Who’s Writing This

Katie Buzas. Fifteen years in product marketing, mostly in B2B technology. Senior Product Marketing roles at LiveRamp and Checkr. Currently working independently with companies, trying to find the real story underneath what they're building.

The diagnostic move she developed in product marketing — finding what's structurally true beneath what's being performed — turned out to transfer. The same skill that made a strategic narrative land was often the one that helped a real change hold in a career or a life.

Her father died in early 2025 after years of dementia taking him slowly. She's the mother of two young children. She lives in Orange County. She's writing from inside the transitions the essays explore — career, identity, parenting, AI, what comes after parent loss — rather than from the other side of having figured them out.

Katie Buzas, writer of The Layer Beneath, smiling and seated at a restaurant table with a marina view in the background.

What This Project Is

A framework. A body of essays. A growing set of resources for applying the framework to a company, a career, or a life.

The framework originates in strategic narrative practice — the structural elements that make a strong B2B narrative land — extended to include the conditions that practice often leaves implicit but that real change seems to require.

The essays explore the framework through three braided tracks:

  • Stories

  • Work examples

  • Personal experience

The three tracks aren't analogies. They're recurring structures operating at different scales.

The resources translate the framework into tools readers can apply to their own situations.

Over time, the work here is intended to support a book, speaking, and other expressions of the framework as it develops.

What This Project Is Not

This is not self-help. The writing doesn't tell readers who to become or what to do. It tries to diagnose how change works structurally and trusts readers to apply the lens themselves.

The consulting work informs the writing, but the project exists because the framework became useful far beyond product marketing.

Everything on the site is free.

Where to Start

  • The Frameworkis the structural overview of the six conditions of meaningful change and how they relate.

  • The Narrative Lens explains where the framework came from and what strategic narrative practice doesn't fully name about real change.

  • The Essays are the body of work in progress, organized by series.

  • Narrative Advisoryis for companies whose work the framework speaks to.

Subscribe to the newsletter for new essays every Wednesday.

Email katie@layerbeneath.com to reach out.