How to hire the right marketer at the right time for your startup — Mux & Segment’s Maya Spivak

Maya Spivak: You have founders who are particularly creative and some of them are design oriented, and sometimes you have these already beautiful websites and really delightful brands kind of built out before a marketer even gets there. And that comes from the founders. That's wonderful. That means you don't necessarily need to find a marketer.

Super super spiking on the creative dimension because you already have that. You've solved for that internally. One of the founders has it. And so you can focus on a marketer. That's more analytical, which is great because that's like half the battle is figuring out where you want to prioritize your skillset search.

Brett Berson: Welcome to in depth, a new show that surfaces tactical advice, founders and startup leaders need to grow their team. Their companies and themselves. I'm Brett Berson, a partner at first round, and we're a venture capital firm that helps startups, like notion, roadblocks, Uber, and square tackle company building firsts through over 400 interviews on the review.

We've shared standout company building. The kind that comes from those willing to skip the talking points and go deeper into not just what to do, but how to do it with our new podcast. In-depth you can listen into these deeper conversations every single week. Learn more and subscribe [email protected]

today's episode. I am thrilled to be joined by Maya. Maya is the head of marketing at mocks, which is an API for developers to build video experiences. Maya recently joined mux after five years at segment where she was the company's second marketer and it's head of global brand marketing and communications.

And before that, she did a stint at wealth front as a marketing director. For today's conversation. She takes a magnifying glass to the core components of a startup's marketing organization. She starts by breaking down the three pillars of a marketing roles, product, brand, and growth. She explains the leading indicators that your startup is ready to hire folks within each of these pillars, which starts with analyzing your sales motion and sizing up the founder strengths and weaknesses.

Next Maya pulls back the curtain on how she architects interview loops for each of these different roles and the unique capabilities that separates good candidates from great must hire folks. Finally, she reflects on her experience as one of the earliest marketing hires, that segment and how she built the marketing org in the first couple years to keep up with the shifting needs of the growing startup.

Today's conversation is of course a must listen to for marketers and particularly marketing leaders and hiring managers that are trying to pluck out the best and brightest to join their or. But there's a ton for other folks to learn from this interview, which explains some of the nuances of startup marketing that you might not fully appreciate.

I really hope you enjoy this episode. And now to my conversation with Maya, thank you so much 

Maya Spivak: for joining us. Thank you for that. 

Brett Berson: So I thought we could start the conversation by talking at a high level. How you think about the different types of marketing roles or skill sets that a given company might need to hire over the course of its life?

Maya Spivak: Well, when I get this question from founders, for example, the first question I lead with in return question for a question, not an immediate answer is. What is your sales process? And the reason I ask that is because that will determine the types of marketers that you want to consider hiring first, what might come later and thinking through the path that a marketing organization will take as it grows for your company, if a company.

Has product adoption that is led primarily by the sales team they're selling into the enterprise. They have to get prospects on the phone. They have to convince them that there's value there. They have to convince them that the product is worth buying. It's kind of a long sales process. It's a different type of marketing organ than one that you would assemble.

If you had a company. That was selling a product primarily directly to the end user. And that would be the whole product led growth oriented company that we're talking about in today's hype cycle, where product led growth is everything. So I would differentiate between the different sales processes.

That are necessary to grow the company and then talk about marketing. So let's go back to your question, regardless of the sales process, maybe you don't even know what the sales process is going to be yet. What are the different kinds of marketers that you might be curious about so that you can orient your knees or at least prioritize your marketing needs based on what you think a person's skillset might be.

There are. Different pillars of marketing, but if you really had to shake them through a sieve, I think the major differentiation would be these three pillars and the three pillars would be. Product marketing growth, marketing and brand marketing. Sometimes people call it corporate marketing. So those are the three big ones.

Brett Berson: So before we go into the three, I like sort of the framing of starting with like, ultimately, what is your go to market motion and maybe to dumb it down. I'm hearing you say what we might think of as more bottoms up oriented versus maybe more traditional or tops down being the two simplest dividing lines.

Maybe you can talk about. How those two different dominant motions would impact the way that you think about these three different pillars of a marketing 

Maya Spivak: org? Yeah, totally. They're different because the fundamentals of what a marketing person or the marketing tactics that they need to orient around are from different skillsets.

So for example, product. Primarily you're selling directly to the end consumer. And so the number one thing that you need is for these people to be aware of the fact that you even exist, that you have a company that is trying to sell them a certain product and that they today can start using it to make their lives better.

So you need a marketer that is. Or knows how to, I don't know if they're able, but like they at least have the good ideas about how to reach these people and what marketing tactics to use in order to get your brand in front of these potential consumers. So sometimes these folks are more oriented towards growth.

They know, growth tactics, they know best practices. They're familiar with performance marketing, they buy ads. They have bought ads in the past. They do social media marketing. They do SEO and SEM. They have experience in email marketing, all sorts of tactical strategies to directly reach consumers. But if you're talking about a top-down sales motion where you need to go hunt and find people and convince them that their time is worthwhile to spend with you in the learning process to get to this place where, um, maybe they'll elect to get a demo or something of that nature, and you really need to spend a lot of.

In convincing mode and usually more times kind of a longer sales process. It takes longer to convince them. And throughout that time that you're spending convincing you need different marketing materials. A lot of these materials are going to be education oriented. Now you have to start writing papers, writing case studies, collecting testimonials, writing, fantastic website copy that comes across as genuine and authoritative and credible.

And finding, supporting evidence and finding customers or other users that are willing to put themselves out there for you and endorse your product. And maybe they'll join you in a webinar, or maybe they'll join. You live at an event and vouch for you on stage. And so they're spending a lot of time creating these types of materials and figuring out how to make use of these materials and these assets, these pieces of collateral.

And so there is a more product marketing oriented skill set where it's very content-based and it's very authoritative in that it takes a stance on your product and creates these definitions from scratch. And so you can see how this is a different type of person than the one who spends the majority of their time on growth marketing tactics.

One of them is kind of a systems thinker, and one of them is a creative. And so you can find yourself with two very different people and skill sets. So it's good to figure out which one you're actually looking for before you look for a marketer in general, do 

Brett Berson: you find that brand marketing and product marketing are quite different?

For example, somebody that's a product marketer and a top down enterprise, probably higher ACV type product world looks very different than a bottoms-up product marketer that has generally the purchase price is kind of more of a transactional sale, lower ACV, et cetera. 

Maya Spivak: So the brand marketer might be a little bit of a bridge between these two pillars in general, where you find that a brand marketer can potentially be the more flexible one where they exist within both sides of the brain.

Right? Right. Brain left brain, the creative one, the analytical thinker. And then the brand marketer is somewhere in the middle where they're capable of. Creating campaigns that are oriented towards selling quickly, creating a campaign that's oriented towards generating awareness slowly, but over a long period of time, the reason the brand marketer doesn't necessarily live in one or either world, but a world of their own is because there's that creative component, which is a skill set onto itself.

They're able to guide the aesthetic creation of a lot of these materials of your website, of your assets and collateral that are the actual production of it. Like the difference between when it pops out of somebody's brain into a doc in the written word. And the difference between when it gets actually laid out into its proper form, the one that you distribute to the public, like there's a pretty.

Wide chasm that can be crossed when you have a good and creative brand team working on it. And so. Is one product marketer capable of being a brand marketer possibly is a growth marketer capable of being a brand marketer. Possibly. It really depends on whether they have that creative component and what type of person that they are.

It's going to come down to the individual, not to get into Ted lasso the show on apple TV, but all people are different people. So all marketers are different marketers. And so those three pillars are the broadest stroke differences. 

Brett Berson: So before we get into each one of those in, into a little bit more detail, how do you think about sequencing of hiring these roles?

Hiring these skill sets, hiring a generalist marketer that then hires these skill sets underneath him or her. I'm thinking that you spend a lot of time talking to founders who are maybe at a 10 or 15 person company. Maybe they have a million in ARR and they're going to build the marketing function for the first time.

And it's always a very tricky sequencing question, particularly when you're hiring one or two people early on and you're not hiring 10 people. And then you have obviously a marketing leader with these three functions that sit underneath them. And so I'm curious how you think about that sequencing question.

Maya Spivak: You think about it in terms of its context. So. The majority of founders that I speak to are exactly at that stage. There may be 10 people in, and they're thinking about hiring their first full-time marketer and who is that person going to be? So the first thing that I caution with is find somebody who has done this before, but not so many times.

And for so long that they're very, very far removed from actually. Doing any IC level work. Now that's not to say that you're hiring a marketing leader and you expect them to do IC level work forever or even for a year, but they should just be prepared to do at least a little bit for at least a few quarters to get you moving and to get some quick wins for the company while they figure out who it is most necessary to hire next.

So the way I think about it is what type of marketer is most complimentary to the founder. Uh, to the other people that are in place at the company and to the sales motion. So why is it important to be complimentary to the founders? Well, at that stage, when there's five or 10 of you or 15 of you, you already know what skill sets are available and what are the.

Uh, the founders and what, there may be inner most fun selves love doing. You have founders who are particularly creative and some of them are design oriented. And sometimes you have these already like beautiful websites and really delightful brands built out before a marketer even gets there. And that comes from the founders.

That's wonderful. That means you don't necessarily need to find a marketer who is super, super. Biking on the creative dimension, because you already have that. You've solved for that internally. One of the founders has it. And so you can focus on a marketer. That's more analytical, which is great because that's like half the battle is figuring out where you want to prioritize your skillset search.

If you don't have that creativity in place, and you're struggling to explain your product. And maybe you're super technical and maybe your product is super technical. What you're looking for is a person who is technically adept, who is able to grok your product is excited by it. They don't have to be able to rebuild it.

They don't have to be that level of technical, but they have to understand how it works such that they can turn that understanding into creative and interesting analogy. That they use to represent it, because if you don't have any creative process already in place, you're depending on a person to bring that with them or find you, those resources find you the agency or the freelancer or the contractor, who's going to translate the brilliance of your product into a marketing website that you'll use to sell against and marketing materials.

Solve for what you already have, or figure out what you already have so that you understand what you need the most. The next thing as we talked about, what's the sales process. What kind of marketer do you need for their past experience to mostly be? Is it a consumer brand builder that you need, or is it a diehard product marketer who sold a couple of different super-technical infrastructure products before?

Or is it a growth marketer? Game to their way around various product led growth hypergrowth companies in the past, because that's what your company is going to be. That's who I would hire first. And then let them help you figure out what your quickest wins are going to be so that you can focus on those quick wins together with them while building out the rest of your team for the long run.

Brett Berson: When you hire that first person, do you find that it is important that you have confidence, that that person can build a small team around? And thus, they have to be somewhat T-shaped or it's better to focus on this very specific job to be done. The very specific gap that you currently have, and if they can figure out the rest of the marketing org or build and manage and hire the first two to three people, that's a cherry on top, but it doesn't really matter.

It's about whatever the next 12 months sort of job to be done in marketing. 

Maya Spivak: I do favor the T-shaped marketer or someone who has extensibility. I think that so many things can change in the earliest stages of a product that it is much more likely that six months after hiring a person, you will decide to change your entire go to market motion, or you will decide to introduce or expand your product line, or you will decide to completely change your pricing and packaging that you will.

If you have committed to, to bring a person on board, full-time you want to be sure that it will not be difficult for them to adapt to whatever change that is happening, because it will almost certainly happen quickly. And so flexibility, resilience, extensibility in a marketer is what I would over-index on, especially in that first hire.

And yeah, that's the type of person that's going to be able to lead a team when it's time to build a team because. They'll know how to assemble the next folks in the ranks because they have enough flexibility and extensibility to know what positions need to be filled temporarily. Fill them themselves, pull back when it's time, when they can hire opportunistically or figure out what the right priority is to hire next and out.

Brett Berson: So let's flip back to the marketing pillars of product marketing, growth, marketing, and brand marketing. And maybe we can go in turn and talk about each one of those in a little bit more detail. And maybe, you know, when you're thinking about hiring these folks, what does great look like for each one of them?

Maya Spivak: Okay. We will start with product marketing, a great product marketer. Well, let's talk about what a product marketer is. So a product marketer is a person that is the bridge between the product teams that are guiding the roadmap for your company of what it is that you're building and what you're trying to sell to the world and the sales teams, or directly the consumers.

In some cases, the folks that are actually buying it or trying to convince people to buy. What it is that you're selling and the way that they do this is they create the materials and they create the guidance and the education and the copy and the message that you use to explain what it is that you're selling so that the world understands it and finds it as valuable as you're trying to convince them that it is so a great product marketer fundamentally has the ability to understand what it is that you're building.

I know it sounds silly. I've met people in the interview process. It's not like it's common that they make it all the way through, into these organizations, but product marketing kind of has this broad name and so different types of companies do it just slightly differently. I think Google has become super famous.

Building the prototypical product marketer. In fact, like creating an Marissa Mayer, invented the entire program, product marketing as a philosophy and as an entire rotational program at Google's decade and a half. And that's great because that's what the entire industry has circled around as what a product marketer is.

But having that framework for understanding what their capabilities are doesn't mean that the person who does that job necessarily has the correct aptitude for the technical details of a product. So for me, a great product marketer has high technical aptitude, and that translates into these like complex ideas.

Sometimes yourself. Products that are super sexy. I don't know. There are product marketers out there who are selling self-driving cars, robots, crypto, and FTS. Right? So they're, they're selling. What's cool right now. And then there's product marketers who are selling stuff. That's not sexy at all.

Infrastructure data investment services. I'm naming industries that I've worked in before, because they're not universally sexy to all people. I was completely enamored with each one of them because the products made sense to me. So, so a great product marketer understands what it is that you're selling.

I can explain it back to you. And when you explain your vision of the future as a founder, the future of your industry, of your product, the company that you're building, they light up because they're excited about it. It's not just a person who knows the playbook of what product marketing is and how.

Build a go-to market plan. It's not that it is a fundamental understanding and excitement about the product that is being. Which gets translated in the copy, the messaging, how you sell the materials that you create to help sell. So there's that, and they're a good writer. That's a necessary component as well.

So do they light up when they talk about it and can they write, well, those are two absolutely important components. Everything else can follow from reading along what that Google framework is of what you should be doing 

Brett Berson: with that sort of context about what the role is all about or what great looks like.

What is your interview or assessment process, and maybe we can take it from the top down, how that maps to those different skill sets or disciplines 

Maya Spivak: interviewing assessment for product marketing in particular, there's always, or I would encourage. And this is something that we did a lot at segment, for example, a.

Technical component. So it's not necessarily, it's not like a test. It's not like a whiteboard test that engineers do a live where they're coding live, but there's some exercise that you can figure out that's right for your company, which will help you to assess the level of technical aptitude that a person has.

So maybe it's something like you give them a vague outline of. Uh, product that you might release in the future, or you show them a page from your site. So basically like an under built page from your site and ask, what is it missing? What would you recommend changing about this particular product page or a one pager?

This is what we had at segment was we had a one pager about a particular feature and we asked a person to read that one pager and. Come back, ready to answer some questions about that feature. And so there was no tricks involved. It was really, if you read this one pager about this one particular feature in our product, do you understand what it is that makes that feature special?

And so I remember there's one question in particular to which the answer was the data has to have it's time series. It has to be stamped with the time or timestamp brother. Otherwise it just won't work. And so. You either get that or you don't, the answer is binary. And so that was like one test that made it really easy to not pass people through.

So there's something like that for every company. Maybe it's about your feature at Stripe in the earlier days. I don't know if they still do this, but they had everybody as part of the interview process read through. Uh, customer support question and try to answer it how you would try to answer at this point.

I mean, I think you have access to the entire repository of publicly available customer support. So it's not like you're flying dark, but it's on you to figure out the context of the answer that you're looking for so that you can find it where it is and recompose it. And they'll see if you understood the concept.

So there's something there where you're testing for aptitude at this beginning level where you've just arrived. Do you grok what's going on enough to comply? The correct answer. I think that's high up there in terms of an assessment of whether or not a person has the correct level of technical aptitude to be a product marketer.

And then the rest of it follows, which is if there's a written component, how well was it written if it's just verbal communication? Was it clear? Is there depth of thought that you can see demonstrated it's it's kind of like that, but it all follows from the technical assessment, which is probably key to the product marketing interview.

Brett Berson: Where does that fit in your interview process 

Maya Spivak: is in advance or during the on-sites. So you're going to have this recruiter prescreen, then you're going to have the hiring manager screen and all of that takes place before a person advances to the onsite and the onsite I'm using that in the same context as the full-on zoom panel or, or whatever it is that we do in lieu of another.

Since everybody's working from home, but normally this would be your on-site standard panel for all product marketers who are invited to the office. And you might have a standard for who does this review at segment. It was for example, somebody from the customer success team would be. The person who does the assessment of that one feature that we gave the candidate a one pager about, they would ask a series of questions and the series of questions would be the same for everybody.

So it was very fair. Everybody got the same one pager and everybody got the same series of questions. So to the extent that nobody's figured this out over, I don't know how many years we were running. The same question for and posted on glass door is kind of amusing, but that's the way it was. Hopefully they changed it after this podcast comes out.

Brett Berson: You mentioned that the top of the process is sort of a standard hiring manager screen. In this case, a product marketer candidate. I assume you, over the years, you've done a bunch of those in as you're exploring the work that they've done. What are you looking for in those answers? 

Maya Spivak: Understanding of the key criteria for success.

So what sold product? What was their category? How did they sell product in that category? How are they talking through their sales process? To me, you would actually be surprised how many times I've asked the question. So what is link company, whatever company that they're coming from or two companies ago.

I'm not familiar with that one. Can you tell me a little bit about it? And candidate will say something like almost completely unintelligible and that. A shame because that's your entry level way to win is your great elevator pitch of your company in the past or the one that you're still at. If it's obscure to explain still, I think that's a giant red flag is the product marketer or the marketer from any company shouldn't be able to have the easiest time explaining what it is.

Brett Berson: When you think about hiring criteria for product marketers, do you look for something different in your first product marketer versus your second or third or. Yeah, good 

Maya Spivak: question. Probably a certain level of flexibility, sensibility, so process orientation, or just somebody who is very analytical and rigid with their playbook and has come from a larger company and has more experience with a very like rigorous approach.

Two things. Every step of the process has to go in the correct order and so on and so forth. It's a beautiful thing. And it's great when you find that person, but they're maybe not the ideal, first hire or better in the later stages because in those first stages, Like we briefly touched on before so much changes in the earliest phases of a company growing that you want your product marketer to have some level of flexibility so that it doesn't personally feel like a huge mental load or hugely stressful for them, for their like wellbeing when they're used to regimenting their.

Processes a certain way, their workflow around their product marketing and how they take a product to market. But your company is just not at that stage yet. So flexibility. I would look for first a certain openness to change constant change resilience. Before 

Brett Berson: we move on to digging into growth marketing into the interview loop that you developed for that and what you look for in a growth marketer early on.

We didn't really talk about the inverse of the process, which is selling and convincing really talented in this case, product marketer. Which at least in my experience in this market have many opportunities to join your company. And I'd be interested in, are there specific ways that you think about convincing great product marketing talent to want to join your company that you're working at or 

Maya Spivak: helping grow?

I think it's really incredibly important to show them the product demo demo demo. If your product is. And they are smart person. There is no better way to convince them that. Showing them how it works. I'm talking about behind the website. The website is ostensibly. The reason that you're looking for a marketer in the first place, it's the first place that I'm going to go to judge or try to judge whether or not the leaders.

What they're selling or how to communicate what they're selling, but if they don't and the website needs some work or it needs a lot of work. It's okay. I still have an open mind because I understand that that's what I'm supposed to do. Like that's why I'm getting on this call, so, okay. You haven't convinced me with your web.

'cause you need help telling these stories and making it make sense. And this makes sense to everybody involved in this interaction. So how are you going to convince me? Well, hopefully yourself as a founder are gregarious and interesting and empathetic and thoughtful, and you can relay all this on the phone.

Like that'll get you far. But nothing will get you farther than an actual demo. And I've actually seen people skip that too. So show me the product. I want to see how it works. And that is usually the most compelling thing. Do not skip that. If you have a good product 

Brett Berson: and if not go make a good product and then go hire a product marketer.

Maya Spivak: Exactly. Baseline right that's foundation. So 

Brett Berson: that's a really good exploration of early product marketing, hiring. Let's flip over and talk about growth marketing. And you explained this a little bit at the start of our conversation, but maybe we could again go back to you're an early team you're hiring your first or second growth market, or what should you be looking for?

What does great look like in this second pillar of marketing? 

Maya Spivak: So in the second pillar of marketing, you are trying to grow. Let's say from the bottom up, this is why you're looking for a growth marketer first. And so this is the person who tactically is aware of all of the ways to reach your audience and familiar with how to actually deploy these tactics.

I say familiar with, because at the very least, even if they've. Not personally done it for a while. They have freelancers contractors agencies that they know to be good, that they can deploy quickly. Cause the thing about hiring growth marketer is this is the type of work that you should be able to get off the ground relatively quickly.

On the one hand hiring a product marketer first is kind of this indication that you need to build your materials. Whereas if you hire a growth market, First you in theory already have materials because it growth marketers, not building them for you. A growth marketer is the one that disseminates. So, if you have your materials in place, meaning you have your website, you're relatively, or you have several pages of it, whatever that do the sale for you.

And it's easy to sign up, like then you have enough for a growth marketer to take and try to disseminate to the world and put money behind and try to get people. To convert and to use it. And once they do or don't convert the year of growth, marketer also has the ability to understand, or at least posit why they're not converting and all the different ways that they might hope to tweak the process for them tweak the entire journey to get them to convert a little bit better if they're coming in through this and this way, a little bit faster, if you give them this and that offer.

And so this person is. Oriented towards quicker, more tactical approaches to their job, that this person is very checklist oriented. And that's great because the consumer that you're trying to convince should be, it should be a quicker close than your long drawn out sales process for a large average contract value like enterprise software sale 

Brett Berson: for product marketing.

What is your interview loop look like for this style of 

Maya Spivak: market? For this style of marketer. I also very similarly want to see past results. To some extent, it's almost easier for them to show you past work or for them to talk you through past campaigns, because they should have a lot of different ones to pull from.

They should be able to explain to you what kind of advertising strategy worked and didn't work for them, how they thought about. Allocating their ads budget. How did they do performance marketing? What was their stance on SEO? What was their stance on content? Like they should have these stances because they would have figured out their promotional mix at some point more than once in the past.

And they'll be able to point to it. Some of it's still live and maybe some of it's been retired, but there's some historic version of it that you can look at and see what's worked. And what hasn't, that is a big one. And then there's nothing really written about it. But the exercise is quick in that you can pose more or less the same question to every growth candidate that you're interviewing, which is play around with our site.

I would love for you to walk me through some quick wins that you hypothesize would work for us. To get people to sign up better or, you know, we're experiencing a softness in signups for this particular thing. Maybe it's a feature. Maybe it's a product. Maybe it's just, they're not signing up for a demo.

And instead they're just signing up for the self-service option. How could I get more people to sign up for a demo and see. See how they walk you through the site, a baseline good growth marketer will try your sign-up process before they get to the interview with you. In other words, they know they have an interview with you and the correct prep work in advance is to sign up for the product if they haven't.

Yet, if you get to an interview with a growth candidate that hasn't done, your signup flow, a huge red flag dismiss that it's over at that. 

Brett Berson: So let's chat a little bit more about that last pillar of brand marketing. And again, what great looks like and how do you assess if someone is great in 

Maya Spivak: this pillar?

Okay. So let's clarify what a brand marketer is. A brand marketer is the person that. Grows and proliferates the Rand that you are trying to build. So I used many of the same words in the definition, not a best practice, but essentially what it boils down to is this the way that the outside world describes and thinks about your company usually comes down to it's.

Assessment of your reputation, your look, feel your voice and your tone and what it remembers, what it thinks about when it thinks of your company name. If you've even gotten that far, if people know your company name, that's your brand. And so the brand marketers are the people who are responsible for that standard setting, that standard building processes around it, and then proliferating it, transforming all of the materials, all of the assets, all of your publicly facing anything.

Everything that's publicly facing, making sure that it adheres to that standard so that it's consistent. So that includes in a lot of organizations, the creative piece, which is the design. Do you have marking designers that actually are responsible for the marketing website and how does it look and feel?

What is the brand, your actual company brand, your logo, your typography, your standards for how things are. And feel then in some places they also will have the build-out. Right? So you'll have the front end engineers that actually manage the site that is being designed by the marketing designers. Then you have other marketers who are marketing campaigns and just brand marketing in general, which is the creation of any sort of like marketing programming that is designed to elevate awareness of your brand.

This could be your big user conference. This could be your. Outdoor advertising all of your out of home, these billboards and your subway takeovers and your, your direct mail, the look, and feel, whatever the theme is of the campaign. What is the creative on it? Is it, what's the tone of it? These are the people that think it up.

Then they're the ones that work with the. Designers or an outside creative agency to bring it to life. And then you also have the supporting element of the production piece. So there's like a chasm between when the idea is born and when the public actually sees it. And that chasm includes the entire design process, the entire production process.

Laying it out getting prints, getting proofs, like all that jazz, um, coordinated by program managers, like very important production job in the movie world. It's like, this is the producer in the marketing world. It's actually also usually called a producer or a programming. And then you also have communications is typically a piece of it.

So you have your people who do PR, which is public relations, AR which is analyst relations for those B2B products. And in some cases I R, which is investor relations for those larger companies that are public or on the verge of going public, they have a whole separate media process, which is that investor relations piece that's brand marketing.

And what is great in brand marketing? I think. Comes down to the line that ties all the brand marketers together under that umbrella is creativity. And it doesn't mean that you have to actually be able to like yourself design or yourself draw or be an artist, but it is that your mind works in this way.

That is creative, such that you are the person that generates ideas. So on the one hand, you can have the knowledge that. Wouldn't it be cool if we started a podcast, like anybody can have that thought, but a person that is creative, it doesn't matter if they're a brand marketer or not like the difference between a creative person and a non creative person.

Is that after? Oh, wouldn't it be cool. If we had a podcast, this is, this is the rest of that process of if we had a podcast. And it had to be this theme in the world of existing podcasts. What would actually be interesting to the market today and actually coming up with those ideas and being able to write the concept, right?

Like a pitch, do an entire pilot, if necessary, a person who is able to create a seed of an idea and then water that seed until it has an actual. And not everybody has that. It seems trivial when you talk about it like this, but if you actually were to assess the different skillsets of people that work around you, not everybody has that creative component and that's okay because they probably over-index on the analytical component.

Not everybody is. In fact, very few people are this unicorn that is both analytical, organized, and creative, able to come up with your seed concept, able to execute it and create a beautiful project plan and execute against that project plan and be like a fantastic communicator. It's beautiful when you find that person, but they're very rare.

So your brand marketers, the best ones can demonstrate, create. 

Brett Berson: Are there specific questions you like to ask when you're interviewing brand marketers that maybe is different than what we talked about in product marketing or 

Maya Spivak: growth marketing different, not particularly. I always will ask about the.

Conception of an idea. And the idea is they were all described to me, different ideas and different projects that they have shepherd it across the line or lead or create from scratch. But what I'm looking for with a brand marketer is how out there, how out of the box was something that they worked on.

And not just worked on, but then if they tell me that they're the ones that had this idea, my mind is blown. There is a very famous in my mind. It's very famous video that Dropbox do. Maybe eight years ago now, I don't know exactly how many years ago, at least six. And it was Muppets. And I don't know. Have you ever seen this video it's life at Dropbox?

It's your like prototypical video that you would put on a come work with us page where the recruiting team is trying to get more people to apply for jobs because they're hiring had a crazy clip and they'll put up a video and it'll be like, this is what life is like working at this company and the production.

Quality of these videos varies. But even if they all were high production quality, like at some point they stopped being very creative because everybody understands that if you have enough wherewithal, you could put together kind of a cool video or mostly nice seeming, people are saying nice sounding things about what it's like to work at a company there's not too much creative variation.

Unless there is. And this Dropbox example is a really good one because they used Muppets to tell these stories. So instead of people, they actually built these puppets, they look like Muppets. It was just kind of quirky and really odd. They were seeing the exact same things as they would be seeing if it was live action, they were moving throughout the Dropbox office.

But this is one example of how. They were just creative and interesting and innovative and did something that nobody else had done. And that example, this six to eight year old example I have been using as like my opening volley for let's get creative with what video we put on our talent page for years.

And I could tell you, honestly, it blew my mind when a week and a half ago I met the woman who was responsible for that video. And she works at mux with me now that was just kind of serendipitous. She said, have you ever seen the Muppet's video on Dropbox? And I'm like, are you kidding? I love that video.

And she blushed because she's like, I did that video. And my mind was blown because I have just finally met a woman who creatively inspired me for years. That's an example of creativity and now we work together. So I couldn't be more than. 

Brett Berson: So now that we've explored the pillars of product marketing, growth marketing and brand marketing, I thought it might be interesting.

Maybe you could share a little bit about how all of these ideas are expressing what you're doing in your role at mocks. And I think what's great is I think in terms of full-time you're a few months in. And so I'm sure this is all the stuff that's clogging up your head all the way back to, like, what is the product?

What is the to market motion? How does that translate into what order we're hiring? And maybe you could use how you're thinking about things in real time at mock stick, bring some of these ideas to life. 

Maya Spivak: Yes, totally. So the way that I think about these ideas, that monks is primarily in terms of how to prioritize hiring for hypergrowth.

So mux is the wave developers build video online. Infrastructure. If you are a developer at a company that is trying to incorporate video as a component of your product experience or your customer experience, this is things like, for example, learning on e-learning. The fitness, any experience that you're building live concerts, live music, anything that you're streaming you want to build video in because that'll make your customer's experience better, or that'll just make your app actually the app that you envision you could use Max's API to do that really easily.

And as you might imagine, because. Of the nature of the product being video, we've experienced an incredible boom over the past year and a half, primarily because the rest of the world caught didn't, it's not that it caught on. Everybody knows that video is a hugely valuable and immersive way to spend your time, but nobody has had to spend so much of their time in front of video.

Like we. All had to, as humankind on our globe the past year and a half. So experienced, incredible growth in product adoption over the past year and a half. The challenges now in terms of marketing are just like scaling the org with the aggressive, scary. Of the growth in the company. So we have to support this massive influx of new interest.

We have to scale processes that we've never had to scale before, like prior to the past 18 months. And we have to adopt. workflows that makes sense across a rapidly growing and mostly remote because we all are remote now organization for launching new product. Our go to market motion from a marketing perspective has to be refined to a place where it's not chaotic and noisy.

Whenever we launched new features and products. People can have an easier time of these releases and calendaring them and making sure we're all on the same page and making sure the release schedule is not overburdening one department. It's not demanding too much time out of the design team so that they can actually attend to the rest of their roadmap.

In addition to just launching products, the way that I'm thinking about it now is primarily from the lens of prioritization. What are the holes that I need to fill in the next quarter? In order to make everybody's workflow work better because things are happening so fast. So I'm looking at the org as I inherited it.

Right? Like who did I get? And so I'm looking across the people that I have, what are their skillsets and the type of person that they are going back to the very beginning, what are their major strengths and where are the areas that I can hire more people to come. Um, because every individual is different and what am I just completely lacked?

What do I actually just not have at all? And the answer to that is I just mentioned, I'm hiring for field marketing. What am I hiring for next brand marketing right now? I am the brand marketing team. So I'm hiring for senior brand marketing leader to help create those new concepts. Tell those new stories about mocks and about video and about data for video.

So it's all about what do I currently have the context, which we also talked about, what strengths are existing on my team? What gaps do I need to fill and how do I prioritize those gaps around my immediate needs and the immediate needs of our company. 

Brett Berson: Glen, a little bit about how you've designed the org thus far, and maybe how you're thinking about that evolve.

Maya Spivak: Well, when I first arrived, we had just hired our second product marketing leader right now. Max has two major product lines, video and data, which is analytics for streaming video. And each of those products has a dedicated PMM, but as we grow. Of course we can stack people on each team and that's natural, but as we grow, we're going to have an increased need for focused attention, paid to certain segments of our customer base.

So for example, having 100% of a person over product marketers, attention on the entirety of the product is fine. But what about the differentiation between. The entire process that it takes to launch a new product or launch a new feature and just educate. Around that versus all of the follow on work that has to happen in order to support the sales of that particular product in the different segments that we sell it to.

So like the different marketing efforts aimed towards the startup audience, different marketing efforts in towards mid-market and enterprise audience that wants that get that sales assist. If the chasm grows too wide. And there's just so much to sell. You start to need to figure out how to reorganize your product marketing org, such that there's a person or an entire team that's concerned 100% of the time with how to proliferate the core product marketing, like the actual content and messaging and sales materials.

Into the different segments that you're selling across, and maybe your company is not organized across selling to different segments. Maybe you're selling into different industry verticals, or maybe you're selling into specific categories or something like that. But you might need to re organize the way you split up your team based on who you sell to as opposed to what you're selling.

That is something that is in the process of evolving I'm at max is we're adding in that layer, focus to how we built the PMM org. As it grows, then we have demand gen dimension and growth together, and a nascent brand marketing organization. 

Brett Berson: What's the difference in your mind between demand gen 

Maya Spivak: and growth.

It can be very semantic and honestly depends on the company. It depends on what type of product that it is that you're selling. But in my experience, the main difference, it's completely a terminology thing. So growth normally encompasses all of the experimentation oriented marketing tactics. It's like.

What are the quick wins that we could have to move people through this funnel faster to increase activation. It's like, it's all the science of changing the way people take in your product or use it or sign up for it or whatever it is. It's very experimentation oriented and the experiments that can go across many different marketing mediums, you can have emails.

You can have ad experiments, you can have landing page experiments. You could have copy experiments. You could have series of webinars that you put. You could have, you know, sales motions that you're trying out and you're testing. And generally speaking, it's these short term oriented experimentation plans that once you go through them, you have an idea of whether or not they worked.

Did they, or didn't they. And if they did, maybe you're going to figure out a way to scale them. And you hand that over to a team that scales them. And so in my experience, the demand gen, and when you're calling it demand, gen is like the team that scales them. So maybe the differentiation. The growth team are the folks that are really happy in this place where they're experimenting and trying and testing again again, again, and the demand gen team are the operationally thinking folks that are the ones that are repeating, repeating, and scaling, repeating refining, optimizing fine tuning, that landing page process.

That ABM, that successful ABM experiment that successful email to sales person to meeting setup path, that one growth person or entire growth team like hacked together and figured out that it worked. So it really is just semantics. You'll find. Slightly differently in each place. Growth tends to be like the hipper term, more new school.

Marketers tend to like the word growth for it. But I think demand gen really implies repeatability, scalability and programming, where you create programs out of. 

Brett Berson: So we're talking a little bit about how you're thinking about things currently at Mox. Most recently you spent something like six years at segment, and so I'd be interested.

Can you talk a little bit about the different chapters in the marketing org and how it evolved over time as it relates to the core concepts that we've had? 

Maya Spivak: So, yes, I spent five and a half years at segment and it was wonderful. When I first arrived, I was the second marketer and there was a marketer that was there named Diana Smith.

And she is completely fantastic when I got there. Diana had already been there for about a year and a half and she was the first marketer. And Diana is my like example of a prototypical first marketer, the perfect first marketer. Cause she had excellent flexibility, but very. Definite first skillset that the founders sought her out for.

And the first skillset that they sought her out for was communication. So she came from the press and communications background, and that's what they wanted when they were first ready to launch and make analytics dot, JS a. Known quantity in the open source world, they found, uh, Diana and had her start working on it.

But Diana had the exact correct profile to grow into the PMM leader that she ultimately became in that partially due to her communications background. She was an excellent writer, but an interesting characteristic of Diana's. It's not always typical of all communications professionals is her incredibly high technical aptitudes.

So when you find a communications professional with high technical aptitude, it's a beautiful gift because they have these two critical, absolutely critical components to a great marketer at a technical company, which is that they can communicate with everybody. They can communicate at every level. They are the ones that help you figure out, you know, the classic exercise, like how to explain to mom or grandma to dad or grandpa, what it is that you're actually selling, how to explain to journalists what you're actually selling, how to convince an analyst that you know, and understand the rest of the market and that what you're selling isn't snake oil, and also how to write it all down in a way that makes sense to the correct audience, to the engineering audience, to the data oriented.

That was segment's core user base. So Diana had both these things. Then I joined her and the capacity in which I was originally hired was to be a product marketer, which is funny and ironic because if Diana was hired originally to be the communications professional, and I was originally hired to be the product marketer, we ended up switching roles basically within six months of my arrival, because it became clear the way that we complimented.

And so this is why, again and again, I'm going to go back to all people are different people, and then you get this mixed together. It's like building your dream team. It's like fantasy football. Like how do you draft to the right team of players that compliments each other? They're going to have different complimentary skills.

Depending on the permutation of folks on the rest of the team. So Diana and I switched competencies because when we were put together, it just became clear that my greater strength was this creativity and conception that I could come up with the analogies that. Our first videos that would make our first product explainers that nobody really knew, but I'm super pleased.

And you know, really proud that these videos are still alive. They're still on the internet. Like it's been five and a half years and they still explain what segment is. And you find that out when you start working together, what, what are your complimentary skills that are assets to the company? And then everything grows around.

The first people, if they stick around the teams grew around them. And so you start stacking your team based on what are the soft spots? My soft spot at one point am my it's still, my soft spot is organizational rigor, bread sheets, project management. I will come up. The most complex and multilayered project that is cross collaborative and pulls in partners from even outside of the company, multiple vendors, whatever it's going to be awesome, but, oh man, do I love the handholding of a project manager who is going to be creating and keeping those Gantt charts and keeping everybody to task with the entire process of making the production happen.

So that's the way that it happened. That segment is, it started with us too. And then we started hiring around us and with a selection of different marketing leaders over time, the constants were the pillar, the heads of these pillars, and we got a growth head and then built a team around him and together, the three of us made the foundation of the marketing team.

It 

Brett Berson: is an excellent place to end. So thank you so much for joining. 

Maya Spivak: Thank you for having me.