The story behind Slack’s marketing and the leap from marketer to CEO — Abstract’s Kelly Watkins

Today’s episode is with Kelly Watkins, CEO of Abstract, a platform for structure and transparency in the design process. In joining Abstract last year, Kelly is one of very few folks from a marketing background to take on the CEO seat. She brings a wealth of experience leading incredibly high-performing marketing teams for Slack, Github, and Bugsnag.   In today’s conversation, we start by reflecting on her first year as CEO. She shares her alternative to yearly planning, borrowing from famed military strategist John Boyd. Kelly also walks us through Abstract’s most recent product launch, and how it clearly crystallized her leadership point of view to constantly optimize for trade-offs, rather than clear-cut right and wrong.    Next we switch gears to talk about some of the lessons from her storied marketing career. She unpacks her jobs-to-be-done approach for crafting a product story when there’s loads of competition. She also takes us behind the scenes in developing Slack’s “where work happens” tagline, and crossing the chasm from a passionate early adopter customer base to the ubiquitous product it is today.    Today’s conversation is a must-listen for marketing folks, who will surely appreciate the peek behind the curtain. But all sorts of leaders with goals to more effectively collaborate with the org will come away with a deeper understanding of marketing’s art and science.    You can follow Kelly on Twitter at @_kcwatkins   You can email us questions directly at [email protected] or follow us on Twitter @ twitter.com/firstround and twitter.com/brettberson    To learn more about Kelly’s advice on hiring your first head of marketing, read her Medium article: https://medium.com/hackernoon/how-to-hire-your-first-head-of-marketing-67c43dd2cd73
For more on the jobs-to-be-done framework, check out this article on the Review: https://review.firstround.com/build-products-that-solve-real-problems-with-this-lightweight-jtbd-framework