Say "AI for productivity" out loud and watch what the listener has to do next. They have to translate. Productivity for whom? Doing what? Before or after which workflow? Replacing which pain, producing which outcome? The phrase sounds big, but it offloads all the real work onto the buyer - and that's the lesson building Earmark taught us. The wedge has to be concrete, because broad language makes people guess where the product fits in their actual day, and most of them won't bother.

A concrete wedge does the opposite work for them. "Turn product conversations into finished specs, tickets, and follow-ups" names the team, the input, and the output in a single breath: the team is product and engineering, the input is the conversation, the output is the work they already owe someone. That specificity makes the product easier to explain, easier to demo, and easier to evaluate - and it makes the pain recognizable. A PM never wakes up thinking "I need AI productivity." They think, "I have three meetings today, and after them I still have to write the spec, clean up the tickets, send the follow-up, and update the team." That's the wedge. Not a category - a job.

Broad positioning earns polite nods. Concrete positioning earns recognition.

The difference is visible on people's faces. Lead with "here's how AI helps teams work better" and they nod while imagining the use case. Lead with "here's a product review turning into a spec and a set of Linear tickets" and they feel the before and after without being asked to picture anything. Same product, completely different reaction - one is understood as a concept, the other is recognized as their own Tuesday.

This reshaped how we talk about Earmark. The vision can still be large; we do believe AI becomes an execution layer for work, that meetings are among the highest-context inputs in a company, that teams should leave conversations with the work already started. But a vision isn't a wedge. A wedge has to be narrow enough that someone immediately says "yes, I have exactly that problem." The common mistake is assuming a narrow wedge shrinks the ambition, when in practice it's the only thing that gives the ambition a way in: start with the painful job, own the workflow, earn the right to expand.

For us the job is unambiguous. Product and engineering teams have important conversations every day, those conversations should become specs, tickets, follow-ups, updates, decisions, and handoffs - and far too much of that still happens by hand after the meeting ends. The wedge is closing that gap. Not "AI for everyone," not "productivity for teams," not "smarter meetings," but a specific pain, for a specific team, with a specific outcome. That's what makes the product easy to understand - and, more to the point, easy to want.