Evergreen Lessons: What climate tech can teach product marketers
Originally published on October 3, 2026.
Every product marketer must dabble in multiple markets over their career.
You know it’s true. If not, here’s my quick pitch. Coding is no longer a cost or bottleneck. Everyone’s now a builder. The premium today springs from a scattered set of areas like insight, novelty, taste, attention, and influence. A rich and colorful experience serves a product marketer exquisitely well in this scenario.
This forms the setting for what you’ll read here about my lessons in product marketing from climate tech so far. For the uninitiated, climate tech refers to technologies focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions or impacts of climate change.
You can intuitively guess the headwinds and tailwinds for any company in this space. If you peek behind the curtain, these companies have to tackle a host of recurring topics, like…
A never-ending conversation around technology economics, even when the numbers show up favorably over and over again. There’s always an active PR battle to win over the status quo or traditional technologies.
Climate tech startups are speeding up the time to get to self-sustaining business models, as support via credits, exemptions, or creative incentives tends to evaporate without warning. Not surprisingly, the buyers in this space are no strangers to finance-ready selling. Messages hurled at them routinely take on a finance-flexibility and efficiency-first flavor.
Every sale starts with education, whether you like it or not. You’re educating the buyer on the climate technology in question. If they’re a mature buyer, you’ll likely make a case for why you’re unique and what you bring to the table.
All this before you get to product mechanics, think about adoption and roadmaps, and whatnot. Add it all up, and you wind up with healthy breeding grounds to reevaluate foundational principles around GTM, roadmap, messages, and more. And I want to share a few to tickle that instinct.
Be frugal: on both strategy and finances.
A climate tech startup wins with a constraint mindset. That frame of mind needs to flow from the top down. A product marketer has to be financially frugal for the company.
Frugality doesn’t stop with the dollars. You’ve got to whittle down your bets. William Zinsser’s principles of good writing - clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity - can also translate to principles of good product marketing strategy!
Fight for a distinct POV, now more than ever.
Your customer is inundated with boring, mundane, and sanitized messages. You’ve got to rise above it. I suggest lobbing a challenge to your organization to be different in taste, thinking, and actions. AI makes it easier for all of us to rush to the mean. The culture is flattening! Everyone in a market starts to look alike. Your true edge comes from judgment, originality, and execution.
Think workflows first and AI second!
There’s a sludge of AI-first companies. Some make sense. Some don’t. Be in the pile that makes sense.
To kickstart that process, start with your customer’s workflows. Then work backward to figure out the AI impact. Adopt product thinking here. Interrogate where your premium comes from when AI gets you to “good enough.” Are you willing to invest in the quest for that premium?
A crammed roadmap is an inconsequential roadmap.
Your customers don’t want a noisy roadmap. Be mindful of what constitutes a “launch.” Not everything is a launch. Your messages don’t have to follow the pace of releases. Explore alternate ways to win attention. Think in terms of quarterly promises, even better if it’s biannual (see example).
Meet your customers (desired user) where they’re at.
This needs to be a recurring GTM principle. Meet your customers: in the language they use, in their day-to-day lived experience, in their recurring pains, in their expectations, in their quirks within your product, and more! GTM should evolve from a push effort to a “why don’t you give it a try” mechanism.
Train your resilience and persistence.
A climate-sensitive takeaway: You have to show up every day to chip away at the mission. Your work has to exist despite the news headlines.
Every ping is time away from revenue. Be judicious.
Every alert, notification, hiccup is time away from revenue for your customer. They don’t have enough time. A robust, non-annoying product (if you can offer one) matters the most. If you must communicate, do it inside the product and within the relevant workflow.
Don’t turn your GTM plan into a checklist.
AI makes it easy to churn out multi-page, ‘surface-level research’ style GTM plans. Complete with pages of action items. Your GTM plan, if it needs to have any merit, needs to sidestep that and instead ask (and answer) these questions.
Where’s the leverage?
What can you flip into high-payoff, low-risk opportunities?
What can you rethink structurally?
Which foundational pieces of your GTM motions should you revisit?
A well-serving goal is to find your asymmetric channels and messages that truly change behavior.
Become a student at heart.
Be comfortably clueless at the start. Embrace your newbie eyes by navigating your product at first without any demos or assistance. Get a feel for the software stack and locate the analytics for everything. Create a writing style guide to decipher how your customer prefers to listen and absorb new info. Become a power user of your product and unpack it further using mental models like systems thinking, first principles, and flow diagramming.
My personal favorite: Make it easy to do the right thing!
This might be the lesson to rule them all. It applies to any stakeholder you have in mind, internal or external. For a solar startup, that could include homeowners, installers, lenders, suppliers, etc. Consider the ecosystem players. You have to be cross-functional.
Map the friction and remove it. Reduce the friction in how any stakeholder works with you. Your GTM plan gets more valuable when you rethink it as a ‘friction removal’ plan.
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