When Owner.com raised its $240M Series D, VP of Marketing David Fallarme had to admit something most marketing leaders avoid: the hands-on involvement that got him there was now slowing his team down. Being the person everyone checks with, he says, feels great for the ego, but it’s not the right way to win at this stage of growth. So he’s encoding his judgment into systems instead, from a model that decides which features each customer hears about to shared brand files that keep anything his team creates with AI on brand.
This episode of The Last 90 Days is worth a watch for any marketing leader who’s become the approval step on everything.
What you’ll learn:
Product Marketing Without the Launch Calendar: How to decouple launch recency from promotion, stack-rank what each customer should hear by revenue impact (more Netflix algorithm than monthly release roundup), and keep every message tied to the one question small business customers ask: “Is this going to make me money?”
Hiring With “Nowhere to Hide”: How to cut through polished interviews with a vibe check, a two-way Google doc that reveals a candidate’s questions, response time and real ownership of past work, and a paid project that shows how much they improve with each round of feedback.
From Artisan to Architect: Why scaling as a leader means building the structure instead of perfecting every piece, using forcing functions like a recurring AI science fair, an AI thought partner that works like an executive coach, and shared standards that raise the bar without you in every decision.
The Bottleneck
David's lesson from a $2.3B quarter: if every call still needs your sign-off, you've become the ceiling on your own team.
Stop Announcing What You Shipped
AI made Owner.com's product team so fast that the old launch playbook broke, with emails, banners and webinars for everything. David's fix was to decouple launch recency from promotion. Every update joins a queue, stack-ranked for each customer by the highest-value action they could take, using historical revenue data scored by a small ML team. A feature from two years ago can beat last week's release, and the team only puts its "thumb on the scale" for the true Stranger Things–level launches. When the system decides what customers hear, marketing stops waiting on meetings to decide it.
Nowhere to Hide
Most CMOs know the pain of hiring someone who presented brilliantly and delivered little. David's process is built to catch that. After a vibe check comes a two-way Google doc, where he looks at the questions candidates ask, how quickly they reply, and whether they can explain exactly what they did. Finalists do a paid project he genuinely needs, like a competitor battle card, and he tracks how much they improve with each round of feedback. Hire through a filter this strong, and you can trust people without hovering.
The AI Science Fair
A CMO can't personally make a team AI-native, so David creates forcing functions instead. Three times a year, his team runs an AI science fair, and the bar rises each time. The current round asks for builds that make everyone more productive, like a design MD file and restaurant photography MDs that keep anything an AI creates on brand. A personal slide deck generator doesn't qualify. When brand standards live in shared files, the team stops needing a person to enforce them.
Feels Great for the Ego
David's AI thought partner helps him process hard meetings and stress-test ideas, and now he wants it to do more. His goal is to encode his judgment so the team no longer needs to ask, "Is this on brand? Can we say this?" He's clear about why that's hard: being the person everyone checks with feels great for the ego. But at Owner.com's stage of growth, it's not the right way to win. A CMO's job shifts from making the calls to building the system that makes them.
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