How to build a powerful marketing machine | Emily Kramer (Asana, Carta, MKT1)

... forget the product marketing, content marketing, partner demand gen growth. Like, forget all of it and just think of marketing as you need fuel and you need an engine. And fuel is, like, all the things that you're creating. I mean, this should be obvious, but it's the content, it's the words, it's the design in some regard. It's like all the things that you're making, all the things that are gonna add value. An engine is how you get it out to the right people and all of the tracking of that and sort of the ops work I put under engine. So you need fuel and you need an engine. And the question is, where do you have the biggest challenge right now or where do you think if you did more you would grow faster? Is it on the fuel side or is it on the engine side?

Welcome to Lenny's Podcast. I'm Lenny and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. I interview world class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard won experience building and scaling today's most successful products. Today my guest is Emily Kramer. Emily led and built the marketing teams at Asana, Carta, Ticketfly and Astro, which was a startup acquired by Slack. She was one of the first marketers to be hired at all four companies and has been instrumental in helping these companies build their marketing function, grow their products and build their brands. She also writes my favorite newsletter on marketing, MKT1, and the best compliment that I can give her is that she's a marketer that thinks like a product manager. In our chat, Emily shares a ton of concrete advice on what to look for in your first marketing hire, what the different archetypes of marketers are and who you should look for based on your business model, how to work with marketing effectively as a product team, and also what red flags to look for that tell you that your marketing team is not doing a great job. Emily is super specific and incredibly concrete with her advice, including sharing a ton of templates that you can immediately use that we link to in the show notes. I always learn a ton talking to Emily and I can't wait for you to hear this episode. And so with that, I bring you Emily Kramer. I'm excited to chat with my friend Jon Cutler from podcast sponsor Amplitude. Hey Jon.

Hey Lenny. Excited to be here.

Jon, give us a behind the scenes at Amplitude. When most people think of Amplitude they think of product analytics, but now you're getting into experimentation and even just launched a CDP. What's the thought process there?

Well, we've always thought of Amplitude as being about supporting the full product loop. Think collect data, inform bets, ship experiments and learn. That's the heart of growth to us. So the big aha was seeing how many customers were using Amplitude to analyze experiments, use segments for outreach and send data to other destinations. Experiment and CDP came out of listening to and observing our customers.