Pitch Master: Clarify the Problem. Own the Story.
Structured questions to sharpen who your product is for, what problem it solves, and how to tell that story to any stakeholder, from sales to the C-suite.
Live, interactive session with Jammers during PMM Jam 2026 Beta
How to pitch ideas internally, make stakeholders feel smart enough to repeat your story, and turn product launches into narratives people remember
15 years launching zero-precedent products at Samsung, NVIDIA, BlackBerry. The guy who gave markets language for products that had never been named before
Hassan opened with a line it took him 15 years to write: "I give markets language for zero-precedent products." Not a job title. Not a skill set. A sentence that carries emotion, specificity, and a clear point of view. The whole session was an exercise in building that kind of sentence, for your product, your pitch, and yourself.
Internal pitching is the actual job
One of the first things Hassan put on the table: as a senior PMM, you barely talk to customers. Sales talks to customers. Your actual audience is internal. The CEO, the CRO, the VP of product, the VP of engineering who thinks marketing just chooses colors. The sales team that cannot tell the story without your deck. That is who you are really pitching to.
Everything external is just an echo of what you sold internally first. If you cannot win that room, the external message never gets the chance to land. This reframe changed how several people in the session thought about their own roles.
Excitement is the carrier. The message is the cargo.
Hassan has presented to 10,000-person audiences on behalf of Samsung. He described walking into a boardroom for the Samsung Galaxy Unpacked event, where engineers handed him a pitch for the foldable display. The pitch was: it folds, and it bends. He told them that was going to be a disaster. The story they landed on instead was about Samsung's heritage in display technology and why the foldable was the natural next chapter. The reception was completely different.
His point: CEOs and senior leaders rarely fall in love with the message. They fall in love with the excitement. A polished deck delivered flat gets picked apart. A messy deck delivered with genuine conviction gets bought. The carrier determines whether the cargo arrives.
One week into his role at Samsung, Hassan was told he would be presenting to the president. The day before, he found out it was actually the entire executive board. 180 people in an auditorium. Everyone in suits. Hassan walked in wearing a red shirt, slim-fit jeans, and sneakers, with a deck that looked like a three-year-old made it.
His opening line was not in the script: "How's everyone doing?"
The people backstage aged visibly. Someone threw the script in the air. But what happened in the room was that everyone realised they were talking to a human, not a corporate spokesperson. Shoulders dropped. People laughed. And when Hassan finished presenting Smart Switch with complete conviction about the problem it solved, someone switching from an iPhone terrified of losing their contacts, the president stood up, turned to the entire marketing team, and said: you need to support him more.
The deck was a mess. The excitement was real. The excitement won.
The Movie, the Name, the Signal
Hassan's three-part framework for building a pitch that has emotional stakes before you write a single slide.
Find the scene that captures the problem. Not a statistic, not a market size, not a TAM. A moment. Hassan described a woman walking into a hotel lobby soaking wet at midnight, asking a stranger for $40 because a cab driver was holding her luggage hostage after charging triple the quoted price. That scene killed the taxi industry in his mind the moment he witnessed it. That kind of moment, when you find it, is your movie. It is the emotional foundation everything else gets built on.
Give the person in your movie a name. The marketing leader who had their roadmap rewritten by a CFO who learned about AI on a podcast on Sunday night. Shelly. Lauren. A specific person in a specific moment. When you can name the person and picture them, you are no longer selling a product. You are solving someone's actual problem.
Find the data point nobody else is looking at. Before Uber existed, people were going to Craigslist to find strangers willing to drive them from city to city, just to avoid paying a cab. That signal told the whole story. Similarly, people copying and pasting entire essays into Google to check for plagiarism was a signal that there was a massive need to process and analyze large amounts of text. Signals are the proof that the problem is real, even before the product is built.
Sell the feeling, not the fact
Hassan was direct about this: the logical customer is the most dangerous customer. They are buying you for reasoning, and reasoning can be argued with, outpriced, and replaced. The emotional customer is what you want. They are running toward a feeling or away from one. Your job is to identify which, and meet them there.
Senior PMMs are often the worst at this, because they live in roadmaps and competitive grids. Features make you sound smart in a QBR. They make you sound dead on stage. The VP of operations who got yelled at on Friday because a report was wrong again does not want your feature matrix. They want to feel like someone understands what their week actually feels like.
Find the wedge, not the feature
When Samsung launched the AI PC, the easy angle was faster. Every new processor was faster than the last one. Hassan pushed the team toward smarter and more intelligent instead. Not how PCs had ever been talked about before. That reframe changed who bought it and why they bought it. The traditional PC buyer was not the target anymore. The wedge created a different conversation entirely.
The principle: instead of competing on the feature axis where everyone else already lives, find the angle that reframes the category. Speed was a feature. Intelligence was a feeling.
The sentence test
If Hassan's mother thinks he is selling insurance after hearing his pitch, he goes back to the drawing board. The sentence test is simple: take your one-line pitch and say it to someone who has no context. If they do not immediately understand what it is and why it matters, the sentence is not done yet.
Applied to the Uber hotel story: he would not tell his mother that an app would connect her with a stranger who would drive her somewhere. He would tell her the story of the woman in the rain with the luggage hostage. She would download the app.
Make it travel
The final test of a pitch: does it travel without you? When you get the emotion right, something changes across the organisation. Sales starts saying the same thing. Marketing presentations reflect it. Onboarding echoes it. Investor decks open with it. You are not in every room. But the feeling you created is.
Hassan's challenge to the session: write the sentence your CEO says to describe the company when you are not in the room. Then ask whether sales is saying the same thing. Whether the homepage says the same thing. Whether marketing says the same thing. If they do not, the pitch has not traveled yet. If you got the emotion right, they will all say the same thing without being asked to.
"The pitch is never the work. It is the story. And the story you get with emotion. If you have the story, the pitch will take care of itself."
Hassan Anjum, PMM Jam 2026 Expert Session
Hassan Anjum is a product marketer with 15 years of experience launching products that did not have a category yet. At Samsung, he put the foldable display and the AI PC on stage in front of tens of thousands of people, including presenting alongside Satya Nadella. At NVIDIA and BlackBerry, he built the language for products in markets that were still being defined. He gives markets language for zero-precedent products, and this session was him showing exactly how that works.