At some point in my career, I realized the marketers I admired weren't necessarily the most creative ones. They were the most informed ones. They knew things. About the product, the customers, the sales conversations, the support tickets.
The simple TL;DR is: I'm only as good a marketer as my context.
It took me a while to put words to this. But when the AI world started talking about context engineering, it clicked.
Andrej Karpathy defined it as "the delicate art and science of filling the context window with just the right information for the next step." Gartner called the context layer "the most important enterprise asset of the AI era."
Everyone thinks LLMs are super smart. They're really not. They just have context. They have the right information at the right time, and they leverage it. That's it. AI is only as powerful as its context layer.
And honestly? So am I. So are you. So is everyone.
You can only think outside the box if you know what the 'box' is
There's this cliché about thinking outside the box. Everyone wants to do it. But like... you literally cannot think outside the box if you don't know what the 'box' is.
You need to build your box.
This is especially important if you work in marketing. And even more so if you work in global remote teams (which I have, for my entire career).
When you're remote, context doesn't just come to you. You don't overhear a sales conversation in the hallway. You don't catch the support team venting about a recurring issue over lunch. You don't absorb product decisions through proximity. You have to actively go find it. Every. Single. Time.
Questions are the building blocks of your 'box'
Asing questions didn't always come naturally to me. When I was starting out, I held back. I didn't want to sound stupid. I wanted my manager and colleagues to think I knew what I was doing. So I'd sit in meetings, nod along, and Google things later instead of just asking.
But Google obviously didn't know the internal direction or the company ethos. My context was never enough.
I had to unlearn that. Haha. I had to build the habit of asking questions even when it made me uncomfortable. I'm still not the best at it. But I try.
Now I actively ask a lot of questions at work. Not just about marketing. About everything.
Why did sales go up in Q1? What questions do prospects actually ask on discovery calls? Why does our Q2 roadmap have these specific features and not others? What are the most common support queries? Why are our docs structured this way? Why don't we use this channel more? What's the story behind our positioning and messaging?
The big questions. And the small ones too. Most of these have nothing to do with marketing on the surface. But I find my most useful marketing insights in exactly these conversations. A support ticket reveals the gaps in your docs. A sales objection reveals the positioning gap your content needs to fill. A product decision reveals the narrative your next campaign should tell.
The small, random questions. Those are where the gold is. Every time.
It's not just about asking questions
Asking questions is part of it. But context also comes from observing, from being present, from reading.
I try my best to read every message in every Slack channel every day. It sounds like a lot, but it gives me a kind of insight nothing else does. I'm genuinely grateful to have worked at organizations with open discussions where I can just hop in, take notes, and learn.
Reading more broadly is so underrated too. We're in an era where so many people openly share what they're experimenting with: in essays, on X, in podcasts. All of that is context. About your industry, your domain, the people you're trying to reach.
I wasn't always building context intentionally across all of these. Earlier in my career I only thought about one kind. That's what experience does, I think. It teaches you stuff no classroom can. Now I know you need it all: context about your company, your industry, your customers, your geography.
This matters way more now
AI has made a lot of marketing execution faster. You can generate drafts, repurpose content, build outlines in seconds. But the quality of all that output is only as good as the context behind it: the context you feed the model, and the context you carry yourself.
A marketer who doesn't have context but has a great AI tool just produces generic work faster. That's not the win it sounds like.
The tool isn't what makes the difference. It's what you know before you open it.
The uncomfortable part
Building context takes effort. You have to ask questions that might feel basic. Sit in on calls that aren't yours. Read docs and tickets that nobody asked you to read. Be the person who asks "why?" one more time when everyone else has moved on.
Nobody's going to pat you on the back for reading a lot of support tickets. It's not glamorous.
But over time, you make better decisions, write sharper copy, and catch opportunities others miss entirely. Not because you're smarter. Because you know more about the thing you're marketing.
That's the lesson. Context is everything. For LLMs. For your career. Probably for life too, haha.