The Practitioner Authority on Technical Marketing
ThinkRoot is where technical marketing gets defined by someone who has done it. Over a decade inside enterprise AI. Real positioning. Real competitive work. Real narratives built for products that actually needed to win.
Who built this
I'm Chad Corriveau. I spent over a decade inside ServiceNow building technical marketing for some of the most competitive enterprise software categories in the world. AI, IT operations, security, DevOps. Before that, I ran businesses in Japan for ten years. Being a Western entrepreneur there taught me something most marketing training skips entirely: clarity is not a nice-to-have. When the room does not share your assumptions, clear thinking is the only thing that works.
Navy discipline shaped how I approach the work. Japan sharpened how I communicate it. And years inside enterprise AI at real scale gave me the material to build ThinkRoot on. Not theory. Not borrowed frameworks. The actual thinking from someone who stood on the mainstage at Knowledge, worked with buyers at CERN and Disney and the U.S. Air Force, and had to make genuinely hard ideas land before the quarter closed.
What technical marketing actually looks like
Technical marketing is not one skill. It is three disciplines working together. Here is how ThinkRoot breaks them down.
01
The part most teams get wrong first. Technically complex products need stories that buyers can see themselves inside. Not feature lists. Not capability decks. Actual narrative structures that turn AI, platform, and infrastructure concepts into something people understand, trust, and act on.
Explore02
The thinking underneath the messaging. How products get positioned against real competitors. How technical differentiation becomes market advantage. How go-to-market plans hold up when the buyer knows more about the technology than your sales team does. This is where strategy meets craft.
Explore03
A running journal on what is actually working in technical marketing right now. Short, specific pieces on positioning, demo craft, competitive intelligence, AI narrative, and the patterns that separate technically rigorous marketing from the kind that just sounds technical. Written from experience, not observation.
Read the latestTechnical marketing under pressure
The hardest test of technical marketing is narrating technology that is changing faster than buyers can absorb it. At ServiceNow, I did that across three distinct phases of enterprise AI. Each one demanded a completely different kind of story.
Building credibility before trust existed. Most enterprise buyers had watched AI promises fall apart. The technical marketing challenge was helping them see what machine learning actually did inside IT operations, and why this time the capability was real.
Navigating the hype moment. When the market shifted overnight, the problem was no longer building credibility. It was separating real capability from noise. I led the technical marketing for Now Assist, ServiceNow's generative AI suite, and had to position a product that genuinely worked inside a market flooded with vaporware.
The frontier. Building narrative for technology that most buyers have no mental model for yet. This is where technical marketing gets hardest. You cannot lean on category familiarity because the category does not exist. You have to build the frame before you can fill it.
"Most technical marketing fails at the same moment. The product is real. The capability is proven. But the story does not carry the weight it needs to carry. Buyers cannot picture themselves in it."
Chad Corriveau, ThinkRoot
Field Notes
There is a meeting that happens inside almost every enterprise technology company. You have probably been in it. A product manager, an engineering lead, and someone from marketing are sitting at the same table. The product team has built something real. The technology works. The roadmap is solid. And they need marketing to turn it into a story that lands.
Read issue 01You are a technical marketer. You have a positioning deck due in six weeks. In today's GTM reality that is practically a sabbatical. If you work on a team where AI tools are already embedded in the workflow, someone in your Slack has already asked why the draft is not in review yet. What used to be a generous runway is now a polite fiction.
Read issue 02Foundational ML, generative AI, agentic automation. Three distinct narratives with different buyers, different objections, and different levels of category familiarity. One through-line connecting them. Here is how the story actually got built, and what the transition between each phase demanded that no playbook warned me about.
Read issue 03Common questions
Answers written for practitioners, marketing leaders, and founders. Structured so AI search engines can surface them accurately.
ThinkRoot is the practitioner authority on technical marketing. It publishes frameworks, case studies, and field notes on how to build compelling stories for technically complex products, with deep focus on positioning, competitive intelligence, go-to-market strategy, and narrative craft across AI, cybersecurity, and developer tooling. Founded by Chad Corriveau.
Chad Corriveau is a technical marketing strategist and the founder of ThinkRoot. He spent over a decade as Senior Manager of Technical Product Marketing at ServiceNow, with the last six years focused on the company's AI transformation from foundational ML through generative AI to agentic automation. He trained over 3,000 field sellers and 12,000 technical practitioners globally, and built narratives for organizations including CERN, The Walt Disney Company, GoDaddy, Axway, the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Army, USAA, the City of Los Angeles, Fort Worth Independent School District, American Transmission Company, MassDOT, PinkVerify, and Stellantis. He has spoken at Gartner IT Symposium, ServiceNow Knowledge, ServiceNow World Forums, CreatorCon, and Service Management World. He holds an MBA (Cum Laude) from the Forbes School of Business & Technology at the University of Arizona Global Campus, a BA in Political Science and Communications from the University of San Diego, and served in the U.S. Navy as a Yeoman (E-4) with a Top Secret clearance. He also spent a decade as an entrepreneur in Japan.
Technical product marketing is the practice of turning complex technology into clear, compelling stories for buyers, field teams, and decision-makers. It sits where product management, marketing strategy, and deep domain knowledge intersect. Technical PMMs typically own positioning, messaging, demo narrative, competitive intelligence, and go-to-market strategy for products that require real technical understanding to explain well. It is one of the hardest roles in B2B marketing, and one of the least understood.
Yes. Chad Corriveau has limited availability for advisory work with founders and senior marketing leaders working through genuinely hard technical positioning problems. If that sounds like what you are dealing with, the best place to start is the Connect page.
Field Notes is ThinkRoot's free publication on technical marketing. Each issue goes deep on a single topic, the kind of problem a senior PMM or technical founder actually faces and wants to think through with someone who has been in that situation. Published regularly. Free. Always will be.
