The Strategic Power of Product Marketing | ExperiMENTAL Ep. 9

What if product marketing was the secret weapon your growth strategy is missing?

In this episode of ExperiMENTAL, Sundar sits down with Damian Valdes, Associate Director of Product Marketing at Spotify, to reveal why product marketers are often the most underutilized force in tech. From launching features like Spotify Jam to designing internal growth experiments, Damian breaks down how PMMs shape product roadmaps, avoid cannibalization, and influence business outcomes beyond campaign performance.

Whether you're scaling a feature, debating when to hire your first marketer, or trying to find product-market fit, this conversation will change the way you think about marketing’s role in building great products.

KEY TAKEAWAYS
• What product marketers actually do
• Why startups often bring PMMs in too late
• The link between product marketing and product management
• How Spotify PMMs balance campaign work with feature development
• The risk of muddy messaging in wide product portfolios
• How Damian used the Jobs-To-Be-Done framework to shape product decisions
• How in-app promotions became a growth lever at Spotify
• Why experienced hires matter more than “scrappy generalists” at early stage
• How to prioritize work using the Eisenhower matrix
• The importance of consumer empathy from L’Oréal to Meta to Spotify

BEST MOMENTS
00:02:05. “We serve as the voice of the consumer.”
00:03:17. “It solves the problem around people hogging the chord at a social get together.”
00:05:22. “You run the risk of maybe cannibalizing the two versus because like truly incremental.”
00:06:58. “Product is brand. Brand is product. Consumers don’t differentiate.”
00:10:04. “We included things that weren’t yet launched... that actually informed the product roadmap.”
00:12:55. “Good marketing is strategy. You can’t remove marketing from it.”
00:17:47. “If it’s measurable, then it’s manageable.”
00:27:07. “Spotify is a company that’s willing to take big bets.”
00:35:23. “Beauty is such a personal decision. It says so much about who you are.”

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🎧 ExperiMENTAL is hosted by Sundar Swaminathan, Head of Data Science at Bounce and former Uber leader. This show is your behind-the-scenes look at how top marketers and data scientists make smarter decisions.

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Transcript

0:30

One of the reasons why I think companies have started to add product marketers to their teams. I think generally if you look at startups, product marketers aren't there typically early on, it was later brought in because I think the portfolio gets wider. We as on the bike parking side, we're not as close to the actual build of the feature. We're looking much more at the overall landscape and the overall portfolio, and we can bring that consumer lens, like how does this feature live within our overall offering? Welcome to experimental, the podcast that cuts through the noise to bring you actionable insights in B2C growth, marketing and data science. I'm your host, Sunder, former head of brand data science at Uber and the mind behind the experimental newsletter. Join me as I talk with industry leaders who have driven growth at companies like Uber, Spotify, and Netflix to uncover the experiments, failures and breakthroughs that lead to real results. Now let's get experimental. Damian, it's a pleasure to have you. Thank you. And welcome to the Experimental Podcast. Thanks for having me, Sandra. It's good to see you again. And. Yeah, pumped to be here. Yeah, well, I think, we have a lot to talk about. I think product marketers are one of the most underrated marketing skill sets that no one gets to ever talk to them. As much as I would love. So I think I'd love to just start with what is a product marketer? And sort of as your career has evolved, what have you found it to be? Yeah. You know, it's a great question. And, really, it's evolved a lot over time. But to be quite honest, when I first started my career, I actually never really heard the term product marketing as a like subset of the marketing vocation. And I think in the last, like 5 to 10 years, we've seen it really take off. It's much more common. It's I see me at tech companies anymore. And so as a result, it also varies immensely. So, more mature organizations, the size of your company can also be a major factor. And so it really does vary. But what I will say, the one kind of unifying thread between, all product marketing is that at the end of the day, we serve as the voice of the consumer. And so whether that's how our product and our marketing shows up, you know, in the wild, after we've launched, we're trying to grow a product or feature. And also on the inbound side. But I think that's the other half of what we do. It's not just advertising campaigns and, you know, growth campaigns, promotions. It's also the actual product itself. You know, partnering with our product and or counterparts help inform what we do and what we don't build, how we talk about it, how we, you know, the name of it, any, any surface where a consumer could happen upon, the product and how we talk about it. That's really where our responsibility lies. Cool. Can you, can you share, maybe what that would look like with, like, a brief example at Spotify? Yeah. So, this product called jam, it's part of our social product portfolio. And the way it basically works is it solves the problem around people hogging the chord at a social get together, whether it's two of you, 30 of you, and it allows, users on their individual devices to add to the queue. And so it's, you know, it's a, solution we knew that users were asking for. And a lot of the work that my team have with that, launch on the inbound side was trying to figure out, you know, how we talk about it. I'm educated on it. It's it's. Well, I might have explained it's a singly. It's actually a pretty complex one to explain to people who aren't familiar with that type of product. So a lot of those education in app education, kind of our external efforts as well, since it's kind of an inherently a party product, we want to sell that aspirational use case as well. Most times we're hanging out. It's probably like a handful of you is doing a study session. But we also want to show, hey, you can have up to 32 people on one place listening to, you know, each other's music. So, tell us a little bit more about the line up of like, paid campaigns on it. And honestly, was a really fun launch, really fun campaign, a really fun product, a how they encourage you to try it out if you haven't already. Yeah, no, I have, and it is, it's really quite fun. But just like something you said, you know, it sounds like as a product manager, you're you get like a full suite, we'll say, of all the possible channels, versus, I think traditionally, like some marketers only like, you know, focus on one lens or the other. Do you see that as an advantage or is it like, oh man, this is really complex. I have to think even more about how to manage a complex launch. One of the reasons why I think companies are started to add product marketers to their, to their teams, I think generally if you look at startups, product marketers aren't there typically early on and they're later brought in because I think the portfolio gets wider and we does the on the park parking side, we're not as close to the actual build of the feature. We're looking much more at the overall landscape and the overall portfolio, and we can bring that consumer lens, like how does this feature live within our overall offering? And so that's why I think why product marketing be so valuable, that helps you take that approach. Because, you know, we don't want to happen is work on a feature that's, you know, somewhat similar to our existing one. What's in the portfolio now? The way you talk about it, positioning is now going to muddy those waters. And potentially you run the risk of maybe cannibalizing on the two versus because like truly incremental. That's why I see the real value product marketing. And we're I think you have to also put on your product manager hat as well when you're working with teams. I often say that, if you look at like a good product team that you have design, engineering, insights, product and marketing and those are kind of like the five fingers of the fist to to getting a, worthwhile, viable feature out there. Yeah. And on that, like something you had mentioned is that, you know, the best product marketers are product managers as well. Can you can you double click on that? What does that mean? I'm currently employed at Spotify, but in my previous life I've really started my product marketing career was at, the artists formerly known as Facebook Inc. Meta. And in my time there is it's there for about half a decade. Saw the role changed dramatically and evolved into Neil and all the best ways. And I want to say about halfway through my tenure there, there's a lot of really great kind of like posts that a leadership would share as a way to, like, kind of provoke thought and collaboration across teams. And at the time, one of the more senior, part directors for this post, obviously said that a good product marketer is a good product manager, and I totally subscribe to that logic. And what they mean by that is the end the day. You know, people don't see your org chart. And you know, product is brand. Brand is product. Consumers don't differentiate. And so for them, you know, part about being, I think, a good marker that you need to know how the sausage is made. You need to know, you know, what is the launch process look like? Where's the life cycle look like for a feature? Because that will make you better able to speak the language. As a product manager, I think really the product manager product marketer relationship is the most important one you have on the marketing side. And the more you understand the constraints that go in to launching a feature writing. I think most marketers who don't work in tech are aren't familiar with the idea of a MVP, right? A minimum viable product. And often there is that kind of almost like tension might be too dramatic, but often you have this kind of back and forth between product, like, they just want to launch the thing yesterday, right? I never had a Facebook PMK for not a little bit embarrassed about your product quality. Then you waited too long. On the marketing side, of course, you're thinking, well, will I have one chance to get this right? You don't want to promote something. We don't know if it has product market fit. There's always this kind of tension between the two. But I think the more you can understand how your feature is built, why certain things can really be done until after the pies are alive and you've had that user, you know, feedback incorporated, I think it makes you better able, you know, speaking to the feature, promoting it, you know, understanding it. Yeah. That's a that's a really good point. I imagine everything from like how you position it. Like what things you don't say or oversell, undersell like all of that. And also it sounds like you guys probably think about it like almost like a product product marketing roadmap where you can layer on, you know, things as a, as new features and new optimization, potentially for a product rollout to, that's really cool. And I think one of the things that you had mentioned is you really like the jobs to be done framework, and I know that's very popular as product managers. Is that why it also became, one that you really enjoyed as well? Absolutely. I mean, I think what I love about the jobs to be done framework is that it kind of positions away from like just a list of features, right? You need search, you need toggles, you need a profile page. Right. It's it's less what are we building. Right. It's more consumer language. Right. One of the tenants of the Jospeh done framework that I really like is that kind of first person, like I want a way to do X, I need a way to x, y, z. Right. It's that I have a problem, say that needs a solution. And I'm hiring you, you know, Spotify or Meta or Instagram, whatever it is to solve that problem. So that of course is a product framework that, you know, in my previous slides, as I own, outside of tech, we didn't really employ, we were so much more focused on, you know, campaign metrics and all that. And by, taking that approach, it also helps inform how you talk about the feature at the end of the day. And so, you know, I mentioned about being a good product managers, also being a good product marketer, right, everybody. And it cuts both ways. I think one of my favorite things I did when I was at meta, we worked on this kind of like max diff survey that we learned about what are the things we want to talk about for this product. And we included things that weren't yet launched that could be that'll feature, features. And that actually ultimately ended up informing the product roadmap because it kind of spelled out, hey, these are the nice to have aspects of the product. These are the must haves. These are the, you know, barrier to entry for this market. So, you know, I think the jobs we've done framework use that same kind of verbiage, right. Consumers aren't going to stack rank, toggle versus profile versus block. They're going to say, oh yeah, I need to make sure I have time controls or I need to make sure I have, you know, a way to manage my contact list or whatever. I think it's it's really it's all part of the same, I think, way of thinking. Yeah. And I mean, for me, you're saying and I really do see it and I've seen it like places like Uber or like they are so similar a product manager, product marketer. But if you look at like the tech ecosystem, there's so much emphasis on APM and product marketing is almost sometimes depending on where you are, like a, like a, a function that's off to the side, like where do you think the disconnect is, whether it's for founders or just the broader ecosystem that don't try to bring product marketing into it more, sooner? I think what often happens at startups is that you have to have design you like if you're going to if it's if it's visually at that design and you need a product manager to someone has to build and manage this thing right at the end of the day, at least, strategy. And so often what happens is that marketing is brought in later into a company's maturation. And the roles that marketing might play are often filled. I'll be imperfectly, but they're usually filled by design and product like, or some combination. The two. Which is why you'll often see some startups. I mean, you've, you've probably driven through San Francisco at some point in your life and seen the billboards there, and you're like, who is this talking to? Yeah, there's absolute nonsense on this billboard. There's 18 words in size, 12 font on a row where people are going to see five miles an hour. Who made this? Right? And I think it's like, that's clearly a start that has a high their marketing team yet, or their marketing team is not in-house and they're not they don't know what they're supposed to be putting out there. And so I think often, marketing can be seen as a sequential step where it's like, okay, we built this thing marketing. Can you give us a name and write a press release? And, you know, I think that's not even fully what we do. And I think it's also not the full potential of what marketing can do. You know, there was this, call this videos, this, tech conference a number of years ago, and they were interviewing a lot of the CEOs budget tuxedos. And one of the questions they had was, would you rather be, marketing, like, leave or lead sales? And, you know, the responses vary. But I remember the, the CEO of, Databricks, his answer really stuck with me. He said, oh, marketing 100% because good marketing is strategy. I think that that you can't remove marketing from it. It's there's always some modicum of it in everything, the colors you choose, the design where it says the price says something about the product. Right now everything has some modicum of communicating the value to the consumer. And so I think, you know, I've been on teams where people saw marketing as kind of a sequential step. And later, as our role evolved and we were more involved in some of the research and roadmap exercises, they I that's all there. That's all them. That's hard to realize. And I know we bring marketing earlier and earlier, earlier into into the, inbound process. But I think your own experience, you've been at some of these larger companies that have also seen the value and and have, like I would say, the cover to be able to, to afford product marketing. Do you think just you yourself would be able to go to an earlier stage startup and do the job that needs to be done for the startup? As a product marketer, I mean. I'm always going to top my own ability, right? But, I think, you know, there's a right and wrong time and a company's maturation to bring in marketing. I think at the end of the day, it really depends on the nature of the company. You consumer versus B2B, right. I think the other thing is a lot of times startups, they it's hard to fight the, the urge or the tendency to want to hire more. Early career, talent largely because it's more affordable. And I think you kind of get what you paid for in that sense. And often I've seen, you know, I've had friends of mine, college friends of ours even, who would do the work for startups. And they hired, a marketing manager, you know, who's maybe has only a handful of years experience. And so that's not to denigrate the quality. The talent of that person has, of course, but there's just certain things you don't know. Yeah. Operationally, how to scale. Right. That that just comes with, I think, a little bit more tenure. And so I think it's not a matter of when you bring a mark is or a wrong or right turn of things, who you bring in. I think you need to bring in seasoned, more experienced kind of industry minds. And in fact, the the tendency to want to hire maybe just one of those early career who's maybe vicious but doesn't know what it takes to, take a, a user base, you know, from, you know, to the next order of magnitude. Yeah. And to your point, like a lot of the argument is always like, hey, I want to hire this scrappy generalist. And interesting to me, I think you as a product marketer are actually that, like, you're quite a generalist in a good sense and that like, you have to be able to navigate across channels and think their strategy. I also struggle to be honest a lot with this is like a data science leader. I'm like, oh, you really could have used a data science higher sooner than you think. It's just not a skill set that you imagine you can afford, but it has benefits to it. You know, kind of like like a product marketer. One of the, things that I wanted to, to touch on was the Eisenhower matrix prioritization. I have yet to have heard of that, so I'd love. Yeah, I'd love for you to tell me about that. That's it's it's literally, our RL 34th U.S. president Eisenhower had this framework for triaging, basically, in this case of the US government problems. Right. But I think it applies to your work. And I think, I mean, I've worked at massive companies where we still were operating very frenetically, for lack of a better term. And so it basically comes down to, priority and urgency, right? Especially if you're a manager or, or you're working across like some of my product marketing counterparts. You know, I've been lucky that in my more recently, I've embedded within like 1 or 2 teams, I'm able to do much more heads down work. But a lot of times when you're brought on to many, a, you know, a maturing company where your role in this case product marketing is still a bit more spread out. You're probably across maybe a dozen or more different teams. And so it's context switching, and it's also figuring out what is the most important thing that day to be focused on. And so the Eisenhower framework really is one. It's it's pretty simple to look at urgency and timeliness. If it's like it's super priority, it's super urgent. And you're talking about a fire drill, right? Those ones are easy. Everyone knows, you know, when you have to, like, drop everything. This is a you know, I don't have a quarterly earnings call tomorrow and there's a reason that's required. And on the other side you have the more obvious ones. It's not priority and it's lower. And C just honestly probably just cut it. It's those two other quadrants that we often struggle with and that we don't take the time to kind of think slow and figure out what actually is urgent and which is a high priority because you of course, if something is urgent but maybe low priority, then you should delegate is what the of the framework recommends. And if it's high priority, but it's not urgent that one is then kind of like how do you ensure that that still getting the focus you need? Because if you don't focus on that in a timely manner, it's only a matter of time before it goes into the unfortunate quadrant of high priority and urgent. And so, when I work with my team, one of the things I often ask is like, where in the quadrant is this? And then you have to do that. I think actually a product manager taught me this trick. Ask the same question three times and then figure out, really? Is this actually a high priority? Is it is it that someone else just doesn't know how to communicate their own priorities? Because this is now I got a bad game of telephone where you've been led to believe that this is urgent, and actually some probably product VP mentioned this in passing and it got recorded by the AI notes, and the AI notes misheard you. And actually this is an that could happen next month. You know, like really drill down. And so that I think is it sounds so like basic and it's one of the things when you're learning you're like, well, duh. But I think actually what separates good teams and great teams is often their ability to understand where really a project or priority or request lands in that system. Yeah. And for yourself just again over your career, like have you do you have heuristics that you've built in to be like, I think it's in this quadrant versus this, like, how have you yourself been able to navigate and find out where it is? So for example, one of the biggest things is what what is the, operational partner contingency that this is plugged into. Right. So if we have all of ICI work, you know, throughout the day, it's probably you can do it truly by yourself. And the the case is like, is this who's this urgent for whereas this is like a, you know, multi team access and dependency. A lot of times what may not be necessary, a urgent and or high priority item for one team is the keystone for another. So that's usually the first question I ask is to if we don't deliver on this in a talking matter, who who's going to be hamstrung as a result? You know, at the end of the day, especially if you work at a company with it's not if I were a little bit shy of 10,000 people, you know, it's very likely that work you're connected to is connected to a lot more other teams that, you know, you may not be aware of. And so that's whenever I have, you know, inbound requests from other teams. One of the first things I have to kind of triage is that as identifying who else will this affect if it doesn't get done? That's hard. And I think when you're early in your career, you don't even think about that. You're like so much in your I have my one thing on my plate that I have to do so well, and that's it. Yeah. No, that's, that's a really good way to also take a step back and prioritize what's arguably best for the business, too. Therefore, impactful, which I think is really, really cool. I want to ask this is a bit of a random question before I forget, how involved are you with unwrapped. You know, rafts? It's like the. Rafts. Yeah. By far biggest, you know, singular marketing moment of that product moment. At Spotify and I have been largely uninvolved in it. You know, and I don't say that as I don't want to be or that I wish I could be. It is a massive undertaking. It's very, like, pretty much if you work at Spotify, to some degree, you will be involved in raft or at least work one that's tangential to it. I will say I am largely not leading that work, but one thing that is interesting about rap that I really, I think speaks to, I like that speaks to earlier topics is is actually, managed by the marketing team. And, you know, I don't think most consumers would be able to differentiate between a real product manage or a marketing managed experience in the app. Yeah, I was I was surprised to learn that once I, you know, once I moved to this role. But, I think it does speak to that in the day. If it's a worthwhile consumer experience, it's in the app. Consumers just see it as Spotify. Yeah. But maybe a bit of a plug for why more effort should be marketing led. But we won't get there. Well always. Well we've plug that. Yeah. Oh it's like that. But on that. Right. Like I'd love to talk about how to put together a mini growth team. And specifically I think you mentioned, like, you, there's an evergreen initiative at Spotify that you kickstarted. Let's, let's, go into that. Just just to preface this, this entire topic. But when I worked at meta, I had the good fortune to work on supported product team led by a man named Morgan Brown. Him and one of his, you know, colleagues from is like early in his career on Ellis wrote this book called Hacking Growth. Yeah, I'm sure you've seen it make the rounds and, yeah, I, I actually, you know, even did a short stint shadowing as a product manager while supporting his team just because I found his approach to to growing products, you know, so compelling. I read his book and to this day, I sold. You know, I'm not a PM myself. I still consider just, you know, being his style of leadership and his his kind of his thought process, one of the most helpful things for my own career. And in his book, he talks about kind of exactly that, like how do you kind of, you know, form this, learn quickly, like, let's fail repeatedly type of, approach to, to, you know, growing your product from within the app. And so, about yeah, a while back, maybe a little over a year ago, I was talking to one of my counterparts who also leads our in-app promotions about, you know what no one asked us to do. This is what I would say. And the goal really was, you know, our hypothesis, which is not, crazy, warns one that I think is the real fundamental to any growth marketing is that we knew that day by day, our in-app promotions are one of the best ways to grow feature adoption. And we also know that going into adoption is overall good for consumers. They get exposed to new features they otherwise don't know, and therefore they like the app more. Right. And that was kind of the the foundation to it. And so, you know, I put together a myself that park launch party marketer, we had our on platform program manager, got a, you know, I bargained for some lightweight, creative, support to just create some lightweight assets. And then for my product counterparts, some data science support so that we could, you know, measure, you know, did we move the needle? All that to really our goal was like the other day, we should be comfortable with our promotions, you know, small little tests. We should be kind of the promotions, not moving the needle because at the end of the day, something that I never said, like, if you're gonna be wrong, be wrong all the way down, right. But know that you're wrong, because if it's measurable, then it's manageable. And so that was, you know, that was kind of the, the foundation was that if we don't drive, you know, could click through and that could lead to dreck. That's like part engagement. That's fine. Now, we know not to do that. And, I one of the more fun part is that worked on just because I know they you to see, you know, your hypothesis to to work. And if we target a certain way, if we, you know, change creative, you know, AB tests, abcdefg tests, you know, everything. And what was great about the, the products one, you know, we did learn that some things just don't work and that's fine. You know we had the scale and the small enough sample size. It's not, you know, break anything but was what was more beneficial that we did get learnings from this kind of, you know, multi-month series a mini campaign test that now our users insights for larger in-app promotion campaigns. And you know that in a day, like I said, no one asked us to do this. We just had strong conviction and were okay with testing and learning and failing repeatedly. Yeah, but it also sounds like it then became the foundation for either more investments, more resources to realize there was something there and worth investing in, which I think in itself is a is a huge win. Yeah. Oh for sure. And, you know, even now, I can't speak to the inner workings of what we're doing and how we operate because, you know, for current, you know, projects. But the insights we gained from that are now being leveraged, not just in my own work, but, you know, other members of the public marketing team, I referenced some of the campaigns saying, like, if this works, this x, y, z approach or runs it, you know, try something similar. Yeah. But something that I think you, you mentioned, like when we were talking before, which I think is really quite powerful, is that now bigger companies are more focused on success. So replicating success than learning from failure, but that that's like a really powerful thing to say. Like, well, what have you observed just because you've been at, you know, quite some large companies. Perspective is one that I know is not unique to me. And a believe this. Yeah. I'm also glad to say, I mean, based on what I just shared, like Spotify, I feel that we are as a company. You know, I've worked at other companies before, and I got to say is a company that's willing to take big, big bets. It's literally the, you know, internal way of operating is, you know, our, our bets process here. And so, but in, you know, in former lives, I saw that often. You know, if we saw a, the red, yellow green ification of, of campaigns and you saw red, it was seen as, you know. Oh, well, what did we do wrong. And, and in a way of you know, what do we do wrong. Like time to go figure out who failed versus what do we do wrong. Great. Like let's let's dissect that. Right. You know, let's do let's do a postmortem and really figure out how we can understand why versus, Oh, well, this worked. So let's just copy paste that for other products, even though the, you know, the context, the audience, the offering might be completely different. You know, it's it's very tempting to do that, which is why, you see, you know, tech companies all the time go and launch features that you're like, who was asking for LinkedIn to have stories, you know. Yeah, or games or many of the other things. But I don't know, it's it's you're copying the what and you're not understanding the why. Yeah. And that to me is such, you know, it's so prevalent. So that to me it's, it's that's just it's not just, you know, focusing on failing and not being okay with it, but also focusing so much on the what and not so much like, why are we successful versus, you know, yeah, I remember when everybody's launching stories within every single consumer app. Yeah. That's, that's I think one I, I've seen and learned the hard way. And many of these companies though, do start on the celebrating failures like unpacking. Right. It's how you find product market fit, etc.. What do you think changes over their time to to flip to the other side where they're trying to replicate success? I mean, I think in general, the more you have to lose, the scarier it is to lose it, right? When you're when you're scrappy and small. Also, to get one that's your, you know, two founders and ten employees, then it's like, hey, whatever, we're here to disagree and commit, right? It's much easier to gain that, that kind of like, we're all we all have equal stakes in us, and we're all okay with failure. I think once your company's worth, you know, nine figures plus, and you have a thousand employees is one. I think there's this fear of you have more to lose. So therefore, you. What would you rather do? Swing for the fences or potentially lose a lot? Or just make a small a thousand small incremental small wins, but you're not really learning. And so it's I think one is the latter is much more short sighted. But it's easy. It's comfortable. It's easier, you know, you can you can kind of hide in plain sight. But I think that's part of what it is. It just comes naturally with, with being a bigger company, you know, and I would say the thing you have to try to keep, I think a lot of big tech companies try to keep this culture of like, being scrappy, you know, thinking like, thinking like a startup, I think is often the thing we hear a lot. I've heard of that. I've heard it at Spotify. And I think companies and they can retain that culture will will do. Well, but it's hard, you know, it's way easier said than done. Yeah. And it sounds like, you know, Spotify is able to keep a bit of that. Like, have you seen anything that makes Spotify I feel like is, hey, this is a different place than the other places you've been. I mean, I would just say I'm very encouraged by how much, how much we're willing to put invested behind ideas if they have merit. I know I would say and are not speaking to you any specifics back and say, every year I've been here, I can think of this 1 or 2 projects where they were, like I said, not necessarily, requests from leadership. They weren't mandates as part of our overall marketing plans. For example, someone just came in with a good idea, made the kind of business case for it, and it got, you know, you got the you got the investment. And I've seen that, you know, not just for my own work. I seen other people within the company do that. And so I think to me that's very encouraging. And I think it also stems from, you know, other companies can be very tops down. Very hierarchical. It's kind of, you know, you have a handful of people at the very top who are kind of setting the mandate for what the org works on. And I think that can be very good for an efficiency standpoint. Right. If anyone has a shared sense of vision and truth from a singular entity, that it's much easier to march towards that, North Star, the con to that is that you're going to have far less, a lower likelihood of people kind of maybe do more bottoms up approach of ideas and submissions. That make that make sense. I don't know how much you can share, but like, what does Spotify look at as its biggest marketing challenge in the next couple of years? I can offer my own personal perspective. And, you know, and I can also just reference things that have been said publicly by, you know, a lot of our leadership. I think I think in general, there's just this big question around what is well, what is I mean, for tech or is I mean for Spotify with it mean for all of us, right? I think, I think one thing that's universally true is that we as people are bad, like humans. We're bad at predicting the future. You know, in the day, we're not bad in a thousand. On on our crystal ball. I think with with AI that being, you know, if I'm gonna be humble here and admit ignorance, I think that we have only really scratched the surface of what it can do. I'm sure there are some visionaries who are out there who have very specific sense of what the future looks like. But I think back to this is like, you know, I was a kid and, the idea of, like, office computers was still kind of making its way into small, smaller businesses. And my mom says, we get this clinic. And they had only a few years earlier introduced computers for all of the staff. And so she worked with a lot of the database for like basically patients files. And this clinic. And so they would get the, you know, clinic, it would get the patients information that would type it all up on the computer. And, you know, the thing about the patient, they would click print and put into this giant box full of paper, you know, like it's a lot. And we saw registered. Hey, what if that was just in the computer all the time? Right. And so you had these rooms just full of beans. And I say that, you know, it's it's funny to us, we're like, oh, so obvious, but I'm sure even right now, you know, we'll look back in five years as to how we were using AI. And the role is playing in our both our business use cases as well as our consumer ones. We're gonna be like, they were just used to make, you know, user generated artwork fairly new, the things they could have done with it, you know, from there. Right. So that's that's what I see is like, and it's a challenge, but like, I don't know if we've cracked what the real opportunity is as a, as an industry for AI, I think for AI, yeah, I think right now it's a shotgun spread and we're all just waiting to see which one kind of takes off. Yeah. Yeah. And it's still quite, quite early. I feel like I think like ChatGPT the only came out a couple years ago. So it's still feels really early and maybe going back to earlier in your career, like, again, not related to AI, but like did working at L'Oreal. Like, how did that alter the way you think about brand and marketing and like taking that to tech and now taking that to tech with it within an AI world, does that do anything for you? You know, it's it's funny, I was speaking, a couple months ago, at this, like, Wharton event, and I was talking to some of these executive MBAs, not that, like, you know, show off, but, but we were talking about exactly that. Like, how much? How much does having started your career marketing, you know, hair care products and anti-wrinkle creams carry over into, you know, music tech. And I think, you know, I think back to actually when I was at Carnegie Mellon, I got my full time offer from L'Oreal, and I went to the dean of the school time, Doctor Milton Caufield. And I said, you know, I'm kind of worried that I'm going to go, you know, start selling products. I myself, I said, buzz my head off, my hair off. Back then, I was I was not a target user for a single product in the entire portfolio. Now, you might be, though. I mean, you've got a great, great set of hair. Oh, yeah. Thank you. So, so that's that's one thing. But but you know, I was saying I don't want to be I don't know if I'm gonna want to walk in and view the rest of my career, you know. Am I going to pigeonhole myself into into this space? And, you know, his answer was, you know, at the end of the day, doesn't matter what you're marketing, you know, whether you're selling. You know, he mentioned he had a lot more of his adjunct professor is he had marketed Beretta pistols and through the loom underwear, you know, and I don't know if the subject matter expertise had a lot of overlap. There. And at the end of the day, I think what what makes a good marketer is your ability to quickly understand a space that really embed yourself and immerse yourself in how people think. I actually think L'Oreal is on the best place to start my career, because beauty is such a personal decision. It says so much about who you are. When I says a lot to to, you know, earlier career marketers don't just learn the landscape. You know, the four piece, you know, price promotion and all that, but learn the history of the segments you're in that's gonna tell you way more. And so I remember I went to L'Oreal, I there was this book they gave was called The History of Beauty. And it just talks about this mankind. You know, since we started, we've been doing we've been using beauty products. They're just more rudimentary back then. And they talk about, in the 70s there this moment where L'Oreal Paris started using the tagline, because you're worth it. And that revolutionized the entire way people think about beauty products. And so, you know, that approach, that way of thinking, a way of looking at a historical, you know, that the category historically, really creating user empathy, if I had to because I wasn't using wrinkle creams at the time. That to me has served me immensely in my career. And it was, you know, I was successful. L'Oreal. As a result, I was able to market video games. As quickly thereafter, I was working on family products at meta, which, you know, I myself, you know, had children. All of these are categories where the user is so personally invested and you, you have to have empathy for them, understand what are the pain points, what are the solutions they're looking for. So I would say L'Oreal has been pivotal in that, as were my subsequent roles. Yeah. I was gonna ask, do you find like you need to have that human connection with the product that you're marketing? Like, is that how you pick some of the companies you work at? You know, that's like the one throughline I would say in my career is that I've been I've always worked on brands where the audience is so incredibly invested on an emotional level, and the reality is that, you know, forget the author, Rene Brown says, you know, we as humans, we think that we're logical creatures who sometimes feel, but really we are feeling creatures who sometimes think. And marketing, I think, provides provides the emotional. We make the mundane magical. You know, if you're in for marketing paper towels and salt, you know, there's there's there's there are brands for both those categories that you can probably name. There's a reason why. And so, at the same time, I think I am very lucky in that I've always worked on products that people are very passionate about it. You know, sometimes they know the brand better than you, and you have to respect that. And, yeah, I think that's, you know, I think it's very rewarding as a result. That being said, I could go, you know, maybe someday I will go work as the, you know, product marketer for Morton Salt or something. We'll see. But it's also a pretty important part of, of, a person's life. So if they like it for sure. You kind of touched on it, and I wanted to I wanted to get into a little bit more, which is if you if someone who's listening really did want to go into product marketing or early career, like, wants to, to make that decision. Like what? What advice would you give them? I had a similar question from, I was talking to a Carnegie Mellon undergrad because they were like, how do I get in into tech or into marketing? I'm the experience, right? I think, you know, I myself have hired lot like marketers, and I've never one of the things I've talked to hiring the the talent team is I don't want to just be people already in tech. I think you can in the day. For a good marketer, you can learn quickly. I think that's the thing I would say is learn how to become a subject matter expert quickly. And I think what that means is, you know, look at how people talk about that respective industry. There's there's a product, you know, you can get free focus groups on Reddit and Twitter and, you know, the social platforms. I think the other thing is truly, I mean, like I mentioned, learn if you're going to be a product buyer, learn how to be a product manager. I think if you're able to speak the language, right, understand, you know, MVP, early adopters on setting, the, you know, sales like world versus product, like growth, you know, learn the language, the industry you're in and learn how how historically products have been successful in this industry, you know, learn what it what they did at Airbnb right to to to grow the product off of Craigslist. Those kinds of those types of stories. I think are super important to know and be fluent in. And I know that they be curious. You're always learning and, you know, even folks like me who maybe been in this industry for, you know, over a decade, we're still figuring it out. You know, the industry changes so dramatically. Five years ago or we were into consumer tech is not where we are now at all. Absolutely. I think that's totally fair. And the always be curious thing, I think is also, it's almost like a precursor, like, or even how I hire, like natural curiosity is something that's like very hard to, to replicate. And so it is to your point, like if you can keep that going and if you can find ways to feed that curiosity, it goes a long way. Okay. 2 to 3 more questions. Knowing that you love your role at Spotify. But if you could be a product marketer anywhere, where would you be? Like, I'd love to go jump and do that right now. I mean, I'll be fully transparent. Staff has always been like at the top of my list of places I want to work. You know, when they reached out to me, I was thrilled. So, you know, I'm. I'm staying put. Where? As much as possible. Yes, yes. Is there you're saying. But, But what I think the one that I think it'd be fascinating to understand and work in the app industry because I think it's when it was introduced. Right. So, you know, OkCupid and Tinder, you know, I want to say, 15 years ago, I think for a lot of people it was a relief. I think they were like, oh my gosh, this is this is awesome. Because, you know, I live in a city or I know a lot of people or, you know, I've, I've, you know, how many, how many more friends who can I know anyone. Whatever. Right there is this, I think, huge pivot in the way our our societies approach dating. And I think at first it was, you know, while there was a stigma overall, people enjoyed it and they liked it and they heavily relied on it. And over time, I think the sentiment around DNS has shifted. I don't know, I would say, you know, the super majority of people who have had to use a dating app or you know, who's dating and don't care for them, and, and you've seen new, new entrants in the space try to try different things. Right. Like Bumble tried the whole thing where, I think, women message first and I think, you know, other ones have tried to like, do niche audiences with certain lifestyles and, but overall, I think and we thought we had cracked the code on it. I don't think we have I think we're back almost to square one. I think, but, you know, it's a it's a personal one and I think it's one where it's how do you how do you monetize it without having misaligned incentives, you know, because for every other consumer tech app, ideally you have retention. You know, you have, yeah, over month growth. And it's like, well, but do you as a consumer want to have retention on a dating app? Ideally as I love hinges marketing campaign. You know, it's just the app that's meant to be deleted. Yeah, I think that's very clever. Yeah. I think they're probably, as far as I know, the only data that's really, figured out, at least on the positioning standpoint. But I really do think that the Mash Group and all these players that are coming back at square one with how do we bring this back to be like a solution people are happy about versus reluctant? Yeah. So just like a very fun product marketing challenge. It's a very human challenge. Right. And I think it's one shot. Yeah. That really you know you talk about product and brand being so, so intertwined. I think the day now there's no there is no one that's more close than that one. Right. You. Yeah. Yeah. No thank you. That's a, that's a really that's a really good answer that I've. Yeah I've never thought about it that way. Okay. Last question, you've mentioned a lot of books. What's your favorite and what are you reading now? I mean, for sure, I think any early career product manager or product marketer read hacking Growth. That's that's like a no brainer for me. When I first applied to colleges, I, was applying to be a, engineer with a minor in history. Because I didn't know what either of those degrees meant, quite honestly. And, you know, I was fortunate enough to get into a lot of great programs, you know, Carnegie Mellon being one of them. I was lucky that Carnegie Mellon offered a number of different colleges, you know, with all great programs. And I quickly learned that I wanted to do marketing. I'm not very long into my undergraduate tenure, so which is why I switched to Tepper School of Business. There. It was after I read a book called The Culture Code. The book is probably about 20 years old now, but I genuinely believe that the lessons espoused in that book hold up today. And basically, it's another name. Cleartrip. I'm butchering his name. It's a French name, so I apologize. All my former L'Oreal and Ubisoft colleagues never learned how to pronounce, but what his book basically does. He was, a trained doctorate, like clinical psychologist for, not for market research, but ultimately he used his decades of experience to kind of unpack the way we do, research on different industries, you know, automobiles, food, etc., and something that he said that I only now, like, have more conviction on is that when it comes to research, like focus groups, for example, you really can't focus too much on what they say. In a day, there's always going to be a delta between stated and observed behavior, and it can vary wildly. Right. And if you if you ask a hundred people and a focus group if, if they eat healthy, the super majority will say, oh, yes, I'm very, health conscious and I eat very well and I have a salad twice a week, but, you know, you go and see what they actually eat and there's going to be a massive gap between what was stated and what's observed. And so his book actually went and talked about how he would do a different kind of like almost deeper level of research where you would ask, like, kind of like more like kind about like your childhood experience with this product or this industry, you know, or cars for you and your kid. Some of the first time you were ever in a car with your parents, like, really like a whole level deeper. And it kind of unpacks the why behind how people think. So looking less at what individuals say they like or want or think, and more about how people think and why they think that. And it really opened my eyes to how you could get something, a consumer story or insight and get that level deeper of why they think or why they want the things that they want, and then turn that into, you know, a meaningful experience or product or what have you. It's it's a really well done build, and I'm not doing it justice, quite honestly. But I think that was one that even now, you know, I've had, earlier career marketers who had been taught or managed where I gave them a copy of that book. I was like, you know, I think this is this should be how you think when you when you reference insights in your work. I think that's another must read. And what I'm reading now, you know, I take a brief pause on, on, nonfiction at the moment because I was like, I need to have some fun, to, you know, distract him. But so, you know, I got some good sci fi books read rising, I think, through the next big Star Wars film. When they turn into a into a live action, show or movie. But yeah, that's that's where I'm at. Good. I gotta, I gotta borrow that, like, sci fi, is definitely where, where I'm at as well. I like, definitely need escapism. So, so I will. I will actually. Yeah. Well, Damian, this is awesome. Like, I sure learned quite a lot about product marketing and I hope everyone listening has to. It's been really great. You've had just a ton of experience across so many cool companies. And so I really appreciate you spending time on the experimental podcast and just really sharing all of your wisdom. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for having me. And, yeah, I had a great time chatting today. Thanks for tuning in to experimental. And today's insights spark new ideas or made you feel like a smarter marketer, consider leaving a review on your preferred podcast platform. It really helps support the show. For more in-depth discussions and resources, visit Experimental beehive.com. Until next time, be curious and stay experimental.