Claude-Powered Tier 1 Product Launch

Ryan RadcliffJuly 24, 2026

Director of Product Marketing at Vivun

The context

This case study was created from an episode of the Product Marketing Adventure Podcast. It has been adapted into Dusted's case study format to preserve and showcase the guest's real-world experience. Written to preserve the voice of the true author, Ryan Radcliff.

When I joined Vivun, the company had deep roots with sales engineers—a full product line and customer base of technical people supporting big deals. The founders got fired up about a completely different problem: giving the seller expert support live on the call. Hero is our AI sales teammate that joins live calls, knows the deals, products, and customers, and helps proactively before, during, and after. Most sales tools work before or after the conversation; Hero is right there inside it. We burned the boats, built a whole new product for a completely different person and problem, and brought back the old Hero product name (we still held the copyright). This meant new branding, new colors, a new website, and a new way of thinking about Vivun as the overarching research firm on top of Hero. We’re around 75 people. My CMO sat down with the founders and E-suite first and locked the strategic narrative—an incredible gift—so I could start from there. I started about a week before Q1 on February 1st.

The challenge

This was far more than a messaging refresh. It was a major identity shift for a new audience: quota-carrying sellers under pressure instead of sales engineers. We needed a whole new story, correct personas, and a new point of view, then had to operationalize a brand-new narrative from scratch and get a company of ~75 people flying in the same formation. The timeline was tight—soft launch April 6th, big launch May 5th, new website in two weeks. I also needed outputs that non-PMMs could run with without getting caught by hallucinations or scope creep, something my earlier ChatGPT attempts at a former company couldn’t deliver. Classic risks included assuming we already knew the persona or the industries where we win, plus the new urgency that LLMs would define us unless we showed up with extreme consistency.

The approach

I started with classic product marketing work, not AI: who it’s for, the problem we’re solving (aligned to how sellers see it), differentiated value, impact, proof, a positioning statement, a benefits ladder (emotional + functional), and a sanity-check filter—“if this doesn’t help a seller prepare, respond, or follow through when the pressure of the moment is on, it doesn’t belong.” I built a 40-page positioning and messaging manifesto plus a separate persona doc, doing heavy research with Claude as the foundation, then operationalized it across the company. The manifesto opened with purpose (“this is a positioning thesis”), then 12–13 sections of foundation: market context/why now (no patience on sales calls; the moment as the unit of value; cost of missing it; why existing approaches break as AI raises expectations), target personas, core situation (“when would I use this?”), old way/new way, what’s required to win, how Hero meets it, differentiated value, proof points, and key messaging. I front-loaded Raskin-style narrative so we defined market reality and the problem before ever talking about Hero or Vivun.

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