Melissa Waters (Upwork) | The Changing World of Work

A recurring theme has started to pop up on the CMO podcast, Sustainability. One of our recent guests even incorporated sustainability into his job title. He might not be alone. According to Deloitte's 2023 Global Marketing Trends Report, sustainability continues to be a focus for brands. While some organizations may want to pull back on sustainability initiatives in times of economic uncertainty, consumers continue to stress that a brand's commitment to sustainability is critical to their preferences. However, only 25% of brands that Deloitte surveyed say their focus for 2023 is on urging consumers to take action. Instead, organizations are recognizing that focusing on their own sustainability efforts can have an even more positive impact on the planet and on their business. For more inspiration on how to make this year be your organization's most impactful year yet, check out Deloitte's 2023 Global Marketing Trends Report at Deloitte.com slash Global Marketing Trends. What's the first brand you remember having a big impact on you? I love this question. Well, my mom will tell me that the first one ever was McDonald's because when I was at Gurbin, Texas, and if you've spent any time in Texas, it's a very large state and it takes a very long time to get anywhere. I spent a lot of my time in a car seat and from the time I was really small, the way car seats reside, you're staring out the window and I could see those golden arches from on my own way and I would throw fit and backseat if my mom would cast McDonald's and not stop. That's good marketing. Hi, I'm Jim Stangel and I help major brands find their purpose and activate it and the profits follow. For seven years, I was the Global Marketing Officer for Procter & Gamble where I oversaw the marketing of hundreds of brands. You may not know it but the CMOs, the Chief Marketing Officers of all of your favorite brands are trying to connect you with your favorite products and services through purpose and on this show, I delve into how they do it. My guest today on the CMO podcast is Melissa Waters, the Chief Marketing Officer of Upwork, whose current ad campaign has a zombie CEO return from the dead to warn us that the old ways of working are indeed dead. Upwork is the world's largest work marketplace. In 180 countries, they connect businesses with independent talent, both freelance and full-time. In 2022, Upwork's talent community earned almost $4 billion on its platform and categories ranging from app design to consulting to accounting to creative services. And it's not just for small businesses, 30% of the Fortune 500 leverage Upwork's platform. My guest, Melissa, has been CMO at Upwork for about 16 months following a career path at a who's who of category building companies. Pandora, Lyft, Him and Hers, and Meta, where she was the global VP of marketing at Instagram. Melissa has an undergraduate degree from Houston and Journalism and PR and an MBA from the Olin School at Babsom. This is my conversation with a CMO who likes to listen to a poetry podcast to relax. Here's Melissa Waters. Melissa, welcome to the CMO podcast. We are recording this episode during March Madness and your undergraduate school. The University of Houston is the number one seed and the favorite. So the first question is, how are you spending the March Madness season? I love this question. Jam, March Madness in our house is not as huge of a deal because we're not a huge, but we're a more of a football family. My son is obsessed with football, so we're more of a football family than a basketball family. But I love seeing University of Houston shine, and it just reminds me what amazing sports teams and what a legacy of basketball leadership they have. Prior to me being there was known for the Fyce Lamma Jamma era. So it's been quite a pinnacle basketball leadership for a long time. And I was a tiny kid. They were also awesome. They were like the first team that took UCLA's winning streak away. Way back. Way back. Is Upwork doing anything special for March Madness? Anything in your marketing plan or anything you're doing internally? We do some really fun internal contests around March Madness, so it's always a good time to just engage people on team member participation. And I love that we rebrand so many challenges, March Madness challenges, so they may not be at all related to basketball, but more about just, let's get in the season of competitiveness and engage people on things. I want to start this conversation with the world of work, which is your company's focus, and which has changed so much in the last three years. The tagline of your ad campaign is, this is how we work now. So Melissa, let's start with you speaking to all of our listeners who are likely still struggling with the right approach about work at their companies. Everyone I'm talking to is struggling. They're seeking for is there going to be another way, or are we in a world of lots of fragmentation forever? And you're all about you're all about talent access and making hybrid work. So let's start with your kind of high level counsel to our listeners about how they should think about work at their companies. Wow, it is such a big question, and it is such a personal question for each company and their culture. If you think about, I've watched Say On This Topic, so I'll try not to go on too too long. But if you think about at the highest macro level, the fact that companies have gone through major revolution in the last 20 years, 30 years around the digital transformation that they've been under. So proliferation of technology has caused them to rethink how they do work. The systems that they use to do it have the processes and procedures and people requirements, everything. It's just cause top to bottom transformation. I think the same thing is happening on team transformation. We're asking ourselves, top to bottom, what must we do differently to be prepared for a different era of work and the way that work gets done? And everyone rightfully so, I think, because we have used in person as a proxy for culture. The first question and the most persistent question that people ask is where. How do I organize work around where it gets done? And the point we're trying to make, and we've been doing this for 23 years, this is not a new company, this is a legacy company that is going through its own resurgence and chapter two, but what we ask all the time is not to have a conversation about where, but to have a conversation more about how. Who are you employing? How are you employing them? How are you constructing your teams? And does it really have to be about where? And does culture have to be embedded in the where? We are a fully distributed, remote first culture, and three quarters of our team is a hybrid workforce team. And what that means is that a quarter of our group is full-time employees, and three quarters of our group is some different type of classification. And there are all sorts of different types of classification of hybrid workforce that we define. And that's my counsel to folks is to not think about it so much as aware and more about how am I engaging my teams and how do I make sure that I work hard at building culture so that it can cross all sorts of different methodologies. What we see in the research is that this next generation and COVID certainly accelerated this natural trend. So people who have been in the workforce for a long time, who are oftentimes very senior leaders don't know how to do things differently. They don't know a different way. And yet this new generation that's coming up that will be our current and future managers say, why? Why not? Why do we have to do it the way that we've always done it? Why can't we? And they come from a place of possibility. So it's really one of the main impetus behind the tagline that we ended up with our ad campaign on this is how we work now, was not to imply that this was a future state that was often some distant land, but in fact help communicate to folks that this is here, it is now. And it's a little bit of a provocation around if you're not thinking this way, you're already late. Yeah, you're sort of already going here, but you know, when I talk to leaders and maybe this is my my said is more senior leaders, I guess, but the ones that I talk to that are really into hybrid and flexibility and open-mindedness and asking all the questions you're asking still wrestle with two issues. One is how do we do coaching training on the job training role modeling? I mean, when I was a PNG, I learned so much just by being in the room, watching what goes on. And so that's one, that's one area of the struggling, and the second one is the culture one, where I think they're saying how do we build a culture of trust and purpose and psychological safety and all that good stuff, if we're not together. So I'm sure you think a lot about both of those. So how do you respond to those two challenges people are I think still struggling with who get it and who do believe this is a new reality and work, but they're still resting with those two issues. Yeah, I'm empathetic. It's not that we don't wrestle with those same exact issues. It really just comes down to intentionality. I'll start on the culture piece and then the leadership piece is one that has been on my mind quite a bit and it's not so much specific to COVID and to hybrid work, but more just writ large. On the culture piece, I think it's, and I have been in tech companies that are known for their internal culture. So Meta, Lyft, Pandora, these are companies that really celebrated bringing people together. There's such a nuance to the way that a lot of these tech companies built their buildings, their campuses and their internal offices to be able to imbue culture. And if you look at that question for any company and say, well, what are the characteristics of our culture? I mean, the source code that you write has to be true no matter what style of work you're in. The application of that source code can be interrogated around can this live some place besides the walls. Can we practice some of these values in ways that are not simply, you know, the billboards that you pass in a whole way that signal to you that those values are true, but can we practice them in actual practices? So for instance, we host a company Q&A meeting every Thursday morning, our CEO hosts it. One of our main principles is transparency and that information flows fast. So we believe in helping people feel connected to the business, never very distant from the business. We are our executive team is very active, not only in meetings like that, but in Slack every day and so accessibility and kind of a feeling of a flat organization is paramount to the way that we work. So I think culture is really a question of having to look at your source code and then look at the application of your source code and interrogate and question yourselves on whether or not there's other ways to imbue that source code into more digitally native environments versus just the physical environments. And it's a lot easier to put principles on a wall on a poster that people pass every day or the snacks in the kitchen or the color that you painted the conference room, which are all tools that I've used in in office planning around how we bring a brand to life internally. But to put them into digitally native places is a similar creative exercise and it can be applied the same way. On the leadership components, it's so interesting you bring this up because it's been on my mind quite a bit lately. I agree with you. I think that the concept of a lot of people's development is through that kind of osmosis that you get in observing people around you. And I was actually thinking about the concept of what gets taught in consumer package goods companies, what gets taught around traditional leadership development, schedule development. I had a couple of years starting off in consumer package goods before I transitioned to tech. So I have a first-hand experience with that versus in tech where we actually don't really do traditional training and leadership development the same way. I've never seen it in the companies that I've been in. And I guess I should say meta has more leadership training program, but as far as marketing specific leadership training, that is not necessarily part of the culture of technology companies. And a lot of our training comes from just observing the person above you, observing the people to the side of you, hopefully being really good at picking up on the lessons that you can't that are observable. And hopefully having a great manager. And that's really like the bottom line of where you will or will not get skilled development. So I think that the idea of intentionality around that, going back to the same kind of line of thinking around building culture comes down to intention, I would argue that those if you're going to dedicate your time and energy towards skill development, that can easily be communicated and distributed through non-in-person channels, for sure. The question becomes, where does the not formal training, but the informal training of your example of sitting in a room in a meeting? Zoom life is a more formal structure. You go in and out of meetings, there's not the walking into the conference here and walking out of the conference term side conversations that happen. And so some of the things that we've utilized is having actually room to prep and then debrief afterwards in baking that into a process. So if we're going to have an executive review, and we know that we need to actually share information that is not just inside of that box of Zoom executive review, taking time before and taking time after to make room for the things that would have been hallway conversation and figuring out how to imbue that into the organization. So it's not easy, it comes with intentionality, there's no shortcut to it. But I think if you really think about what is it that I'm trying to hang on to from that prior life, there is a way to design it into the way that we work in a more digital format. Did you know that nearly a quarter of workers say they are likely to quit their job in the next 12 months? And less than half would recommend their organization as a place to work. Well, if you listen to this podcast, you shouldn't be too surprised by all this. I recently interviewed for this show Upwork CMO of Melissa Waters, and she talked about the need to define a new reality at work. Well, here's some help for you in trying to make progress with all of this. Deloitte Digital's new study of workforce experience has discovered some potential solutions. They surveyed 4,000 plus US-based workers and determined the nine factors that can have the most impact on a person's workforce experience. And by elevating the workforce experience for employees, we can help elevate the customer experience. Workers who were surveyed who have had an excellent employee experience were found to be three times more likely to say their organization is customer focused and one and a half time more likely to enjoy working directly with their organization's customers and clients. A potential and powerful win-win. For more, get the report today at www.deloittedigital.com slash us slash wxd report. As a marketer, our job is to be creative. But what does that mean? I love George Lois's definition of creativity. George is, of course, a famous art director, and he said creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything. I love it. The way I think about creativity, I love George's definition, but I think of it as fresh and unexpected ways to solve a problem or to discover new opportunities and new approaches. In the world of business, however, creativity can be a scary word, but it doesn't have to be. In the 2023 Global Marketing Trends Report, Deloitte surveyed more than 1,000 top executives from today's top brands to understand how they plan to meet their customers' needs this year. Turns out, some of these high-growth brands are reimagining creativity in their organizations. At a time when we're seeing a shift from creative skills to analytical skills in marketing, these brands are often doing the opposite. And some CMOs are discovering creativity can be their superpower. Are you looking to make a meaningful impact in your organization in the year ahead? Check out Deloitte's 2023 Global Marketing Trends Report today at Deloitte.com slash Global Marketing Trends. Many leaders will tell you you want to retain the best talent. We hear that over and over again on the show. But Deloitte Digital's research suggests that a positive overall experience with an organization alone is generally not sufficient to retain workers. In fact, 25% of surveyed workers reveal they plan to leave their current organization within the year. So what can an employer do? In my experience, I have found that it always comes down to relationships. In fact, when I was at P&G, we found a strong correlation between an employee's relationship with their first boss and their ultimate career advancement. Deloitte Digital's research also found this to be true. A positive relationship with a manager is a critical factor in employee engagement. Deloitte Digital's tool, the workforce experience north star, can help you build stronger manager-employer relationships. It measures a combination of employee experience factors, satisfaction, and retention. If you are looking to drive loyalty and retention at your organization and I'm sure you are, check out Deloitte Digital's new report at www.deloittedigital.com slash us slash wxd report. You brought up your CEO a moment ago and I was, I watched a long video of her online speaking about the new reality of work and talent access. And it was a beautiful talk. I mean, I was entertained, I learned a lot. I liked her immediately. It's someone I would like to work with. And she was a CMO before CEO, correct? Yes. So I'd like you to speak a little bit about working with Hayden as a former CMO. What sorts of things do you work with her on? What sort of issues is she most interested in? I love working with Hayden. She's the reason that I'm here. I know a woman on our board, Layla Sreenivasan introduced me to Hayden and she said, I know you're not looking, but will you just talk with Hayden about her search for a CMO? And I got to know Hayden and I got to know the board. And I over of course, many months, decided to join because of the leadership team, because of the board, but also because of just this true belief that I have that we are in a transformational moment. And I love ushering in new consumer behavior around transformation. It's the pattern of my career. And so the origin of our partnership is really one in which she's saying to me, look, I've been here 11 years. We've tried a lot of things. We've done a lot of things. I think we need a new thinker and we need creativity applied to this brand and this business. And that's my calling card. Sign me up if business challenges can be solved through creative thinking. So what we work together very closely, very consistently, weekend and week out, day in and day out, she is very interested in realizing the potential of this business and realizing the potential of this brand. And when I came on board, the thesis was, listen, we have single-digit unaided awareness. We've been around for a long time. People don't know us. And we are trying to move up market into an enterprise business, not just a self-serve talent marketplace. And that's like running two businesses. It's a self-serve, you know, Upwork.com, go find what you need. And it's a sales enabled and sales assisted enterprise business going in and supplying, you know, sometimes volumes of talent to some of the biggest enterprises in the world. And to do that, we knew that we needed to have people be aware of us, have people know what we offer, and help our sellers be successful in calling on our customers. So the job of brand is not simply, you know, raise awareness writ large, but also to make sure that our sales engine is primed and to make sure that, you know, our self-service talent marketplace is primed for, you know, eventual conversion. So our partnership is really strategic, consistent, and aligned. You know, we're aligned on what we're here to achieve. And it's been really fun to work together. She is, she's also a former product leader. So she's not only does the former head of product and the former CMO, she's kind of played every role in the business. She knows the business inside and out just the way that anybody who's been here 11 years might. And she's a phenomenal enabler of my work and my impact in the organization, which I cannot discount. That is such a gift. There's a career planning lesson and everything you just said. I mean, I love the fact that you were called for some advice about the role and who might fit in the role and how do we go about this. And you ended up in the job. So any thoughts about that? Is it about taking advantage of serendipity, keeping your ears and eyes open, saying yes, when people ask for help. I mean, what are the career lessons for you from that experience you had in coming to Upwork? Yeah, it's a great question, Jim. I think it's all of those things. I think it's also a sense of helpfulness. I just fundamentally believe that this is a small community that marketing communities small, the tech community small. And generally, when somebody calls and says, would you mind lending a hand? I don't hesitate and say I always say yes. And I do that whether it is mentee asking for time and I do a lot of mentorship work, whether it is, like this friend of mine calling and saying, would you do me a favor and provide some advice to a CEO who I work with on the board or anything in between. And I believe that it's, I like to contribute. So maybe that's a personality characteristic of mine. I like to contribute in fields that I can be helpful to folks. And even if I didn't take this job, I have a feeling I'd maintain a relationship with Hayden and still be on a short list of folks she might call for advice. And that is also a great outcome. And as we got to know each other better and spent more and more time together and talked more and more about the business need and what she was looking to solve, I couldn't help but be compelled by the fact that it did feel like a unique moment in time. And yes, that's right. I was not looking to leave. I was perfectly happy running marketing for Instagram that that, which Antonio, our mutual friend Antonio, that you brought me in to do. Even though he, you know, I don't hold it against him but retired two months into that job. So I went to go work for him and then he sailed off in the sunset, which is fine. I am still, I still speak with him regularly. But yes, I think the helpfulness is probably my guiding principle on that. And you learn by being helpful. And our careers are all, our careers are all about relationships. They just are. And everything in my career that I remember fondly is about a relationship. The reason I, I have had a nice business after leaving PNG is all relationships. It's all trust. It's all. So I just, I just believe if your intent is sincere and you really do want to help people and you want to learn while you help and you're curious about others, it just leads to a good life and a great career. I could not agree more, could not agree more and other relationships are what I love about this community. It's genuinely a community of goodhearted people, smart, smart, hardworking, goodhearted people. And now I have a list of folks I call regularly for advice on things and we reciprocate that. And I, it's a lesson that I have leaned on for a long time, which is to make sure that community is part of the, you know, fabric of my life. Well, one more question about the world of work before we get into your role as CMO at Upwork. Do you think that, I think I know what you're going to say here, but we had a model pre 2020 that most companies sort of followed. And since COVID and so many other things, everything has sort of everyone's experimenting, they're trying to figure out, as you said, for their culture, their company, how are we going to work? Do you think we'll ever have sort of a working model like we had pre 2020? Are we in an era of constant customization, personalization, fragmentation, if you will? Hi, it's really hard to say that I, I don't know that we will. And the reason I say that is for two main vectors of what pulls on a norm. One is a CEO, CEO's set the culture and tone of an organization. And I think that CEOs have the power to be able to and can sway an organization one way or another around what works for them. And I think workforce, the rest of the workforce can say I can, I will accept that or not. And so it depends on how much that CEO is willing to face constraint. Do I have constraints in the way that I want to construct my vision of how I want to work? And is that constraint something I'm willing to live with? And if they face a constraint that they're unwilling to live with, then they're going to have to answer to a hybrid dynamic that allows them to, you know, live the way and work the way they want to that works for them and helps them get the most, you know, out of the workforce that they're trying to assemble. So I think those polarities are likely going to keep us in a place of customization, you know, because there isn't one way to do this. You know, some CEOs, and you've seen this in the finance sector, particularly, some people have just come out and said, absolutely not. We believe that this is the way we want to work. This is our format. This is our norm. And people self-select. They raise their hand and say, great, well, if this works for me, I'm going to go do that. I think so many businesses that we're heading in the opposite direction, where they're saying we actually want to try to build a model that works for the vast majority of people here. No, we're not going to satisfy everybody, but we want to maximize the number of people who could raise their hand to join. And if you want to maximize the number of people who can raise their hand to join, you have to look at models that work for more than just one person. Let's flip into talking about your role, which you've been in about 16 months. I've heard you say that most companies should have a chief team transformation officer role. Is that in your remit now, in your job at Upwork? It is not in my remit. It's in our people, officer remit. But I contribute greatly to it, in the sense that I'm like right now working on revising the values and working principles for our organization, because it's one of our objectives for this year is to really land a refresh version of that that has been in the works for some time through research and analysis. I also participate very much across the aisle of a lot of executive conversations, so I don't sit in a name like just a marketing kind of box. But our people officer is the role that is going to really cap the mat for our organization. And I do believe that if every CEO was saying wow would I rename my people officer, my chief team transformation officer, or would I inject the same way that digital forced a lot of companies to think wow I need to actually identify one person who's responsible for this transformation. Would I think about anointing someone as a chief team people in a team transformation officer? That's a pretty interesting question. And I don't know that people are necessarily thinking about that way. I think that going back to my point earlier about how people think about the where, I think a lot of folks are putting this in facilities. You know, facilities need to be rethought. But if you're not doing it across every layer of the problem statement, I don't know if you're totally getting the concept is everything. It is not just physical location, it's hiring practices, who are onboarding, how we're collaborating together, what are the tools we're using? As you're thinking about the new tools and you're in the middle of all this, any insights that might be helpful for our listeners? Well, just having lived with some more, you know, perhaps more modern tech tools being in the tech sector. I cannot overstate the importance of free flowing communication across departments, especially in a digital only or digital first environment. It is so much easier when you're physically co located to pass people on the halls and share information. And if you think about all right, well, in a digital world, we've got to share information and do so in a way where I'm keeping a cross functional, wide range of stakeholders involved in a project, that gets really challenging if you're in email. Yeah, who's on what alias? I can't see it. I don't know. So moving to collaboration tools that allow teams to construct across departments to form, to invite people to feel as though you're part of a team and to allow access to that information for people who want to follow along is so important. And so communication for liquidity is something I have seen great power in. And it's something that we're going to do more and more of here. But I've been it, you know, where I came from last week, we had a tool called Workplace that was basically Facebook for work. Yeah, you spoke a few minutes ago about, you know, when you come into the organization, your brief was pretty simple, right? Increase the awareness from single digits. And I've heard you also say that it's not just awareness, but it's about, you know, being understood for how we're unique, the special products and services we offer. So people, yeah, get who we are as a company, but you want them to go deeper to understand you. So could you talk a bit about what you're learning as you're on that journey, right? I know you spend a fair amount of money on marketing in terms of percentage of sales. I know that. So there's a real deep commitment in your company that brand is important and marketing is important and customer centricity is important. But so many people are trying to improve how people understand their company beyond awareness. So just any insights on your journey to do this on Upwork. Yeah, it's a tricky one, especially when you're trying to do all the things at one time, right? So it's one thing if you're going methodically down the path of saying, okay, we're going to build awareness and then we're going to build understanding and familiarity and then we're going to build conversion. That's not really how it works. It's kind of all things at one time. And I guess I'll say first that we are a legacy performance marketing company. So focusing on performance marketing and focusing on down funnel and conversion based tactics is in our DNA. We know how to do that. What we know though is that if, and I'm seeing this in prior lives as well, that if you do that exclusively and you don't focus on making sure that the upper and mid funnel is filled as well, you're really just reaching a limited group of people. So in going and saying, all right, we're going to go be known by more people. It gave us an opportunity to say known for what, obviously, not just Upwork the brand, but known for what product offering. And we're an interesting one because we're adjacent to some players that people know really well. They know LinkedIn, they know Indeed, they know Zipperkritter from the amount of advertising those companies have done and the legacy of brand building, but we're not really those things. And we're not really, you know, traditional staffing firms that not very many people know. We're at this category of one, our next biggest competitor is a distant one. Category captain around the concept of constructing your teams differently, hiring differently. And so we needed to land not only Upwork and evaluate proposition and provocation of what Upwork is. This is a concept of, you know, how we work now. But going into the value propositions around speed and quality and time and value, the fact that you can hire for a lot less money oftentimes because you're constructing teams, not just from the pool of the zip code that you've been in. And you can look at ways in which you can augment your staffing differently. So we spent a lot of time on message mapping. A lot of time on consumer research to understand the clustering of our value propositions and how they resonate with folks and doing research on those message maps. And then we constructed spots that spoke to the different value propositions in our first wave of work. We're working on our second wave of work now and going further into value propositions. And we're also going to go further into calls to action. How can we experiment with different calls to action around what might motivate people, you know, to sign up today and take an action. So we really did go methodically through a message mapping exercise around architecture of the brand writ large. The campaign line we're using is provocative for a reason. The creative is provocative for a reason. We can't outspend, we need to outsmart. And so in a world where we're trying to get attention, we're using some of those tools to do so. But we're trying to pay it off with really clear value propositions that we've done a lot of testing around. Your heritage isn't performance marketing and you are, I guess in some sense, shifting that. Could you speak a bit about that? I mean, I teach a program at Cannes every year at the festival. And I pulled the people in it last year and what's their number one issue they're wrestling with? And it was exactly that. It was the, how can brand and performance marketing work better together? And which I think is the right question. You've obviously, you're in the middle of that. So what have been some of your insights in your learning to perhaps bring everyone together to be working against one North Star? I mean, just kind of what have you done to sort of change the culture a bit? Because you're obviously, you're reaching me. And I'm not in the act of, I'm not going to upwork to find some new staffing now, but I become increasingly aware of who you are and what you do over the last two years. Yeah. It's such a great topic. And one that I have been, has been part of my remit and my world since the beginning of my tech journey, because tech companies, especially when you move from consumer package goods, where everyone's a marketer, even your CFO is a marketer, everyone understands the value of marketing and you don't actually have to explain why marketing matters. As soon as you cross the threshold into the tech sector, that knowledge base and that level of appreciation is absolutely evaporated. So you move into a world of teaching from, for better or worse, from day one. And I have seen over time, over all the cases that I've been through in my career, some of the principles that I've now applied to this organization and doing transformation in this organization. And I was remiss in saying earlier when you asked about the other objectives when I joined that Hayden gave me was to transform the organization. So she brought in a set of leaders who were all doing this across our orgs. So one of the principles that I've put in place based on all my experience is to bring the teams as close together as possible, meaning if we're going to all be oriented around brand, you can call it a lot of things, branded performance, branded product marketing, brand, a creative performance marketing. I've got many terms where you're saying, look, we're all on the same team, we're all here to achieve the same thing. And if you start with a principle on a culture around one team, I think that's the most important thing. And organizing around the same goals with just different subsets of tactics inside of those goals. It helps break down the cultural barriers. And then I do things like have my growth marketing team running all media. So brand media doesn't sit over in a different organization that sits inside of the growth marketing team inside of the paid media group. Well, that team runs everything from, you know, television advertising to audio advertising to search advertising, etc. And by being in the same center of excellence and actually calling them the center of excellence, having reverence for you are a series, you are a group of practitioners who all have deep expertise. And your job is actually to think about the customer experience and the brand experience across all of them, not in your own silos. It does two things, Jim. It one, it helps people feel like they're on the right team on the same team. They all can see each other work in a one team mentality. It also goes back to your point a little while ago around how do you teach and train folks the more that they're seeing across the proverbial aisle and other types of media, in this case, a media practitioner. They're getting exposure to different types of thinking, find the search engine marketer and I'm seeing on my team as a brand brand media practitioner, they're getting exposure to the range of different possibilities for a career in media. And so I think about it as center of excellence building, not functional team silos. So culture, how you construct teams, having people are organized around the same goals, but just with different tactics inside of those macro goals. And then I'm a big fan of super squads. So I use that term a lot with my crew, which is, let's say we decide we're going to run a direct response television campaign and we're going to do so in a way that is oriented around the media asset, but it needs to have creativity applied to it, obviously needs to have, you know, comms planning, right, et cetera. We assemble super squad from all the different parts of the job that need to get done and have them work on that project together. So I always say to this, you can pretend you're actually in person. If you were in person, I would co-locate you. I would just have you all work together in one pod around this project. So pretend that's the case. What do you need to construct to keep yourselves the co-list? Your own Slack channel, your own team name, your own daily stand up protocols, whatever the thing is that you operate around, your operating practices, you're a super squad team. And that prevents things from being passed off like a baton and instead allows people to feel as though they're problem solving around the same. How many super squads would you have at any one time in your group? Fair bit, actually. Depends on that. You know, we ride an annual operating plan. We break it out by quarter. Everybody knows what the priorities are. Our teams, we have visibility into the calendar of events that have to happen. We run an internal creative group as well. And my creative director and I spend a lot of time building little super squad micro engines. You're going to pick these people up and dedicate them to this project. You're going to pick those people up and dedicate them to that project. And so dedicated little groups of people seem to be the way that we can keep velocity going in parallel versus feeling as though we're doing one thing at a time. And modern life, there's no such thing as one thing at a time. So I really just look at resourcing based on top priorities for the year, top priorities for the quarter, and then the resources we have available and helping assign people so that they're really clear at what they're working on together and they're not doing it by themselves. I think this is a nice mini lesson you just shared about the role of the CMO these days, really. And I think the role you just described about strategy, direction, resource planning, teams, team culture. I'm not sure CMOs would have talked about that 10 years ago. And the successful ones, the ones that are general manager mindset and growth mindset, do what you just said. Yeah, it is a GM job. I say that all the time. People say, what type of marketer are you are you? And I say, I'm a general manager of marketing. Because there isn't, I know there's lots of archetypes. We all come up in our different archetypes like came up in brand and product marketing. But the further you go up, the more you have to cross. And I don't try to become a subject matter expert in everything. What I say my value is strategy and doing that with our CEO and our leadership team. So I really ascribed the first team concept of leadership team is where I spend a lot of my time and making sure that I'm really plugged in with all of my peers and our CEO. And then the functional area of what I oversee when it comes to marketing, I'm here to provide direction, clarity, resource management, unblocking. I use, I tell the teams all the time, I am not formal at all. You don't need to think of me as like a scary boss. I have a real deep desire for considered work. Please don't come to me with things that haven't been thought through. But if you need to escalate because you're blocked on something, I do not want a formal meeting on that. Do not wait for a check in two weeks from now. We live on Slack. I'm available anytime. In my research on you before our chat today, the one word I heard most often of the ones concept was empathy. You talk about that a lot. Side one, I just want to understand why that is for you, the concept you talk about the most. And maybe the second part of that is, how do you operationalize it? I mean, empathy is a beautiful thing. But bringing it into how you work is a little bit more complicated. Yeah, it is. It is. Well, I think there's twofold there. One, if I think about the business sense first, saying the word empathy in a business sense, to me, it really just means deep reverence for the customer and what their experience is. And I think that you would probably hear other people say, oh, I care about customer experience or I'm really customer oriented or in customer first. And I just take a step further to say I'm principled around empathetic leadership, empathy, human-based leadership, which is, do we understand what's going on for this person? Do we understand what's happening for our customers? Taking a look at all the data sets we have that tell us, everything from user behavior to NPS, to perception studies, to sentiment tracking, like we have more data than we've ever had on being able to understand what's going on with the customer. So the lens and empathy to me is just our reverence for it. And I'm a believer, deep believer in behavioral economics. I do not believe that people are logically walking around the world, just taking logical steps. They're walking around the world as human beings with heartbeats. So if that's the case, then let's have some empathy to whatever they're going through and make sure we're staying in touch and attuned to that. So that's my lens when I think about the business, where business people. And never before in my career have I been in more of the business of people than I am now. And so when you go back to the concept of empathy, I apply it to my team, because I know I've been in their shoes. I know what it feels like. I've come up in all the roles that they've done, many of them. I've crossed a lot of those. And I know how confusing it feels to say, man, I'm just trying to do a good job today. I'm just trying to get my work done. I'm just trying to make a big impact on the business. And this is hard today. And anything I can do to help unblock what they're working on and help them be successful is what I consider to be my job. So empathy to me is also adjacent to curiosity. And so my team will also, also say that I spend a lot of time asking questions. Why? What's going on? Where did that start? What's the root of the issue here that we actually need to? Let's not talk just about the surface of the outcome. Let's go and look deeply at what's causing this outcome. And I'm a real big fan going in and trying to resolve issues at the root versus just the symptom. So empathy, curiosity, problem solving, maybe. I love your phrasing of that empathy and curiosity or adjacent. And they are. Now listen, I want to talk about your career path briefly. You've referred to it a couple times. I just think it's so interesting because I would say if not all of your roles, most of them, you've been building a new category, building a new business model and building a new brand. And you've already talked about some of the principles you're applying it up work. But anything else you have learned in that journey about building a brand, building a business model, building a category that would be helpful for our colleagues and friends and listeners. Yeah, it is absolutely the way that my career has formed. And it started when I started at Pandora and we were a category of one in digital music at the time. And we were coming in and having to build the brand and communicate the brand in a new way. And the same exact things happened over and over and over again for me. I would say that Instagram is the anomaly in my portfolio, where that's concerned. But between the emergence of digital music, the emergence of right of sharing the emergence of telehealth and the emergence of the category of work, this is the pattern. And the thing that balance that I always need to strike in doing that, where you've got a layered challenge, you get hired and you're asked to do all the things at once. Whereas if you're in other businesses where a lot of your foundations are laid and you're just having to do one of those things is to recognize the fact that all of it is going to have to operate within the constraint of speed. The only reason I've been brought in in those cases is because people have decided now is the time. We want to do things differently. We're going to bring in a team and we're going to figure out the brand, grow the product, introduce this new concept and communicate the value proposition of a new category. And there's always urgency around it. So I have become astute at trying to understand the internal dynamics and the internal culture that will set the field of play for me to be able to be successful at doing this. And that's probably also a little bit of that empathy dynamic. I've got high EQ. And I think EQ is one of the most underrated things out there in business. And it is impossible to be asked to do that job without taking stock of the field of play in which you'll be doing that job. So for instance, every one of those businesses has had a different speed vector, a different set of stakeholders, a different group of people with different perspectives on what the job actually needs to be and to do. And so I run a really tight and both comprehensive and swift process when I start around who matters, figuring out who matters most. And it's not just the people on paper who matters, always people who have cultural importance that are not on paper, not in titles, who the leadership listens to. And interviewing as many people as possible to get that information in order to play back to the organization, what I think the assignment is. Because they will all have set the assignment. But unless we've aligned on truly what the right assignment is, I will be set up for success to execute the plan. And because every culture is dynamic and different, the way that gets done is slightly different. When I started at Upwork, I was going to run my typical process of, you know, talk to the board, talk to the leadership team, talk to all the people who matter in the organization and go through everything very methodically. Became incredibly clear to me in week one, day five, that that process was not going to work for Upwork. But meta, they kind of tell you, you know, go meet everybody. This is a very socially driven place. Relationships matter. Go spend six months knowing who your stakeholders are before you're, you know, trying to get your work through the system. This work very opposite. We value speed. We value you actually leading. So go lead. It's fine. Don't worry about, you know, the stakeholder analysis as much. So I used surveys instead of one-on-one interviews. I decided, all right, I'm going to do one-on-one interviews with the people who matter most. And then I'm going to run surveys to collect data on groups of people who I don't have time to actually go one-on-one to find information. And it worked, you know. I was still able to extract the information on the organization, but it's spent at my time to collect by weeks. And so I could come to a board meeting, very and fast, a question to my start date and come and say, all right, I've gathered all this information up, synthesizing the themes. Here's what I think we need to do. Here's what I think the job is. And I'm looking for that alignment up front because as you know, for anybody of work, if you don't have alignment with the people here, ultimately deliver it to, then it's wasted time. So I guess my takeaways here are EQ matters, knowing who the players are matter, and the methodology to collect the information to help you establish your assignment can be teams, organizations specific. There's not one way to do it. When I was in my early days as PNG CMO, I knew what we said marketing was on paper. I didn't think people were actually doing that in their work. So I did the same thing you did. I had hired some academics. We did a massive survey of what people were working on. So I had the data about, here's what we say marketers should do at PNG. Here's what they are doing. And maybe this is the reason why most of our brands are not growing share. And that was very provocative. And that was the basis for everything we did. And that wrote your playbook for the transformation, right? Exactly. Yeah, it's a classic. If you can't see the problem and align on the problem, then how can you possibly fix the problem? And just like in any situation, everybody's got a slightly different interpretation of what it is. And until you can extract all the little teeny tiny bits of that perception and perspective and hear the words that they use and what they say, distilling it down and playing it back is oftentimes incredibly powerful. So I love that example of how you did a gap analysis. This is what you say and this is what you do. And there's a gap between say, do when we got close that say do ratio and make it different. Yeah, exactly. And we're not going to grow them if we don't do that. So you have your business case for change, the rights itself, right? That's right. Exactly. All right, we're going to flip into the creative brief and this really wonderful discussion. The first question is, you're a big believer in slowing down, right? You're in tech, but you're a big believer in slowing down. You'd like to be in nature. You like daily walks, you like mellow podcasts. So what happens to you when you slow down? Oh, yeah. I've really been compelled by the concept of a flow state and the fact that the brain needs to be in a flow state sometimes. And I think what happens there is, I'm sure there's much of their science behind all that. So I won't pretend to be a scientist, but being able to allow our brains to wander into different places and observe and be curious about new things. Instead of the frenetic dynamics that we're all on every day. And so I've found more and more that I have to go find I have to actually program time in my life to get my brain into a flow state because our modern day life literally is built in opposition. If that were a goal of what you're trying to achieve, all of our tools or phones, you know, two emails, zoom, slack, everything in front of me every day. And everything about our modern day life is the opposite of a flow state. So I do deeply appreciate being able to have time in which my brain is trying to build a counterbalance to that. And you know, physiologically, it feels like just a giant deep breath, you know. And so yes, I put walks and poetry podcasts and, you know, exercise and all sorts of things into my day. I actually stopped putting air pods in on my walks so that I could just listen to the birds. Decided that was that was what I was going to listen to. It's funny. I do that as well. I wear the air pods for about half the walk. But when I'm through a park, I'll take them out. What's the first brand you remember having a big impact on you? I love this question. Well, I have my mom will tell me that the first one ever was McDonald's. Because when I was a group in Texas, and if you've spent any time in Texas, it's a very large state. And it takes a very long time to get anywhere. I spent a lot of my time in a car seat. And from the time I was really small, the way car seats resigned, you're staring out the window and I could see those golden arches from on my way. And I would throw fit and backseat if my mom would pass McDonald's and stop. So I remember listening to your Morgan. That's good marketing. It is good marketing and starting early, right? And I would, you know, kick my legs and bang on the window and make sure that we stopped at McDonald's. I was listening to your Morgan flatly discussion. She called it Bubbles of Happiness, you know, families who spend time there. And I thought that was really appropriate. But I'll tell you the one that I still draw on a lot. And that shapes me from not just a brand perspective, but their resonance in culture and their ability to use brand and product together, which I think is a lesson for all of us these days, was MTV. You know, I grew up in an era where, you know, it was a precursor, I think, to the modern day era of finding a culture of youth culture and bringing that youth culture together, much the way that social media does today. But MTV was a blend of a seismically important brand, a product that had never, you know, been seen and heard before in that way. Playing around with the irreverence of how brands stayed incredibly, instead of being kind of reverential about other assets, the way that many brands are actually being counter to that, and that I have seen such a big impact on the way that their brands stayed fresh. And the fact that they stayed incredibly culturally nimble. And I think that they were, you know, I think there's a lot for modern brands to draw on around the lessons of old heritage in TV. It was a category of one in the day. And you've had a career of category of ones, at least for a while. Okay, last question, the most inspiring person in your life. Oh, well, well, she's not in my life today. I'll tell you, my grandmother was my person in life. And the reason that she was so inspiring to me is because she grew up in, you know, she passed away a few years ago, but she grew up in the West Texas in the, you know, kind of, in the development of West Texas back in the day through the depression, went on to be educated and raise a family of kids who all ended up well-adjusted and successful, saw every era of the last century living to nearly 100 years old, and evolved her life to go from, you know, 1919 to 2019, and see it all and still be a pillar of her community. One of the warmest kindness, probably where I get my empathy, very deeply value driven person values driven person, and yet someone who could always evolve and be curious about the next generation and how she could show up to support the next generation. And I think that's just such an important lesson. I'm like being your person and also being someone who's curious about the world around you in order to support your children, your grandchildren, your community, being a pillar of your community. So I think I draw on a lot of my foundational identity in watching her be who she was. I always say, I am not me without she. She would have been a good CMO, Melissa. She would have been. She really would have been. That's a beautiful story. And curiosity, right? And empathy and care for people. So Melissa, this has been such a good chat. Thank you for your generosity, your warmth, your empathy, your intelligence, and congratulations on all the work you're doing and up work. It's inspiring for many people and keep it up. And thanks for spending the time with us today. Thank you, Gem. I have loved, loved, loved this conversation. I'm so indebted to you to allowing me to have this time to reflect and think and spend time in your company. I appreciate it. Go Cougars. Yes, go Cougars. That was my conversation with Melissa Waters, three takeaways from this one for your business brand and life. And the first one, you don't really need to have an office to create a strong culture. This was a wonderful discussion with Melissa about the world of work and how we can with more intentionality, with more principles of trust and communication and accessibility, build a strong culture without having to think about the office first. Second takeaway, think about your job design. Melissa talked about her role as CMO in a beautiful way. One of the best examples we've ever had about a CMO thinking very deeply and strategically about the work they do and the difference it can make in the company. This was a bit of a master class on CMO job design. Think about your work and how it matches up to the kind of concepts Melissa talked about. And the last takeaway, slow down to speed up maybe. Melissa talked about how important it is to slow down to put her brain into sort of a flow. She has rituals, practices, she does daily to take her brain and her mind into a different speed. That helps her stay fresh and stay creative. That's it for this episode of the CMO podcast. If you found this helpful and entertaining, I would be so grateful if you could share our show with your friends. And I would be super happy if you subscribe so you can be updated as we publish new episodes. And if you really want to help, leave us a five star rating and a positive review on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen. The CMO podcast is a gallery media group original production.