Jessica Malnik on Remote Work, AI & Beating Commodity Content

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This week on the Unscripted Small Business Podcast, host Jeremy Rivera sits down with Jessica Malnik — a positioning and product-marketing consultant, and the founder of The Remote Work Tribe, a media site, podcast, and newsletter she has run for almost six years. The conversation runs from why hybrid work is harder than going fully remote or fully in-office, to the AI risk nobody talks about — the vibe-coded tool no one owns — to the only content moat left when an LLM can write the same article you can.

Hybrid Work Is the Hard Mode, Not a Compromise

Jessica’s hot take is that hybrid isn’t the safe middle ground — it’s the hardest model to run, because it combines all the hard parts of in-office work with all the hard parts of remote. The predictable result is a company of “second-class citizens,” where the people who are predominantly remote quietly stop feeling included while the in-office crowd sets the defaults.

“I would actually argue hybrid work is even harder than fully in-office or fully remote, because you’re basically combining all of the hard parts of in-office and all of the hard parts of remote into one thing.” — Jessica Malnik

Why Teams Drown in Tools

Tool sprawl, Jessica argues, is an inertia problem. Work defaults to Slack — or, if you’re cursed, Teams and email — so things that belong in Asana, Trello, or ClickUp end up living somewhere else. A tool usually gets installed by one champion; when that person leaves without enforced documentation, the next owner installs the next tool. Her lightweight fix for the knowledge-silo problem is a weekly “three big rocks” email in every department — the spirit of EOS, Scaling Up, and OKRs — which she figures heads off sixty or seventy percent of the issues.

The AI Tool No One Owns

The AI risk Jessica thinks is under-discussed isn’t policy — it’s ownership. Everyone is quietly building their own tools in Claude Code and Codex, and then that person gets promoted or leaves. For anything agentic, she’s a firm believer in keeping a human in the loop — essential in regulated industries like legal, banking, healthcare, and pharma, and wise everywhere else.

Build Only What’s Core IP

On build-versus-buy, her filter is simple: is this core infrastructure, core IP, or a core process? If yes, there’s a real case for building and maintaining it yourself. If not — “Do I really want to vibe-code my own version of Stripe and make it ten times worse?” — buy it off the shelf and let HubSpot or Kit own email deliverability. The hidden cost of DIY is the extra hat: the first eighty percent is fast, but the last twenty percent can take days or weeks, and a small-business owner has just added “developer” and “tech support” to a rack that was already full.

Beating the 1,000x Copycat Problem

Her sharpest point is for marketers. The cautionary tale is ClickUp — an early pioneer of maximum content volume that ranked for a flood of random terms unrelated to its core; pull the numbers into Ahrefs now and the traffic is far down. Volume still works, but only when it’s intentional and tied to what you actually want to be known for. The deeper reason is what she calls the copycat problem — and the answer is information gain: original research, real quotes, internal interviews, and first-hand experience a model can’t reproduce.

“If an LLM — or even someone who is not a subject matter expert — can write the exact same piece of content, that’s commodity, 10x copycat content. Now it can be 1,000x copycat content, because anyone can do that.” — Jessica Malnik

Her practical move: ask all four major LLMs — Copilot, Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT, often via Claude Code — to generate a hundred questions on a topic, map the consensus fast, and write the angles twenty competitors can’t.

Connect with Jessica Malnik

Jessica Malnik is a positioning, messaging, and product-marketing consultant, and the founder of The Remote Work Tribe. Find her at jessicamalnik.com, subscribe to the Remote Work Tribe newsletter, or connect with her on LinkedIn.

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