The New Marketing Skill Isn’t Prompting. It’s Building.

And now we can build even faster and easier than ever—and it’s awesome.

A friend of mine posted on LinkedIn about running AI workshops with clients. Workshops where you get into the weeds on how people work. And it got to the inevitable question.

Workflows

I’ve banged this drum before and I’ll bang it again: if you take a crappy workflow or process and slap AI onto one part of it—reading a spreadsheet, summarizing some data, whatever—and you drop AI into that one part, you know what you have?

A crappy, AI-enabled process.

Nothing’s better. The annoying thing everyone hates—and no one remembers why it’s there—is still there. The inefficient steps are still there. The cobbled together copying and pasting because when people first used the process they thought “this is the only way to do it” still there. Just now you can slap “Now with AI!” onto it like a sticker on a box of cereal that says “3x more marshmallows!”. The mess didn’t go away—you just made one part of the mess slightly faster.

My friend reflected on taking stacks of sticky notes and a marker, stepping up to the trusty whiteboard, and mapping it all out. Write each process step down, stick it on the board, move things around, and ask the uncomfortable question: If everyone hates this part, why do you still do this step? What happens if you skip it? Is there another way?

And I thought about that visual. How many times I had done the exact same thing with a Value Proposition Canvas or other tool.

Then I thought. Maybe I should just build it.

From inspiration to idea to built. And working!

So over the weekend, I did.

I built Sticky Flow—a virtual sticky note workflow mapper. You can change the note colors, change the marker color, add what each step does and who owns it, connect cards with lines to show flow. And when you’re done, you can export the whole thing as a PDF, an image, or a Markdown file—so you can take that workflow to an AI and ask: where does this break down? where could AI actually help? is there a better way to look at this?

Saturday morning to Monday morning. Functional tool. About five hours of actual work. Think about that. I didn’t code anything. I wrote out ideas. AI created the documents to start it. AI built it. I tested it. AI refined it.

What this means for the new era of marketing

Think about what that would have looked like two or three years ago. You’d search for an app. Maybe find something close—Miro, probably—and make it work well enough, even if it wasn’t quite right. And if nothing existed that did what you were wanted?

That was it.

Sure if you knew how to code or had a friend who did you might have been able to cobble something together in about a week. A week. Not a weekend a week.

Now you have an idea, you talk it through with an AI, you build a PRD (product requirements document), you figure out the rough technical requirements, and you feed it to your vibe coding tool of choice (I used Google’s Antigravity). Does the first version come out perfect? No. Close, but not perfect. That’s why it took a weekend and not an afternoon. But you end up with something real—something people can actually try, use, and kick the tires on.

That’s the shift. That’s what marketing looks like now.

Not prompting your way to a better caption. Not automating the part of your job you already hated—content audits, am I right?—it’s having an idea for a tool—something that would actually help you do better work—and being able to build it. Yourself. This week.

Robert Rose just did a whole four-part series on his idea for a “Trust Lattice” and in part 3 he talked about actually building a tool in Claude to make it happen.

Think about when we used to mock up creative. In the analog days, you’d brief the art department, wait a couple of days, do a round of revisions, and eventually land somewhere close to what you had in your head. Digital sped that up but the process was basically the same—you still needed other people, other skills, other departments. In the last five years, a lot of marketers started doing their own mock-ups. And now?

Now you can make the actual thing. I used to map out new website layouts with paper and pen . I even had a pad I got from an agency that had an 800x600px browser window to make sure the things you wanted above the scroll would fit. Now I can tell an AI what I want above the scroll on different screen sizes and it does it.

Marketing is going to be less about putting data into faux dashboard that your bosses said they wanted but haven’t ever looked at (and always ask you for the link to it) and more about making tools you need when you need them. Making prototypes for a customer to look at and try.

Marketing, ironically, is going to get a helluva lot more creative really fast. Going from “data-driven-marketing” and back to “we use data, yes, but let’s do some experiments and make fun stuff too.”

Go build something

Go give StickyFlow a try. It’s on a free Vercel plan, so there will be performance limits, but see how it feels to map a real workflow with it.

But that’s not the point.

The point is: what’s the tool you’ve always wished existed? The one where you’ve been making do with that’s almost right but just not right enough to be annoying. What’s the idea you want to test? What would make your life 10x easier right now?

Go build it. Because now you can.