I’m the Director of Product Marketing at Secfi, Inc., a fintech company that helps startup employees make life-changing financial decisions, including how to own their stock options.

How big is it?

‍We are currently growing our company from 80 employees to more than 200.‍

Where are your teammates located?‍

Our offices are located in San Francisco, New York City, and Amsterdam - with many colleagues permanently remote in other locations throughout the United States, Europe, and South America.

‍What does your team do? What are you responsible for?‍

My priority is to marry our products with the needs of our customers. Product marketing is above all, the voice of our customers. We create and fine-tune customer personas, understanding their respective buying journeys including the personal, professional, and emotional triggers they experience when seeking help to understand and exercise their stock options. Understanding our customers and putting them first leads to positioning our products, crafting messaging and value propositions that engage and inspire action from the target audience. My team and I work cross-functionally and stay on top of industry news as well as competitors to ensure we remain at the top of our industry, staying competitive within the marketplace. With regard to new products, we work across the organization with product, UX research, UX and visual design, business intelligence, engineering, compliance, legal, sales, service, and all marketing channel leads to bring new products to market.

Treating people like people. I can’t overstate this enough. To be an effective leader within a remote environment you have to understand your colleagues and direct reports’ personalities and working styles. Being remote-first isn’t conducive for all roles or people. It’s important to understand in what working capacity colleagues thrive and foster that. For some, that means being hands-off, and touching base as needed throughout a project timeline. For others, that means collaborative Zoom/digital whiteboard sessions. Providing the tools and support each role and team member need is extremely key to everyone’s collective success in a remote and/or dispersed work environment. It’s also important to keep in mind that Zoom fatigue is real, it’s psychologically draining, so working out times of day for “focus time” has been helpful for those who need it. Remote work has really highlighted the need to understand and cater to the unique working styles of each employee. Providing that flexibility to balance work and home life can really unlock creativity rather than feeling “stuck” in an office.

Understanding and observing what makes them tick - with regard to the work itself but also their working styles and what types of people and projects energize them. Feeling engaged doesn’t stop at our immediate team, it’s important that each team member has exposure cross-functionally, feels a broader sense of belonging, and that through knowing others in the business, they understand the broader business which makes their day-to-day jobs easier.

The biggest challenge is working efficiently with creative teams. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, product marketing, design, and product management would be at the whiteboard most days of the week. Brainstorms and visually drawing out what we aim to build are efficiently done in person. It’s been a challenge to translate that into digital whiteboard sessions, but we make do and schedule trips to work in person together anywhere from once per quarter to once per month.

Team dinners, games, rapid “21 questions” for all new hires, an in-person all-employee retreat annually, cocktail making, ping-pong, and virtual cooking lessons! We’ve done dumplings, cookies, homemade pasta sauce and pasta – to varying degrees of success, some noodles came out more the size of giant breadsticks. Still delicious.

Wordle and our random set of 21 questions that all new hires get. Is a hot dog a sandwich? We may never have consensus.

Yes. If you had to wear one item of clothing forever, what would it be and why?

We use Leapsome to give our team members immediate praise rather than waiting for formal annual and semi-annual review cycles. The feedback gets piped into Slack so the whole company can see it and pile on the praise! Sometimes it’s about a massive product launch, other times it’s as simple as “Thanks for sending me soup while I was sick at home with COVID!” That really happened, and, although it’s not work-related specifically, it shows we are all in this remote/dispersed work environment as a team, and that supporting each other extends beyond the explicit goals and OKRs we’re driving toward.

As a leader it’s important to grow and learn in multiple ways - from my skillset, to honing soft skills (a lifelong effort, I’m convinced), and industry expertise. To grow in my discipline within marketing, I stay plugged in to the Product Marketing Alliance - their resources, community, and steady stream of PMM data and research are best in class. In order to lead myself in service of setting an example and effectively managing others, I’ve taken what feels like every personality test under the sun, and participated in three types of leadership courses - from personal leadership, to personal coaching, and a women-focused leadership course. I’ve found that deep self-awareness and how others perceive you as a leader are key to effectively communicating, influencing, and partnering with others. Books like “Influence without Authority” are also invaluable to understanding how to lead through personal connection and understanding, versus leaning on one’s position of authority. One cannot lead without staying on top of industry trends and honing their subject matter expertise - so I grow through reading economic reports and newsletters from larger players like J.P. Morgan to smaller consumer-focused advisory businesses like Acorns and traditional publications like Bloomberg.