Episode description
Episode description
Summary: In episode 3 of 'Dear Marketers,' Host Emily Kramer is joined by co-hosts Devon Watts, Head of Product Marketing and Partnerships at Mercury, and Grace Erickson, VP of Revenue at Cocoon—all three co-hosts worked together twice at Asana and Carta. They discuss the challenges of hiring and organizing marketing teams, how to structure the interview process, and how to set marketing candidates up for success. They also share personal anecdotes and reflections on past hiring mistakes, and emphasize the need to hire for complementary skillset and adaptability over rigid experience requirements. They also go deep into the details of hiring, from interview scorecards, interview assignment best practices, and reference calls, and selling a job offer.
Dear Marketers is produced by MKT1 & Caspian Studios in partnership with Typeform. Episode 3 is sponsored by Framer and Mutiny.
ABOUT OUR HOSTS
Emily Kramer is the creator of MKT1 Newsletter, a marketing advisor, and an investor. She previously led and built marketing teams from the ground up at Asana, Carta, Astro (acquired by Slack), and Ticketfly. She’s helped hundreds of startups with B2B marketing, has over 50,000 subscribers on Substack, and has reached millions through her content. Kramer’s known for her pragmatic advice, first principles approach to marketing, and her “krameworks”. When not marketing “marketing”, you can find her with her dogs in Oakland, CA or eating ice cream on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee.Grace Erickson is a true marketing generalist with 10 years of experience in B2B startups, spanning functions like growth, brand, product marketing, and most things in between. She's currently the VP of Revenue at Cocoon, a Series A employee leave management platform. Prior to Cocoon, Grace led marketing programs at Asana, Carta, and Cleo in various roles, but always with a focus on an integrated customer journey. Besides being a marketing nerd, Grace spends her time coming up with (but not executing) elaborate schemes and browsing Zillow.
Devon Watts is a long-time startup marketer currently leading Product and Partner Marketing at Mercury. Previously, she ran marketing for the high-growth fintech Anrok, and spent time building her PMM, content, and brand expertise at companies like Yammer, Asana, and Carta. Devon has led B2B marketing teams with anywhere from 1 to 25+ people, and has experience in PLG and sales-led motions. In addition to marketing, Devon loves her kids, being on/in/near the water, her dog Dolores, and eating cheese.
This episode features Branca Ballot, VP Marketing at Glide, a no code software development platform for building custom apps that optimize your business, asking us “How do you hire a great team?”
QUOTES
*"Before you do the interviewing, before you do the hiring, I think a big part of [hiring a great team] is scoping the role. And then I think there's also just the interviewing itself. I think it's also important to note that great hiring doesn't stop when you make an offer and it gets accepted. Onboarding and supporting your team throughout is really important." - Emily Kramer
*"If you are the greatest marketer in the world, and you have five of you, you're going to have a pretty bad team. Because they're not going to complement each other.. A great team is great because of how they complement each other and work together, not because they're all individually great." - Grace Erickson
*"There's so many specializations within the broad category of marketing that doesn't exist in the same way on say a sales team or a customer success team." - Grace Erickson
*"Making hiring plans is kind of a fool's errand because you have this list of people that you need, but then you might hire someone that has a different shape." - Emily Kramer
*"Someone can be perfect on paper but not the right person for the role." - Grace Erickson
*"Having clarity upfront about the skills, attributes, and qualities you're looking for helps with consistency when comparing candidates. If you have a few finalists, it helps you hone in on what you really need and who's spiking in those areas. It also reduces bias as a guideline for interviewers. With marketing roles, cross-functional interviewers—someone from product, sales, rev ops, etc.—are often on the panel. You want them to have guidelines and parameters for what they're assessing. Big fan of scorecards." - Devon Watts
*"Resumes are overrated. I think what you really want to get at is, do they have experience managing ambiguous projects and influencing others to get stuff done? I've been at tech companies of varying sizes, and that is a consistent thing, is that folks need to be able to manage ambiguous problems, ambiguous projects, and bring clarity, and drive progress and outcomes." - Devon Watts
*“As the marketing leader your team and the excellence of your team ultimately is what reflects on you. So if you want to look really good, hire the absolute, absolute, absolute best people, especially if they're better than you. Because at the end of the day, they're just gonna make you look that much more amazing at your job.” - Grace Erikson
*"The best people want to work on great teams that make a big impact. And a great way to show that your team is strong and makes a big impact is to be organized and have clear goals and prioritize well. So I think all of the organization stuff and the OKRs and the AORs, they're not just acronyms, right? They're ways to actually build a high performing team and then that helps you hire because you can point to all of the ways in which your team is killing it and they want to be on a team that's killing it." - Devon Watts
Time stamps
[00:14] Meet Devon Watts, Head of Product Marketing & Partnerships at Mercury and Grace Erickson, VP of Revenue at Cocoon
[01:04] Question from Branca Ballot, VP of Marketing at Glide: How do I hire a great team?
[01:39] Initial Reactions to Hiring Challenges
[03:11] Defining a Great Team
[08:30] Frameworks for Building Teams
[14:01] Organizing Product Marketing Teams
[24:14] Interview Processes and Best Practices
[32:37] Assignment Reviews and Interview Questions
[33:03] Testing Skill Sets and Practical Tips
[36:12] Favorite Interview Questions
[48:25] The Importance of Reference Calls
[50:40] Selling the Candidate and Mutual Fit
[56:05] Common Hiring Mistakes
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