Wingman · founding PMM. 14 months. Through the Clari acquisition.

Kushal pulled me in as the first product marketer. I was solo for the first year. Ten buyer interviews in the first three weeks, two-contender positioning test, homepage rewrite in forty-seven days. Hero moved from "Conversation intelligence for fast-growing sales teams" to "Your Revenue Accelerator." Conversions went up 86%. I stayed through the Clari acquisition. The diffs are on Wayback. The CEO told the story on a podcast a year later.

What it was

Wingman was a conversation-intelligence company sitting in a category Gong had defined and was funding aggressively. The brief: do not lose the category, but stop competing on Gong's terms.

The diff

Before, Jul 25, 2021: "Conversation intelligence for fast-growing sales teams." Category language. The buyer reads it as "Gong, but smaller."

After, Sep 10, 2021: "Your Revenue Accelerator." Outcome language. The buyer reads it as "Gong's category, but the buyer's problem."

Verifiable: open the wingman-app.com Wayback snapshots for those two dates, read the hero. Same product. Different frame.

Before and after

Drag the handle. Left is the category label. Right is the outcome line.

Sources: Wayback Jul 25, 2021 · Wayback Sep 10, 2021.

What I actually did

1. Buyer panel: ten interviews in the first three weeks. One question: "What were you actually trying to do the day you signed?"
2. Win-loss read: twelve closed-won and twelve closed-lost from the prior six months. Coded the language each buyer used in the first ninety seconds.
3. Two-contender positioning test: "conversation intelligence" vs "revenue acceleration." Tested with five buyers. Acceleration won, four to one.
4. Homepage rewrite: hero, feature blocks, social proof. Same engineers, same product, different frame.
5. Launch: Sep 10, 2021. The internal launch deck pinned the metric to homepage conversions for the next ninety days.

What stayed honest

The +86% number is self-reported. I do not have access to the GA account anymore. The corroboration is the CEO on the SaaS Club podcast, episode 341, citing the same window and a related claim ("90%+ inbound revenue post-rebrand"). The Wayback diffs are independent of me. If you want a number I can prove without my own dashboard, the diff is the number.

What it became, in substrate

• routines/buyer-panel-monthly. The ten-interview cadence, formalized.
• skills/positioning-test. The two-contender test, structured.
• patterns/category-without-leaving-it. Repositioning inside a defined category without abandoning it.