tenant audit covering conflicting reports, unexplained configuration, and integrations that run clean into work the business no longer uses. That is a better fit for an HR systems audience needing a 90-day rescue plan and a governance argument than for a B2B SaaS product team deciding whether to build a feature.
- Heather Lodge: Choose Heather Lodge when the campaign task is positioning discipline, messaging ownership, or managing a small marketing team. One post argues that positioning is a collective decision and messaging is marketing's job, and that a headline rewritten four times signals unclear positioning. The other argues for giving marketers accountability for outcomes rather than task lists. That suits a founder or marketing leader who needs help setting direction and ownership.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/