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." A category line. Buyers read it as "Gong, but smaller," which is the worst possible read when Gong is the one defining the category.

After, Sep 10, 2021: "Your Revenue Accelerator." Same product, same engineers, same week. The hero stopped describing the software and started naming what the VP of Sales wanted to walk into the QBR with.

Open both Wayback snapshots of wingman-app.com from those two dates. The hero is the only thing that changed.

Before and after

Drag the handle. Forty-seven days between these two snapshots.

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% is self-reported. I don't have the GA account anymore and I won't pretend I do. What I have: Shruti on SaaS Club ep 341 citing the same window plus "90%+ inbound revenue post-rebrand," and two Wayback snapshots I had no hand in archiving. If that's not enough, ask her. Her email's in the reference link above.

One launch motion, dated and visible

Wingman Actions in Slack, the Sep 2022 launch I shipped end to end as Wingman became "Wingman by Clari." LinkedIn post, Sep 29 2022. Comments include peers from the Clari data platform team. Public, dated, named.

What it became, in substrate

The repositioning-inside-a-category move, the two-contender positioning test, and the ten-interview monthly buyer panel are three of the moves substrate carries forward. The skill, routine, and principle layers are open source for any client to clone and run.