How I Built a Cursor CMO

The era of the ten-person marketing team doing the work of one sharp operator is ending. The inverse is becoming true. One sharp operator, equipped with the right system, can do the work of ten.

I know because I've been doing it for two years. I built a system called Cursor CMO: five functional suites, twenty-three skills, covering strategy, content, creative direction, demand gen, and operations. It runs from a terminal. It's the operating system behind everything I do as a Principal Growth Lead.

This is what's inside, how it works, and why you can use it too.

What's inside the system

Cursor CMO is organized into five functional suites, each one mapping to a role you'd find on a full-function growth team.

The CMO suite is the strategic core. It runs a six-skill chain: Discovery Intake (structured business context collection), Positioning Strategy (JTBD-based competitive analysis and differentiation), ICP and Personas (customer segmentation with anti-patterns that force clarity), Brand Strategy (message hierarchy, USPs, proof mapping), Content Strategy (editorial engine with pillars, shows, and distribution tiers), and Design Systems (token architecture for consistent visual identity). Each skill's output feeds the next. The chain produces the strategic foundation that most companies either never build or pay a consultant six figures to create.

The Head of Demand Gen suite handles distribution. Multi-platform ad audits across Google, Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Microsoft. Budget allocation and bidding strategy. SEO audits and content optimization. Campaign planning with industry-specific templates. This is where strategy becomes spend.

The CTO suite manages the development process itself. A dev lifecycle orchestrator, a workflow builder for creating new skills, and a prompt optimizer that transforms rough instructions into model-specific, high-performance prompts.

The Creative Director suite runs a five-stage visual identity pipeline: competitive research, mood direction, brand guidelines with W3C design tokens, an SVG component library, and platform-specific templates. It produces everything you need to go from "we need a brand" to "here are production-ready assets for every channel."

The Chief of Staff suite is the operating layer. Task management, meeting sync, scheduling, daily planning. It reads my Slacks, emails, calendar, and meeting notes, then runs through everything like a $100K-a-year EA would. We agree on priorities, figure out how to make time for everything, and set a plan. Every morning.

What it feels like

A typical workday starts with "let's plan the week." My Chief of Staff reads all of my Slacks, emails, calendar items, and meeting notes to surface everything I need to act on, any follow-ups people owe me or I owe them, and we run through it together. We agree on priorities, what's not important, how to make time for everything, and set the plan. Then we do that every day. It feels like I have a $100K-a-year EA again.

When it's time to do the actual work, I have all of my artifacts, context files, and project information for each client organized in a folder structure. I say something like: "Let's build a new landing page for this remarketing campaign. I want it to look like this, use the same design language as the others saved here, pull the brand guidelines from Creative Director, build the page and send it to Paper for me to review."

Then I watch it work for about two minutes. It builds a whole landing page, top to bottom, exactly as I've specced it, in Paper, right in front of my eyes. I tweak the CTA button language. Maybe add a sticky banner for a promotion. Maybe I regenerate the page copy to hit a more specific ICP so it lands harder. Changes happen in real time. Once I'm happy, I go back to Claude Code and say: "Code this page and deploy it to Vercel. Use the Paper artboard I have highlighted through the MCP connection."

It builds it. It deploys it. I go to the URL and it just... exists there.

It feels magical. It is magical. And until you have that moment yourself, you don't really get it. It's all possible. You just have to figure it out, and right now, you're on the bleeding edge if you do.

Why this matters more than you think

I wrote last month about how marketing is the new bottleneck in tech. The argument was straightforward: AI made building easy, distribution stayed hard, and the businesses that win are the ones that most effectively wield AI to outperform markets flooded with "same product, different logo." If you haven't read that piece, it's worth your time. Everything here builds on it.

But here's what most "I built it with AI" content gets wrong: they start at execution. Write fifty LinkedIn posts. Generate ad creative. Automate your email sequences. That's the easy part. The hard part, the part that actually determines whether any of that execution works, happens upstream.

Brand. Positioning. Competitive differentiation. Understanding who your best customers are, who they aren't, and how to resonate with the ones you actually want. These get dismissed as "fluffy." They don't show up on a campaign dashboard the next morning. And because of that, most teams skip them entirely and jump straight to tactics.

That's backwards, and there's a simple way to see why.

If you've spent time in management consulting, you've probably used a driver tree: a visual decomposition of a key business goal into its component parts, down to the operational levers you can pull. When you optimize a branch of the tree, you improve that branch. Maybe you get 15% more conversions from paid search, or 20% more volume from a redesigned landing page. Real wins. But when you change something at the root of the tree, your positioning, your ICP focus, your core value proposition, you improve every branch simultaneously. Strategy shifts are the tide that raises all boats. Here's a great "driver tree" example from the legendary Libby Weissman.

I watched this happen on a healthcare engagement where I was tasked with doubling digital new patient acquisition for a large system in the Southeast. Tactical adjustments to paid media drove roughly 20% improvement on a flat budget. Redesigned landing pages improved conversion rate by about 30%. Solid wins. But it wasn't until we fundamentally redesigned the digital patient journey, with new branding, repositioned messaging, and a rebuilt care discovery engine, that we cut cost per acquisition by 40% and doubled new patients from digital sources. The core of the program had been upleveled, and every component improved around it as a result.

That's the kind of work this system is built to do. Not replace the marketer's judgment on those pivotal decisions, but give them the structured process, the frameworks, and the deep context to make those decisions well.

The convergence

I'm not the only person seeing this. Emily Kramer, who built marketing at Asana and runs the MKT1 newsletter, coined the term "Gen Marketer" to describe the new baseline: a generalist fluent in AI who can run campaigns, analyze data, build pages, and think strategically about positioning, without waiting for five other people to unblock them.

Jonathan Martinez, an ex-Uber and Coinbase growth lead, wrote in February that the Growth Engineer is the new Growth Marketer. The role is becoming inherently technical. He and Alex Lieberman (the Morning Brew co-founder) built GrowthPair and Tenex around this thesis, helping companies find people who can operate across the entire stack using AI.

These people aren't coordinating their takes. They arrived at the same conclusion independently, from different corners of the industry. The functional roles are collapsing into something new: a full-stack growth operator with pi-shaped expertise who can run the whole motion.

What to do?

I built this system because I realized that the reason clients paid me $750,000 a quarter as a management consultant was that I knew how to do the strategic work that makes everything else work better. Prioritize the 20% that drives 80% of impact. Build a team around it. Most marketers go their entire career without learning how to do this. They never get the chance to learn from someone who has managed hundreds of millions in ad spend across American Express, Verizon, UnitedHealth Group, Healthline, and Novant Health. The system makes that thinking accessible.

I also realized I could provide the whole service without a big bench of freelancers, contractors, and associates. Finding great people to execute on strong plans is about 80% of the problem in building a great growth motion. That's where the McKinsey joke comes from: great plans, dead in a PowerPoint on a shelf somewhere because nobody could execute them. This system unlocked my ability to activate my plans, not just leave them on a CEO's shelf to die alone. I could build a virtual execution team to do the work.

Over the next month, I'm going to break down every piece. How the strategy chain works, how it builds ICPs and personas using synthetic customer research, how it produces content strategy and design systems that aren't generic garbage. Each post will go deep on a specific skill suite with real examples from real engagements.

And if you want to run the whole thing yourself, you can. Marketer in the Loop subscribers get access to the Skills MCP, an installable package that puts all 23 skills directly into your Claude Code environment. One config line. All the strategy, content, and creative direction skills that power this system, available to use on your own business.

The question isn't whether one person can do the work of ten. The question is whether you'll build your system before your competitors build theirs.

In next week's post: A deep-dive on using the Marketing in the Loop MCP for your brand strategy and positioning.