A note from our CEO

Hi everyone,

Remote is hard. Getting the team in person is an important building block of any remote strategy, but more than that, I think it's the best measurement of how successful your remote culture actually is. Let me explain.
 
Our head of marketing, Steve, wrote a beautiful post last week (check it out here) about his first Cartograph retreat, and how the culture was something he felt immediately in how quickly the team connected, gelled, and dropped into a rhythm.
 
Strong remote culture isn't new. It existed long before the pandemic-era WFH boom, most notably in Web 2.0 and online gaming communities. Even before video or voice chat, people built deep, lifelong relationships that "made it out of the chat": they attended each other's weddings and built real-life communities after years of online-only connection.
 
I consider culture a critical, core business function. What does that actually mean? Culture is how you message each other, how you use emojis, how you template your files, how you write agendas and share notes. It's where you collaborate, how and when you ask questions outside your team, and how you share findings or give shoutouts. And yeah, it's also the Slack jokes and the presentations on gloving at team meetings (we've got plenty of both). But zoom out: it's really about designing a space where the rules and safety for expression are well established. Pixar's campus was famously designed with "collision spaces" where people would run into each other and spark collaboration. Remote is no different. You just have to design it intentionally.
 
Every friend group, group chat, neighborhood block, and rec sports team has a culture. Most are created circumstantially and by accident. But to be great, especially at scale, you have to design it.
 
So when the whole team shows up for "Monday Merch Night" (wear the merch of the brands you work with), and people who've never (technically) met immediately jump into conversations and sit with folks outside their teams, you know something is working.
 
Anyway, here's a few images:

Til next time,

Chris

🚨🚨 P.S: I’m going to be on a webinar hosted by the Tastemaker Conference later this month! Susie Bulloch from Hey Grill, Hey and I will be talking about how brands can get the most juice out of Prime Day (or Prime Day maxxing, as I like to call it). Still waiting for final details on the time and landing page, but keep your calendar clear on May 28th to make sure you can tune in live. I’ll post full details on my LinkedIn as soon as they’re available. 🚨 🚨 

In this newsletter:

• Sales and Ad Spend Numbers

• The AI Prompts We Use Daily

• A Look at Cartograph’s Proprietary Dashboards

• Search Term Trends

Last Month’s Sales and Ad Spend Numbers

April was down a bit compared to March in both sales and ad spend, but that’s to be expected given March’s bump from the Big Spring Sale.

The AI Prompts We Use Daily

Everyone's talking about AI agents, Claude Code, fully-automated workflows with human experts in the loop, MCP servers, token consumption...

The most valuable AI use cases we see in our day-to-day? Not that fancy.

We asked the Cartograph team how they're ACTUALLY using LLMs to streamline their work and free up time for more valuable activities. Here are some of our favorites (all with a focus on Amazon Brand Management, though many can be adapted to other applications):

📦 Operations: Feed your inventory dashboard data + historical run rates into the LLM and ask for order recommendations by ASIN, prioritized by ad spend.

It’s also super easy to pulse-check potential warehouse issues by prompting the AI to scrape Reddit and seller forums from the last 30 days for any updates, and redirect freight shipments.

📊 Advertising: Drop in a search term report, target report, and SQP and ask it to find wasted spend, surface gaps, and flag which bids to move up or down.

And a great way to make sure you’re not missing any low-hanging fruit: "What keywords are on my PDP but missing from my ads?"

🖼️ Content: Paste in your product images, description, and your competitor's listing and ask where you're losing. Then drop in your reviews and ask whether your content actually addresses your customers' biggest pain points (it’s surprising how often they don’t).

📝 Strategy: This one isn’t as Amazon specific, but it’s one we use a lot; read a technical document, like a supplement label, and not 100% sure what it all means? Drop it into your favorite LLM and ask for a plain-English summary of key terms, differentiated attributes, anything unusual, items to watch out for, etc to make sure you’re not getting bamboozled by jargon. 

🤝 Soft skills: This is another one you can use in a ton of contexts: "Give me three ways to say no to a request on a live call while still sounding collaborative." Then: "Make it shorter so I can say it naturally." Super useful, especially if you can anticipate the situation ahead of time.

The common thread with all of these prompts is that specific inputs + a clear ask = real time savings. No custom GPTs or vibe-coded tools required.

What's your #1 go-to prompt for day-to-day activities? I’d love to hear about it - just reply to this email and it’ll go straight to my inbox.

A Look at Cartograph’s Proprietary Dashboards

We look at a LOT of data in our never-ending journey to optimize Amazon performance. While the reports and dashboards available in-platform are great, they don't always tell the whole story (or tell it clearly enough). So we built our own that pull together all the data we have available in a way that makes it easy for us (and our clients) to see what's going well, what isn't, and what the next steps should be.

We put together this doc to showcase a few of our favorite and most used dashboards. All active clients have access to all the same reports we do, so our brands can check on their Amazon performance 24/7 in a format that's easy to digest. Maybe it can give you some ideas for your own analytics needs! Click here to access the full paper.