https://martymarkenson.com Marty Markenson's blog RSS feed https://martymarkenson.com/rss https://martymarkenson.com/blog/writing-jira-tickets-that-dont-suck One of my favorite Claude Code workflows as a PM. Rough idea → Claude Jira skill → ticket created via CLI. 5 minutes instead of hours. Let Claude write tickets using the code as context. No more meetings explaining what you meant. Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://martymarkenson.com/blog/paste-tickets-into-claude As a PM, I care about sprint goals, stability, and building the right thing—not who or how the code gets built. We automated PRs with Claude. Initially terrible. Tighter rules, smaller tickets, and better testing made it work. Have you set it up to actually work? Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://martymarkenson.com/blog/success-is-about-leverage "People don't pay for hard work. They pay for value." Quitting my job taught me that working harder won't make people care. Find something easy for you but magic to others. Fri, 24 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://martymarkenson.com/blog/finally-did-it Bought my dream house. The SaaS failed, but building solo taught me to ship fast—and companies pay good money for that. The software is dead. The house is real. Wed, 22 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://martymarkenson.com/blog/vitamins-not-painkillers 5 years ago I dove into real estate. VR tours → AR filters → branded GIFs. One influencer led to another, and I hit $10k/month. But realtors used the GIFs once and never came back. Failing at selling GIFs was the best education I ever paid for. Fri, 03 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://martymarkenson.com/blog/what-quitting-actually-did Quit my high-paying PM job in 2023 to go full time on a side hustle. Had a year of cash saved. But your idea is either working or not—quitting doesn't change that. Instead of killing the idea faster, I burned 12 months and savings on something that would never scale. Sun, 21 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://martymarkenson.com/blog/treating-business-like-a-game I've put pressure on myself to hit $10k MRR, launch a podcast, build a known product. But success should make life better. So I treat it like a game—get to the next level, celebrate wins, try again when it doesn't work. Way more fun. Tue, 26 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://martymarkenson.com/blog/how-i-design-without-a-designer Nope. Just me, Claude, and the right setup. Tell Claude to be an expert designer, have it interview you, ask for your design system, save as .designsystem. 20 minutes to setup. People will think you hired a professional. Mon, 21 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://martymarkenson.com/blog/i-just-killed-a-product A video editing service for realtors. Looked good on paper. The profit wasn't there. Success isn't just knowing when to push—it's knowing when to give up. Fri, 21 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://martymarkenson.com/blog/ship-fast-and-break-things Why blindly shipping products is like giving keyboards to monkeys and hoping for Shakespeare. Think first, ship second. Wed, 12 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://martymarkenson.com/blog/i-shut-down-my-online-business At its peak it made $10k/month and $56k total. Here are the lessons from shutting it down. Fri, 31 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://martymarkenson.com/blog/my-first-business-failure Gave it a shot, learned a good lesson. Finding customers is not enough - you need the right business model. Wed, 22 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://martymarkenson.com/blog/2024-year-of-new-beginnings Got married, rebuilt the Apollo Theaters website, hiked 3 peaks, finished trail races, Disney twice, Noah Kahan, closed my first product, won vacations at charity auction. Just getting started. Tue, 31 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT https://martymarkenson.com/blog/the-single-screenshot-theory To build a lean, high-growth product, you need something that can be explained in a single screenshot. Within seconds people decide: "I've got to try that" or "You need to convince me." Wed, 30 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT https://martymarkenson.com/blog/business-is-a-different-kind-of-hard Everyone says starting a business is hard. But no one really says why it is so hard. Thu, 19 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT