If you are genuinely good at your job, there is a decent chance you cannot expla
By timbo-jordan · September 19, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
If you are genuinely good at your job, there is a decent chance you cannot explain how you do it. That is the thing I have been picking at for a couple years. Marketing is full of judgment that feels like art. Who a product is really for... Why a competitor is winning.... Which message will land....
Most people who are good at it cannot fully articulate the process. Some cool tools like Scribe are helping tremendously, but even when it's documented, it doesnt mean it gets done automatically. Which means they generally can not hand those skills to anyone else. Which means it usually never scales past them.
I do not think that is permanent. I think most of it is a process nobody has bothered to write down because MAYBE we felt like it didnt matter? Like writing it down didnt mean it would actually GET DONE?
Alibaba.com gave me a chance to test that. They launched an AI agent feature in Accio, and asked a group of us to each build an agent out of one of the the things we do best.
Mine is called Brand Message Fit. It reads an Amazon listing, works out who the copy is aimed at, and checks it against who is ACTUALLY buying. Knowing if we are targeting our biggest opportunity WELL is something most people get wrong IMO.
The build was the interesting part. Not a prompt, not a clever instruction, not a simple Claude skill file, but an orchestrated system built with their engineering team, from my own thinking taken apart piece by piece. One of the most interesting pieces of the process was having to answer this question: "Why do you look at THAT piece of data first?" and realising I had never answered that out loud in my life.
Fast forward, and the agent works. Dang well. Which leaves the question I cannot stop turning over.... How much of what you do is genuinely irreplaceable judgment, and how much is a process you have simply never written down and had a way to make it ACTIONABLE through automation?
I suspect the second pile is bigger than most of us want to admit.
Link in the comments if you want to try my agent OR that of several others (sign up for new account for free, no Credit Card, you get 500 redits which is enough to try ALL these custom agents for free...)
Some of those other collaboraters are Mike McClary Ali Decker Marino Brian Fried Emily Baker Abe C. Chomali Brett Bohannon Mike "Reezy Resells" Rezendes II ColderICE - Ecommerce Digital Marketing Justin Chen Marouane RHAFLI Tia Ellis John Aspinall ✱ ARTEM BESPALOV Michelle Barnum Smith Amy Wees Ziwei Chen Mia Ming