The winning wedge isn't "AI productivity." It's a painful job for a specific team.

"AI productivity" is too broad to be useful. Markets don't start broad - they start with a specific team, a specific pain, and a job that repeats.

Everyone wants to be more productive, every team has too much work, and every company wants to move faster. None of that points anywhere. A market starts with one team doing one painful thing over and over. For Earmark, that wedge is product and engineering teams turning meetings into finished work. As one founder told us, "The meeting is where the decision happens, but the work still starts afterward."

That's the pain. Product and engineering teams spend their days in high-context conversations - customer calls, product reviews, sprint planning, design critiques, bug triage, roadmap debates, architecture discussions. Those conversations aren't the problem; what happens next is. Someone has to turn the conversation into a PRD, turn the decision into tickets, and capture the tradeoff, the owner, the risk, the open question, and the follow-up - all while making sure engineering has enough context to act without another meeting. That isn't generic productivity. It's a specific workflow with real consequences, and when it breaks, teams don't just lose time. They ship the wrong thing, reopen settled decisions, miss customer nuance, write vague tickets, and force engineers to ask questions that were already answered in the room. The cost was never the meeting; it's when the output from the meeting comes out incomplete.

A broad AI assistant can help with many things. A focused AI product can own a job.

That's why the wedge matters. The market rewards products that are painfully specific at the start, because specificity is what creates trust. The tool speaks the team's language. It knows what a useful artifact looks like. It knows the difference between a decision, an open question, a requirement, and a passing comment - which is exactly the difference broad productivity tools tend to miss. A generic summary isn't the job; the ticket including the why, not just the what, is.

Product and engineering teams don't need more AI novelty. They need less drag between alignment and implementation: the customer conversation becoming product input, the product discussion becoming a usable spec, the design review becoming implementation notes, the planning meeting becoming tickets with context, the decision surviving the handoff. That's the wedge - not "make everyone more productive," but turning the highest-context conversations in product and engineering into the work those teams already need to ship.

The broader vision can be much larger, but the starting point has to be narrow enough to matter. The real signal isn't pretty notes - it's a tool that saves someone from rewriting the same PRD and tickets after every product meeting, the kind of thing a team reaches for every week. The best AI companies won't win by promising productivity in the abstract. They'll win by finding a painful, repeatable job, doing it better than the old workflow, and expanding from there.

Product and engineering teams meet to make progress. They should leave with the work already started.

For us, that job is clear, and that's what Earmark is built to do.