Marketing Masterclass with Kady Srinivasan | The Startup Operator

Kady Srinivasan

I've observed that there are three ways to build a brand. One is the big CPG model, which is basically you go and spend a lot of money, millions of dollars to raise brand awareness, and you go out of home, you do billboards, you do TV, that kind of stuff. The second is your focus on one kind of lever like HubSpot did, which is inbound marketing. They're all about inbound marketing. So, their entire brand was built on the basis of content marketing. So, they just created a content engine that just created their brand and created the buzz. The third one is the more scrappy, resourceful, grassroots kind of brand building. You make sure you identify your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and build an integrated marketing set of strategies around that ICP. So, you build a brand almost from a grassroots level, but very heavily focusing on your ICP and growing with that ICP.

Roshan Cariappa

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Startup Operator podcast. I'm Roshan Cariappa. The Startup Operator is where we curate insights on startup execution. Learn everything you need to know on how to build and scale your startup. On this podcast, I talk to Kady Srinivasan, who's a senior marketing leader. She's been with companies like Dropbox, Clavio and now Lightspeed. And she's also someone who's got a very diverse experience. She's been in gaming, entertainment, SaaS, and so on and so forth. And she has this knack for being strategic and tactical, and she can talk about these things in a way that is easy to digest and assimilate. She's super concise. So, this was a fascinating conversation, I certainly liked it, and I'm sure that you will too. Don't forget to like, subscribe, share, do all of the good stuff. Thank you so much again for all of your support, and I hope you like this.

Hey, Kady! Welcome to the startup operator podcast. Thank you so much for making the time.

Kady Srinivasan

I am excited to be here, Roshan. Thank you for having me.

Roshan Cariappa

Yeah, I've been meaning to talk to you for a while, ever since I caught your session at Sequoia, and I think we're going to talk a lot about the brand and how to build a team and support a hyper-scale startup and so on and so forth. But one thing that is very obvious from your experience, it's so diverse, right? You've been in entertainment, gaming, retail, from Dropbox to Owlet to Clavio and so on and so forth, right? Across all of these diverse experiences, what are some common threads from a marketing perspective for you?

Kady Srinivasan

Yeah, no, thank you for that's a great question. So, like I said, the industries that I've been in are really diverse. The one problem that I see over and over in all companies is even when there is product market fit, there needs to be a real clear understanding of the Ideal Customer Profile. So, in most of the cases, I've stepped into roles where we haven't really defined and gotten alignment on who the ideal customer profile is across the entire organization. So, demand is coming from one particular set of audiences, but the company feels like we need to move in some other direction. And so, because of that lack of clarity, what happens is marketing messages get mixed up.

 So, we are trying to appeal to one set of personas where our demand is actually coming from some other set of personas. The sweet spot is somewhere else. And so that causes a bunch of confusion because if you don't have clarity on who we are going after, how to build marketing, positioning around it and narrative around it, then how do you build marketing strategies around? That becomes very confusing. So that's been the main thing. The other common theme I found is that this marketing is not an island at all. Right. In any company, marketing is almost like I feel like the team is sort of a Grand Central station in a lot of ways. You're connecting to all kinds of other functions and departments, and you're to some extent directing the flow of information from outside of the company, i.e., the customers into the company and to the right people. And you're directing the flow of demand. You're directing the flow of information and feedback. So, marketing needs to consider themselves as sort of a central clearing house, if you will, of the right kind of information about our customers and feedback. And that doesn't typically happen. A lot of marketing teams are set up as, hey, go figure out this demand gen thing. Just go start doing some ads and then generate some leads.

Kady Srinivasan

Generate some leads. Yeah, I'm sure you've seen this too. You're going in as a head of marketing. You're going to have to help co-create the strategy and make sure marketing is helping drive the company strategy, not just marketing strategy.

Roshan Cariappa

Yeah, I'm reminded of that. I don't know this diagram in this old Kotler book, right? I mean, where he puts marketing at the centre of it and other functions revolve around it. But that's easier said than done, right? How do you meaningfully overlap with, let's say, a product or customer success and so on and so forth? I think most of the overlap exists with sales, of course, and then these overlaps get bigger and bigger as the organization scales. But let's say very initially for a marketer starting out, let's say maybe a series, a company and so on, what would you suggest to this marketing person in terms of overlapping more meaningfully with other functions?

Kady Srinivasan

Yeah, I think it comes down to what the company is trying to achieve. Right. As a company strategy? If the company is saying, look, we know that our product is resonating well in a certain market, and we are really dialled into that market now, we just need to raise the awareness, or we need to go out. There and tell the story about who we are, then that's a different problem than saying, let's go figure out where we have a product, market fit. Who are the customers? We have an audience. What is the sweet spot? So, it really starts with defining what the company problems are that we need to solve. I think, look, I don't want to sound as if marketers have the most strategic minds because we don't.

Roshan Cariappa

They do.

Kady Srinivasan

Right. Why? It's a distribution curve, I guess. But I'd say product and sales, everybody probably thinks they're the centre of the world for a company, right? All of us are needed, and we need to work in an ecosystem. I think what is unique about marketing is that we have different sets of skills within marketing that can flex in different areas. So, you have people who are content writers, who are super creative or designers, and then you have super scientific, analytical people on the growth side.

So, you kind of span the spectrum. It becomes easy for us to try to understand what the company needs and then figure out how to solve it. So, if you're my advice and this is what I did well, some of it I got wrong, some of it I got right when I was in a series A startup is just really zoned in on the top three problems the company is trying to solve for and invariably there is always going to be a marketing component to it and how you help the marketing component. For instance, I'll tell you one of our biggest problems was we didn't have a product market fit for one of our audiences. Marketing had to do everything from let's go survey the customers, do some ethnographic studies and understand who our ICP is, then help the product build the team. And then we got through that, and then we started to look at Churn, and Churn became a big problem and said, okay, how do we want to think about Churn? So, you can't go and do marketing in isolation of the company context, and that's the biggest thing that I think pretty much any marketing leader needs to be aware of.

Roshan Cariappa

Yeah, I think you mentioned Product Market Fit, right, and I always feel that's a work in progress, right? Because you can still be at a 15-20 or 30 million and still be trying to find product market Fit along some axis or the other right, and so what you said in terms of what is the problem statement that you need to go solve for becomes very important then, right? Because then you might have to interface more meaningfully with the product and say that, hey, you know what, you want us to put out X, but then people are really asking for Y and is that something that you could consider and so on. Of course, I mean, easier said than done.

Kady Srinivasan

No? And I think you're bringing up the right question, right, which is, even if you have an insane product market fit, your penetration in that market is probably still low. And so, you can have an almost theoretically infinite runway in penetrating into a certain market. But at some point, the cost of penetration becomes so much bigger than your cost of going to other audiences in other markets that you start to balance out.

Okay, we feel like we have critical mass in one market, in one segment. Do we now want to go address something else? You step back a little bit. The higher order question also is at what point in a startup's lifecycle do you say, okay, I'm happy with the net new ads and additions that I'm getting to the business now. I really want to start focusing on the Lifetime Value (LTV) and cross-selling the user base that I have. How do I harvest? At what point do you take that bifurcation on that road and start to focus on one or the other strategy? And that's all in my mind. It has to come from marketing. Who's driving that kind of conversation?

Roshan Cariappa

Yeah, so 2020 happened, and I was super paranoid that all our customers would churn and whatnot. So, I spent a lot of time figuring out what we can do on the customer marketing side of things, right? I mean, just support, launch adoption, success, just communicate a lot more, enable them and so on. And I can say that it's had, let's say, a non-zero probability of success in terms of our Net Revenue Retention and so on and so forth. So, I do feel that marketing can be relevant throughout the lifecycle of the customer. I mean, oftentimes, I think as marketers, we're just happy to get people in through the door and perhaps celebrate a win. But we can do so much more beyond that, I think, correct?

Kady Srinivasan

Exactly. Yeah.

Roshan Cariappa

So, all of these things, right? I mean, who gets to think about this? Is this the CMO's job, or is this the VP marketing's job? Or is this something that has to be collectively owned by the entire team? Right. And on that note, I'm always curious about what a person does when they graduate to these specific roles. Right. Because I do feel like what I did as a manager is very different from what I'm doing now as a VP. So how is that different for a CMO?

Kady Srinivasan

I think the scale of the problems is just different. Right. You're starting to look at taking decisions on bigger and bigger problem sets and having to basically step back a little bit more and think about the bigger picture a little bit more. I think that's one aspect of it. The second aspect of it is the consequences of the decisions you make are going to be that much bigger. So that's another thing that you have to know or deal with is when you are in, I'd say, an executive role, for instance, you're taking decisions as a member of an executive team, not necessarily the leader of your functional department. And that's the biggest transition that I've seen kind of people go through. I'd say the third one is, look, as a CMO, you probably have a big bunch of big teams who's directly reporting to you, but you also have a large amount of influence on a lot of people, sales or customer support or product. They are basically all the people, the ecosystem around you. So, whatever you say and do has a ginormous amount of impact.

So, you have to be necessarily thinking six months out. You're saying, based on all of these trends I'm seeing, I think this is what we can expect to get X, Y and Z, or I know that we need to do a rebrand that's going to take us twelve months. So, what do I need to do now to put those things in place so that it's going to happen in twelve months? So, the time frame of decisions, the time frame of execution just gets lengthened if you're a CMO. But the flip side of that is you also tend to lose sight of the day-to-day of the business. So, you have to be aggressively on top of details, and you have to be really understanding the minutiae, getting to know the details as much as possible. Because otherwise, it's so easy to get lost in the strategy and the top-level stuff that it's easy to lose sight of what's actually happening.

Roshan Cariappa

Right? So, a lot of startups, as they scale, right, and especially pre-IPO, they hire, let's say, an experienced marketing leader from the Valley, and that person is the CMO and becomes like the de facto spokesperson for the brand, right? Do you see that work better, or do you see a CEO graduate to that role better?

Kady Srinivasan

It all depends on the context, of course. The reason why many pre-IPO companies go for someone who has had a pedigree and experience is that taking a company public is a pretty complicated task. There's lots of moving pieces, lots of different stakeholders, and at some point, you need to have to really think very critically about the story you're trying to tell across multiple audiences and manage that. You have to manage a bunch of stakeholders.

 So, I'd say it needs a certain level of experience and expertise, which is why people automatically gravitate towards people who have done that before. Now, that doesn't mean that somebody who hasn't done it can't do it. Obviously, there are extremely talented people who have potential and can do it. It's just a matter of making sure that you're comfortable that you're taking a risk on someone who hasn't done it before, that they are the right person, the right set of DNAS to do it. I mean, one of the companies I worked for, they went public, and the CFO had never taken a company public. But he is just so amazing that he did a really amazing job in doing that. I wouldn't recommend a CEO to act in the role of a CMO. To be honest with you. I think there is some danger in a CEO kind of operating at that level. You want a CEO to be operating at the strategic level. But I would definitely, if you're a CEO, based on your appetite for risk, you either go hire someone or try to hire internally. Give your people a chance.

Roshan Cariappa

Okay, let's talk about the brand. Let's say a series A company or series B or whatever, right? I mean, you have your leads coming in demand, and the engine is pretty much set. The flywheel seems to be moving. How do you make the case for a brand? Because oftentimes, when you talk to a founder or even the exec team, a brand just seems like a lot of money with very fuzzy outcomes. Right. And you're asking to invest in outcomes that may or may not happen in, let's say months and years. Right. Not something as immediate as, okay, I launched a campaign, I got some X number of leads, and we're going to hopefully convert a portion of those leads to revenue, right? Something not immediate, something not tangible. So how do you make the case for a brand in such an environment?

Kady Srinivasan

Yeah, so look, the way I think about the brand is I've observed that there are three ways to build a brand. One is the big CPG model, which is basically you go and spend a lot of money, millions of dollars to raise brand awareness, and you go out of home, you do billboards, you do TV, that kind of stuff. And I'll talk about the specific use cases for each of those. The second is you focus on one kind of lever like HubSpot did, which is inbound marketing. They're all about inbound marketing.

So, their entire brand was built on the basis of content marketing. So, they just created a content engine that just created their brand and created the buzz. The third one is the more scrappy, resourceful, grassroots kind of brand building, which is you make sure you really identify your ICP and you build an integrated marketing set of strategies around that ICP. So, you do events for that ICP. You really focus on your customers and getting the word of mouth out from your customers. You do. Very targeted PR. You do very targeted campaigns that drive certain direct response types of ads. So, you just build a brand almost from a grassroots level, but very heavily focusing on your ICP and growing with that ICP.

So, the first one is the big blitz strategy. The pros and the use cases there in my mind are when you want to get your word out in a big way, you don't have a lot of time, and you just want to make a big splash in a certain market or back in, I'd say 2019. 2018. There used to be an arms race to own certain categories and own certain keywords, and people had lots of money. So, then you would do that. You'd go just splurge on brand and just get the word out there and all that kind of stuff. The second one is the second strategy, the use cases. You have to be very clear about what the problem is that you're solving for your customers. You know what your customers are, and you give them exactly what they want. And it does take time, but you have to be 100% invested in it. The third one, in my opinion, is the more pragmatic one in this environment, which is you don't spend millions, but you do spend on very specific targeted places to go and build your brand. The advantage of that is that you can actually measure those things. So, from a PR perspective, you can measure earned impressions. If you're doing events, you can measure MQLs and SQLs from events. So, there are ways to micro-measure the brand through all of the different tactics and activations you're putting in there. So, it becomes a lot easier, and you don't have to go make the case to your board that I'm going to spend $3 million on a brand and ask them to take a leap of faith on that, which will never happen in this market. To me, that's the way you start thinking about digesting the brand. Now if you get to a certain point where you are like, okay, now we are seeing organic traffic go up, we are seeing that our inbound lead quality has improved quite a bit, and then you say, okay, now we have an expansion opportunity to go into X, Y and Z. Then you start to get more aggressive, but it becomes part of a process.

Roshan Cariappa

Oftentimes brand is an afterthought, right? I mean, so there's a lot of moving parts and a lot of legacies that one has to manoeuvre. Basically, simply getting all of the stakeholders in a room is just so challenging in terms of thinking about it very tactically, right? How would you go about articulating positioning or building out this brand such that we can later amplify through campaigns and so on and so forth?

Kady Srinivasan

So, see, the way I think about the brand is basically there are two different aspects. One is the identity itself, the visual and the verbal identity of the brand. And then there is the spreading the word out, getting the word out, the distribution side of the brand. When it comes to visual and verbal identity, it's what does the brand represent? What does the brand stand for? How do you show up from a visual aesthetic perspective, a tone and voice perspective and that kind of stuff? And that has to be you can work on that without spending a bunch of money. All you need is some really smart people who know the customers really well, some creative people, and you're thinking through the category, the competition, what the company wants to achieve from a mission and vision perspective. But the other thing is it has to be super tightly linked to your product positioning.

So, you need to make sure the product story you're telling ties to the brand story you're telling it and becomes a seamless thing that you can do without any money, basically. Right. Of course, you can also go hire agencies who do that for you and all that stuff. But the distribution of that then is the part that we talked about in the previous couple of minutes, which is getting the word out about that brand is going to either take you resourcefulness or it's going to take you money, depending on which way you're inclined. So, in my opinion, brands should be the first part of it, to answer your question, it should not be an afterthought. It should be something that you all sit together and do as a company. Your Chief Product Officer should be completely aligned with your Chief Revenue Officer, who should be completely aligned with the CEO or the CEO on what does the brand represent, who is the company, who is the brand, what is the product, how does the product show up in the brand? It's like the colours you use, the logos you use. All of that should just come together to do it. So, in that way, the brand is kind of, first and foremost, right. I've never started a company, but I'm sure as an entrepreneur, when you're thinking about a company, subconsciously, you're thinking about the image you present through your company. So that is the brand. Basically, that's thinking about the brand. The other part of it, getting the word out there, that's the thing that you leave to your marketers and say, okay guys, figure out how to do it within a certain number of constraints. You have x $1,000. You need to show me this kind of results at the end of it, like organic or whatever, and go figure it out.

Roshan Cariappa

Yeah, no, I think, as you alluded to, right? I mean, the brand exists in some form, for sure. It's amorphous, maybe nobody has really articulated it precisely, but it exists. And what you're trying to do in this whole exercise is to identify that and then figure out ways to amplify it. Right. What are your thoughts on category creation? Is it passe now? Is it something worth investing in? We saw this whole craze in 2018, 2019 that you mentioned, right, and then I think some of that has fizzled out also. There are so many nuances to this. Right. When you're talking about a category, it's not just about you. I mean, you also have to think about your competitors and your peers and so on. Right, so what are your thoughts on category creation?

Kady Srinivasan

Yeah. Look, I don't know. I think when we were going through that craze, it didn't really resonate with me the whole idea of deliberately going out and creating a category, particularly when you don't have a product that is unique and different, it's just really hard to say that you're a category. However, to be honest with you, I can see the theoretical appeal of category creation. It's the idea that you're framing the problem statement in such a different way to your customers that they don't bucket you along with your competitors, and they think of you as something completely different, a new service, new whatever.

So, to me, the appeal of category creation is just that you're completely reframing the problem statement and the way the market looks at your solution, right? I don't think you need to go through the idea of a category creation to do that. I think you just need to be very smart about marketing. Like if you read the 22 Laws of Immutable Laws of Marketing, the Alrise book says that marketing is basically a battle of owning the perception in a customer's mind. It's about owning a single word. You want to be the one who they associate with when they think about that word. So, like Hertz, I think they give an example of Hertz as there's a gold standard. If you say the gold standard of car rentals, Hertz comes to mind that kind of stuff. So, it's about owning a word. And if you can do that cleverly through marketing, you don't really need to go through all of this category creation stuff. Now, if you have the money, of course, like I'd say, do the lightning strikes and all that stuff. In this environment, I'd be very surprised if people don't have outcomes associated with all the money they spend against brands. Sorry, just to get back to the critical question, I believe there is value in helping customers understand that your product solves problems in a different way than your competitors. I believe there's value in saying that it could be a new category. And I think particularly if you're selling to enterprises, I think there's value in trying to get the analysts behind saying, okay, this might be a new category so that you gain market leadership in that problem statement. Whether that comes under the heading of category creation or just plain good old marketing, I don't know.

Roshan Cariappa

Yeah, also when, let's say, you're disrupting a conventional space, right, for instance, let's say CRMs, right, you don't want to call yourself the same old application. I mean, you're doing something different. You're solving the same problem, but you're solving it in a different way, right? You want to sort of evangelize your approach to solving that problem. So, you want to avoid getting lumped along with all of the stuff that a legacy application in that space does. Right? So that is also a reason that people were considering it. But it's not worth the squeeze, right? There's so much of transients with these categories as well. Drift is a classic example, right? They started this whole conversational marketing thing, and then they've become so much more than that; right now, what do you call them? Marketing automation? I don't know. Right.

Kady Srinivasan

100%. The transience of the, as you said, the category itself is one thing, but it's also very hard to go and create a category. Particularly if you don't. Your product needs to be able to back it up, and your customers need to be able to use that word in an intuitive way. And so there are lots of things that happen. Category creation takes a lot of time, and by that time, the market has changed. So many different things can happen.

Roshan Cariappa

Yeah. And all of this is just nice unless someone budgets for it. Right? I mean, is someone really budgeting for that category of application? Something that you talk about a lot is aligning with the CEO. And this is particularly important irrespective of what stage of growth you're in, what stage of startup you're at. Right. It may be a seed or Series A or even further down. What are some ways to align with the CEO? I personally feel that it's either a hit or a miss. Right. Either you get with the program, or you could spend a lifetime trying to convince a person of your vision, and folks will always be at odds and perhaps never meet. So, is it bleak, or are there some tricks of the trade that you've noticed in order to sort of overlap and align better?

Kady Srinivasan

I mean, it's such a good question, and I really like the way you framed it, which is you are expected to both be an expert and therefore disagree and provide your feedback while also toeing the line and saying yes, okay, I'll do whatever it's required, type of a thing. And so that's the hardest balance, and you'll almost never find the balance. You're almost always going from one end of the spectrum to the other.

I think what's worked is some of what has worked, and because there are many things that haven't worked, I think it's constant alignment on what needs to happen. For instance, in my current job, as tactically as this, in my one-on-one doc, I have a list of the top priority projects that my boss and I have agreed on, as this is the kind of stuff that we need to go and do. And almost every week, I give him an update. Here's the timeline; here's how we are doing against these. So that might give a sense of comfort that, okay, the things that are top of mind for the CEO we are going after, and there's a plan to do that. But at the same time, in my one-on-one doc, I also have things that say, okay, here are things that we need to talk about or that I'd like us to explore a little bit further because this is what I'm seeing. So, I think that's one super tactical. The other thing that has worked for me a couple of times is when you come into a new job, you really have to put in the effort to build a marketing strategy. Right?

And I usually use this framework, AG Laffey’s framework. It's called playing to win. Yeah, where to play, how to win framework. It's been just wonderful to get people aligned. So, get the executive team aligned, get the board aligned, where to play, how to win. But the problem is every quarter. You need to go and update that because things keep changing, particularly in a high-growth environment. So, it's that constant alignment of, okay, let's step back here for a quarter. This is sort of the roadmap. This is what we are looking at. Here's what we need to do here. X, Y and Z. This is my observation.

 I think that's what it comes down to constant alignment and just being on top of the conversation with your CEO and you being the person who's proactively pushing for those conversations because the CEO has 1000 things on their mind. They're not going to, of course, track everything. If you're in SaaS in particular, you and the CRO have to go into those conversations almost super aligned, right? You have to be on the same page regarding the kind of go-to-market strategy we are going after for these SMB customers; here's the go-to-market for our enterprise customers. You have to have a very clear idea of how you both are doing it, and that helps with the alignment as well. If the CEO hears the same message from you and the CRO, it becomes easier.

I think one additional thing I'd say is when you have a great team who's working on problems, you will naturally find that some of the things that you went in with in terms of assumptions are not working or there are different ways to do it and surfacing up that work. And those assumptions and that data are going to be super helpful to elevate the common understanding across the executive team. Hey, look, we went into this program, let's call it, with this set of assumptions. Here are some ways that those assumptions are wrong. And so now let's go back and redo, or here's how we are rethinking this problem. Those kinds of things build trust, and that's what I'd say is the trust factor is the most important one when it comes down to yeah.

Roshan Cariappa

That's such a great answer. I think you have to earn that credibility, right? I mean, you can't walk in as the expert and dictate terms because you're ultimately solving a business problem, and you do have to prioritize those problems. And marketing is a tool to solve those problems. So, we'll take a small tangent here. I want to ask you about your pet peeves in marketing. Is that like a whole laundry list of stuff, or do you have your top three?

Kady Srinivasan

That's a good question. I think my biggest pet peeve is that we have chosen a profession that almost everybody in the world thinks they know.

Roshan Cariappa

How to do marketing or they use it pejoratively. Right?

Kady Srinivasan

Yeah, exactly. For the longest time, I didn't want to be known as a marketer because it was such an I think that one thing is there is so much logic and science behind marketing, but I don't think people appreciate that part. And so, you get constant feedback and advice, oh wait, this company, your competitor, is running this particular campaign, and we should be doing this other campaign and stuff like that, which sometimes is helpful, but sometimes not. I'd say that's one pet peeve.

The second pet peeve is marketers get a bad rap because we don't tend to showcase our achievements in ways that make logical sense. Like we'll say, oh, we ran this amazing campaign, and all our salespeople and customers were talking about it. That's just not going to land well with anyone, especially the CFO. So, you must be very logical and structured when presenting and communicating. So, I keep giving this coaching to marketers as a job of communicating. Your job is communicating and making sure you communicate internally because communication is probably the most important part of getting buy-in and alignment internally. So, marketers could be better communicators. That's another problem I've seen, at least internally.

Roshan Cariappa

No, I noticed that as well. I think we really suck at talking about our work, right. And the kind of impact that's had or how important it is and so on and so forth, right? I mean, we just assume that it's, hey, it's so obvious we're doing fantastic.

Kady Srinivasan

And the focus on process rather than outcome. That's another thing that gets me. I'm like, no, we need to figure out what we are solving for and then work backwards. Not try to think about an idea to do something and then figure out why we need to do it.

Roshan Cariappa

I want to talk about building the team. You talk about hiring doers versus hiring strategists. So, I personally hired a bunch of generalists when we began five or six years ago, and all of these folks have scaled up fantastically. Well, we hired experts at certain intervals of time for, let's say, SEO, paid campaigns, and so forth to get that last-mile knowledge into the system. What do you think about scaling your team? As you grow. Let's say the person who is running paid campaigns, right, can't be doing that forever. Now he or she must scale well beyond that to achieve a certain mastery of whatever they started with. But then they also have to meaningfully overlap left and right, pick up other things to do, and so on. How do you think about scaling your team as you grow?

Kady Srinivasan

Yeah, I think you hit on it, which is you have to constantly do a balance of generalists and specialists. That's definitely number one. I'd say the other thing is you need to have a balance of people who are doing but not people who do strategy, but people who coach. Balance of coaches versus doers. That's the second one, and I think as you think about it, the third one is the span of control. You just need to make sure that you're controlling for what is a set of responsibilities and scope that people have. At the end of the day, my philosophy is you need to be able to give the people in your team a chance to step up and be able to take on more.

And, as you said, there are people who will show aptitude in coming out of their tea, coming out of their depth and going broader. And those are the people making connections across different disciplines, putting it all together, and bringing that level of thinking. That's basically strategy, right, when you think about it. So, you need to give those people a chance to do more of that, to see more bridges or create more bridges, to see more connections across multiple things. But in order to do strategy, you have to be a detailed person. That's the weird conundrum because you can't build a strategy in isolation. So, if you can find more of those people, just pour all your gas in terms of coaching and mentoring and get them there simultaneously in certain functions. What I've done in the past is like ABM, right?

 You can give people the latitude to build that expertise over a long period of time. But there are so many people out there who already have that speciality that you can plug and play with. So, you hire them, you do a very critical job of picking those capabilities which have been on, you know that there is already a playbook out there. You have plenty of people who have done it before; you just bring them in. But the people who are really showing a lot of promise in doing that, you go and elevate them. Now. I've also hired VPs of Product Marketing. VPs of pricing. And there, I think when you do that, you have to be very clear about what are the outcomes and what is the DNA you're looking for from a leader of that kind of calibre. Outcomes. You can be very clear in the first year. These are the things that I want you to solve for. The DNA is the more complex part because you need to be very clear about what is the balance of leadership versus business, knowledge versus context, functional expertise, and expertise that they need to bring.

 You need to be very clear about the culture fit. It would help if you were very clear about how they are going a lot of the time. What happens is people who have done a job for many years are extremely valuable because they've done that job and seen a bunch of things. But they also come with a playbook that might not fit in with your unique context. You need to find people who can also create a playbook when it's needed, and so that's the calibre of people you're looking for when you start hiring a VP and that level. So, I think it's a mix, to be honest with you. Promote within when you find the change makers, bring in the right people at the VP level, bring in the right people at this functional capability level so that you construct the team in the way you want. And you know what, to be honest with you, it'll not work out the way you want it to. There are so many times when you are going to have to make some tough decisions. So many times, where you're going to have to say I was wrong, or business changed, or this wasn't what we were looking for, and then you're going to have to make changes as needed and be pretty ruthless about it.

Roshan Cariappa

That's such a great point you bring up, right? About playbooks, right? And this is something that I want to talk about as well, right? Let's say you hire this expert, a person who's been there, done that and so on and so forth. How much do you trust this person to come and replicate whatever they've done versus ask them to still look at things from a first principles perspective and balance the two out? And often, we're almost different from them, right? Because they've been there, and they've done that, right? Especially if you're hiring someone senior. So how do you balance those two things?

Kady Srinivasan

And by the way, this is exactly the conversation that's playing out in your CEO's head when they bring you in as a marketing person. It's you being very clear about this again; I go back to outcomes, you being very clear about the outcomes that you want and being able to say this is my vision; these are the kinds of things that are important to me. Here's where we should go, bring them on board with the vision and then sort of let them choose how they want to do it.

But at the same time, you probably have some very specific ideas. I'm just giving some random examples, right? I don't want us to over-rely on partnerships for growth. I don't want us to touch self-serve. Right. You kind of give the sandbox or the boundaries of which you are very clear that you don't want, and then you just let them go. And then, with the CEO, it does come down to having constant alignment, and you hope that that leader is doing the same. Like they're creating the alignment, they are getting close, they're building the trust on an ongoing basis.

Roshan Cariappa

You talk about not growing faster than your process, right? And being really organized about it and almost making your present role redundant. In some sense. You have to keep thinking ahead. How do you think ahead? Right. And is there something that you would suggest, as I don't know, sort of a milestone or something to think about? It's easy to say that, okay, where will we be like three or six months from now? Right. But you're still thinking very linearly. Right. So how do you sort of move that delta? How do you think ahead? How do you plan for what could be?

Kady Srinivasan

Yeah, it's such a good point. It comes down to really keeping a year on the ground, to be honest with you, on the market. So, what are your competitors doing? What are adjacent, not just your competitors, but the adjacent sort of products that may 1 day become your main competitors? How are they sort of evolving? What are your partners looking at?

Generally, partners in that ecosystem, they have a really good sense of spidey sense of what's happening in the market. How are your customer needs evolving? I remember having one conversation with a customer; they were saying, yeah, this is fine for now; your product fits my needs. But for now, it just sent my alarm bells ringing. What do you mean for now? What else is happening in your context that we are not serving your needs about? So really digging in with customers about the problems they are facing, how we are not helping them or generally what kind of problems they wish were being served by different products.

And then, honestly, the biggest threat to all of our businesses is Generative AI. Right? And that's the one that has the potential to completely change how we do things. And so, for me, it's been in the last couple of months, I'm just feverishly trying to absorb as much as I can about Generative AI, so I can understand what implications that has. So, it's things like that. And that's why as a leader of marketing, I don't do a good job of this. But you have to really carve out time to think and process and learn for the future because your existence, the company and the team depends on that.

Roshan Cariappa

Right. My final question, or pre-final, depending on how much time we have, is about building a marketing culture, right? I mean, you talk about going on an adventure, right? Letting people make their mistakes, learning from them, balancing compassion and accountability as a manager and so on. What has worked for you in building this sort of a marketing culture where people are intellectually curious, have freedom and responsibility in equal parts and so on?

Kady Srinivasan

It comes down to defining your values and making them very clear to people. One of my values is learning, passion for learning, innovation, and creativity. So, whenever I come into a new situation, I just make that super clear: this is what drives me and is what's super important. And then you build some structures and systems around that.

 So, for instance, like a rewards program, right, where every quarter at a town hall, we recognize people who have gone above and beyond, failed in some way, or created something new in some way. So, you create these systems around the value system, and building a culture comes down to consistency, right? You pick a few things, and they are entirely consistent about those sets of principles and behaviours. And then pretty soon, people start to realize, oh, this is what is expected of me and us. And you start to see amazing kinds of innovation, creativity coming out of it.

Roshan Cariappa

Right. Any books or podcasts that you would recommend before I let you go?

Kady Srinivasan

To be honest, I've been doing a lot of reading of Harvard Business Review. And there that's one thing, and then the second one that I recently discovered is a website called Modelthinkers.com. It basically outlines different kinds of business models, and it's fascinating. There are so many different applications for different kinds of things, so I suggest checking that out. I've not really had time to dig into any books, but I will send along some recommendations when I remember them.

Roshan Cariappa

Awesome. Thank you so much, Kady. This was a lot of fun. I mean, I have a ton of questions that I want to ask you. Maybe we'll do a follow-up.

Kady Srinivasan

That sounds good. Thank you for having me.