My 2025 Year in Review: Leadership, Product, and the End of Easy Growth

That is what 2025 felt like.

AI did not just add tools. It changed discovery. Search kept drifting toward answers instead of clicks. Attention got thinner and more brittle. Customers grew more cautious, then more impatient. Meanwhile, inside companies, the same killers stayed busy: shifting priorities, fuzzy ownership, missed deadlines, and leaders who want the comfort of “great culture” without the discomfort of real standards.

So the theme I kept coming back to on Transmyt was not a tactic. It was a choice.

Build an operating system for growth that earns trust, or keep collecting half-finished campaigns like souvenirs.

This recap walks through what I wrote about over the year, how the year evolved, what kept recurring across topics, and what I think will win in 2026.

The real theme of the year: trust became the strategy

A lot of teams treat trust like a brand value. Something you say. Something you put in a deck. Something you hope customers “feel.”

But trust behaves like math.

When trust rises, deals move faster. Retention improves. Referrals show up. Reviews get written without begging. Your brand stops relying on perfect timing and starts benefiting from earned reputation.

When trust drops, every part of growth turns into a grind. Leads take longer to close. Churn creeps up. Word of mouth flips from help to harm. Your marketing starts shouting because it cannot persuade.

That is why so many 2025 topics, even the ones that look like pure marketing, kept snapping back to the same place: delivery, clarity, and reliability.

Marketing can spark interest. Trust finishes the sale. Trust keeps the customer. Trust protects you when a platform changes and a channel breaks.

In a year where discovery shifted and attention broke into smaller pieces, trust did more than matter. Trust became the advantage.

How the year evolved

Q1: visibility, AI, and the risk nobody wanted to own

The year opened with a loud contradiction. Companies wanted AI wins, but they still wanted the old rules. They wanted faster output, but they also wanted control. They wanted to “use AI everywhere,” but they did not want to talk about privacy, support, accuracy, or what happens when platforms change how they deliver attention.

So I started where the pressure lived.

I wrote about AI as a layer on top of marketing, not a magic replacement for thinking. I wrote about privacy disasters and the cost of treating user data like a rounding error. I wrote about how search and discovery were already changing, and why waiting for “clarity” was a great way to wake up late.

This is the work that kicked off the year and set the direction:

• My 2025 Marketing Playbook
• From Automation to Ideation: AI’s Better Role in Your Business
• The Evolving Role of CMOs: What I’m Expecting in 2025
• Another AI, Another Privacy Disaster: Welcome to DeepSeek
• GEO vs. SEO: The New Rules of Visibility in an AI-Driven World
• Banning TikTok: The Collision of Geopolitics and Everyday Life

If Q1 had a single message, it was this: stop treating visibility like a stable utility.

Search still matters, but the job changed. You no longer compete only for rank. You compete to become the answer that a model summarizes, the brand that gets mentioned, the source that feels safe to recommend. That shift does not kill SEO. It expands it. It forces you to care about clarity, structure, and proof. It forces you to care about what your category sounds like when an engine compresses it down to a paragraph.

And it forces a blunt question: when buyers ask AI what to do, does the answer include you, or does it forget you exist?

Q2: fundamentals that convert, not content that performs

After the early AI wave, a lot of teams did what teams always do. They chased tools. They chased hacks. They chased volume, hoping volume would drown out uncertainty.

That is when the writing pulled hard in the other direction.

Because fundamentals still work, even when the channels shift. Fundamentals work better when the market is messy because they do not rely on perfect conditions. They rely on human behavior.

So Q2 leaned into content strategy that drives action, social strategy that converts, and the customer journey as the actual unit of growth.

• How a Powerful Content Strategy Drives Customer Action
• Sales Funnels are Dead: Why Customer Journeys Matter More
• Marketing on a Tight Budget: How Startups Can Punch Above Their Weight
• Why Emotion Beats Logic in Marketing (And How to Use It)

Here is what I saw across companies this year: many teams did not suffer from a lack of content. They suffered from content that did not carry the buyer anywhere.

It is easy to publish. It is harder to guide.

A strong content strategy does not aim to “get engagement.” It aims to earn a next step. It answers questions in the order buyers ask them. It reduces risk. It clarifies the offer. It shows proof. It moves a person from curiosity to confidence.

Same with funnels versus journeys. Funnels feel neat. Buyers do not. People loop. They stall. They ask a friend. They disappear. They come back when the timing changes. If you only design for a straight line, you will keep losing the deal in the curves.

So Q2 became about building marketing that matches reality.

Q3: Late summer: systems, sequencing, and the cost of chaos

By late summer, the year’s lesson sharpened. A lot of teams had ideas. Many teams had talent. Some teams even had budget.

But too many teams could not hold a plan long enough to let the work compound.

That is where focus and execution stopped sounding like management talk and started sounding like survival.

• Why Shiny Object Syndrome Is Your Biggest Business Threat
• The Power of Sequenced Campaigns in Sustainable Growth
• Stop “Romanticizing” Chaos: Discipline Is the Real Founder Superpower
• The Pivot Addiction: Why Your Team Never Gains Speed

This part of the year mattered because it separates “smart” companies from durable companies.

Random acts of marketing do not stack. They exhaust people and confuse customers. Sequenced campaigns stack. They build familiarity. They train the market. They give your message repetition without sounding repetitive because the story progresses rather than restarting every week.

Chaos feels productive because it creates motion. But growth does not pay for motion. Growth pays for outcomes.

If your team pivots every time someone gets nervous, you lack agility. You have anxiety.

And buyers can feel it.

They feel it when your story changes each month. They feel it when your offer looks different across channels. They feel it when your delivery slips and your support goes quiet. They might not say “this team lacks operational discipline,” but they will say the one thing that matters more: “I’m not sure.”

“I’m not sure” kills deals.

Q4: trust, retention, and leadership standards

Q4 does not care how smart your strategy sounds. It cares if you ship.

This is where the writing turned more blunt, because Q4 punishes softness. If deadlines slip, revenue slips. If the roadmap drifts, the pipeline follows. If your team hides behind “culture” to avoid accountability, the market does not give you extra time for being nice.

• Launch Plans Ship Products. GTM Wins Markets
• Customer Trust Is the New Currency, Here’s How to Earn It
• Most of Your Revenue Lives in Success, Not Sales.
• Traffic Down, Revenue Up: Winning with Zero-Click Conversion Strategies
• Eight Seconds To Win: Marketing In A Culture Of Rotting Attention
• When Deadlines Become Optional, So Does Your Company

This is also where the internal operating system became impossible to ignore.

Marketing cannot fix a company that cannot deliver.

If you want customer trust, you need consistent execution. If you want retention, you need onboarding that gets people to value fast. If you want a strong go to market strategy, you need a plan that survives past launch week.

A launch plan ships a product. Go to market wins a market. That is not wordplay. It is the difference between “we posted about it” and “we built demand and earned adoption.”

And then there is the hard truth many teams try to avoid: most growth lives in what happens after the first sale.

That is why I kept pulling attention to Customer Success and retention. It is not a soft topic. It is the most reliable lever when acquisition costs rise and attention gets thin.

What 2025 proved

I’ll keep this short, since we both hate pages of bullets. Here are the few points that carried the year.

• Marketing strategy wins when it builds a buyer path, not content volume.
• AI search pushes you to optimize for answers, trust, and clarity, not only rankings.
• Retention and onboarding carry safer revenue than new leads alone.
• Discipline beats chaos because it lets the work compound.

Everything else this year, every topic, every debate, kept snapping back to those truths.

Here’s What I’m Betting on for 2026

2026 will reward fewer things, done with more depth.

1) AI visibility becomes everyday work, not just an important side project

GEO versus SEO will not stay a debate. It will become a day-to-day reality.

Teams will need content that earns inclusion, not just traffic. That means clear structure, plain language, real proof, and a point of view that feels stable. AI systems will keep summarizing categories. The brands that appear in those summaries will benefit from a new kind of top-funnel. The brands that do not will keep asking why their “rankings” do not translate into results.

2) The best teams stop chasing traffic and start building conversion ecosystems

Traffic will stay volatile. Some industries will see declines that do not reverse. Some will see spikes that do not convert. So the clever play in 2026 is simple: build an ecosystem that converts even when traffic behaves badly.

That ecosystem includes your website, messaging, sales motion, onboarding, and customer success motion. It includes case studies that sound true, not theatrical. It consists of a clean journey from “I’m curious” to “I booked the meeting” with no friction points that make the buyer feel stupid.

3) Customer success continues to be a growth partner

Retention will not be a back-office KPI. It will sit closer to growth.

The best marketing leaders will care about time-to-value. They will care about activation. They will care about expansion. They will care about churn signals and support experience, because customers treat the support experience as a preview of what it feels like to be stuck.

Trust is not what you claim in a campaign. Trust is what the customer experiences when something breaks.

4) The calm brands win

Many companies will get louder in 2026. AI will make “more content” cheap. That will tempt teams to flood the market.

The winners will feel calmer, clearer, and more consistent.

They will publish less junk. They will publish sharper thinking. They will repeat the same story across channels without sounding robotic, because their message will stay stable while their examples change.

5) Leadership standards continue to become a growth lever

Most marketing problems are leadership problems wearing a marketing costume.

If you want 2026 to look different, you do not need a new content calendar. You need standards.

You need ownership. You need deadlines that mean something. You need a plan that survives discomfort. You need the courage to say no to distractions, and sometimes to the wrong customers. Because “nice” does not pay payroll. Clarity does.

The 2025 Transmyt reading path

If you want the year in a clean arc, here is the set that captures the themes and the progression.

AI, privacy, and visibility

• My 2025 Marketing Playbook
• From Automation to Ideation: AI’s Better Role in Your Business
• The Evolving Role of CMOs: What I’m Expecting in 2025
• Another AI, Another Privacy Disaster: Welcome to DeepSeek
• GEO vs. SEO: The New Rules of Visibility in an AI-Driven World
• Banning TikTok: The Collision of Geopolitics and Everyday Life

Fundamentals that convert

• How a Powerful Content Strategy Drives Customer Action
• Sales Funnels are Dead: Why Customer Journeys Matter More
• Marketing on a Tight Budget: How Startups Can Punch Above Their Weight
• Why Emotion Beats Logic in Marketing (And How to Use It)

Systems, focus, and go to market

• Why Shiny Object Syndrome Is Your Biggest Business Threat
• The Power of Sequenced Campaigns in Sustainable Growth
• Stop “Romanticizing” Chaos: Discipline Is the Real Founder Superpower
• The Pivot Addiction: Why Your Team Never Gains Speed
• Launch Plans Ship Products. GTM Wins Markets
• One Clean Journey From “Contact Sales” to First Meeting
• Stop Selling To “Everyone” And Start Selling To Someone Real

Trust, retention, and attention

• Customer Trust Is the New Currency, Here’s How to Earn It
• Most of Your Revenue Lives in Success, Not Sales.
• Traffic Down, Revenue Up: Winning with Zero-Click Conversion Strategies
• Eight Seconds To Win: Marketing In A Culture Of Rotting Attention
• When Deadlines Become Optional, So Does Your Company