Sep 11, 2022 · 1h 10m · lennys-podcast
How to build a powerful marketing machine | Emily Kramer (Asana, Carta, MKT1)
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Marketing leader and MKT1 co-founder Emily Kramer joins Lenny Rachitsky to break down foundational marketing frameworks, including the Fuel and Engine mental model, hiring Pi-shaped marketers, and establishing effective cross-functional collaboration between marketing and product teams.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Lenny holds 20.2% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Lenny as informed peer 3.1 Guest teaching 5.4 Guest disagreement 1.9 Lenny pushing back 0.4
speaking balance: gold is Lenny, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 37:07 PLG is a misnomer to avoid saying marketing
Emily forcefully dismisses conventional industry terminology, claiming that product-led growth is essentially an excuse tech companies use to avoid admitting they need marketing.
Hardest push from Lenny ▶ 36:22 Lenny challenges marketing ownership of conversion flowsLenny challenges Emily's assertion that marketing should own website conversion by pointing out that product managers often run those experiments successfully in PLG startups.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 18:40 The Pi-shaped marketer replacing T-shaped adviceEmily dismantles standard hiring wisdom regarding 'T-shaped' generalists, educating listeners on why early startups require 'pi-shaped' marketers with two distinct domain spikes.
Lenny holds their own ▶ 59:16 Lenny demonstrates angel portfolio management experienceLenny demonstrates deep personal expertise by breaking down the reality of managing founder requests across 150+ startup investments to complement Emily's advice.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Lenny as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Lenny pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Emily Kramer's Career Journey and MKT1 Overview | 2 | 5 | 1 | 0 | Lenny establishes Emily's background and prompts her to explain why hiring early marketers is so confusing for founders. Emily introduces her high-level fuel versus engine framework while Lenny acts purely as an interviewer. | |
| Diagnosing Growth Bottlenecks: Fuel Versus Engine Breakdown | 3 | 6 | 1 | 0 | Lenny asks for concrete examples and heuristics to distinguish fuel from engine bottlenecks. Emily educates on channel distribution, positioning assets, and marketing ops. | |
| Marketer Archetypes and the 'Pi-Shaped' Marketer | 2 | 7 | 2 | 0 | Emily introduces her proprietary 'pi-shaped marketer' framework, explicitly replacing the traditional 'T-shaped' advice commonly given to early founders. Lenny listens attentively and summarizes. | |
| Differentiating Growth Marketing, Demand Gen, and Growth PMs | 4 | 6 | 2 | 1 | Lenny asks whether growth marketing and product growth PMs are essentially the same role. Emily distinguishes how the functions separate or overlap depending on whether the company is top-down enterprise or product-led. | |
| Evaluating Early Marketing Candidates and Identifying Red Flags | 3 | 6 | 3 | 1 | Emily criticizes the common VC mistake of recommending senior big-company marketers (e.g. from Google or Salesforce) for early-stage startups. Lenny presses on why that background fails. | |
| Determining the Right Stage to Hire a First Marketer | 2 | 6 | 1 | 0 | Lenny asks when a startup should hire its first marketer. Emily outlines the milestone of early product-market fit and explains how self-serve models need marketing sooner than enterprise sales models. | |
| Sponsor Message: Athletic Greens (AG1) | 2 | 4 | 1 | 0 | After an ad read, Lenny clarifies that Emily's advice is focused primarily on B2B and asks where brand marketing fits into the taxonomy. Emily explains how brand marketing bridges fuel and creative design. | |
| Cross-Functional Collaboration: Marketing and Product Handoffs in PLG | 3 | 6 | 2 | 0 | Emily explains the critical 'marketing to product handoff' in PLG companies, emphasizing cross-functional ownership over early user onboarding. Lenny prompts for organizational best practices. | |
| Reframing Product-Led Growth and Funnel Ownership | 4 | 7 | 5 | 2 | Lenny pushes back with a common PM perspective, asking why marketing should own top-of-funnel conversion in PLG when PMs often run growth experiments. Emily offers a contrarian take, arguing 'product-led growth' is a misnomer designed to avoid saying 'marketing'. | |
| Collaboration Frameworks: AORs, Roadmap Week, and the GACCS Brief | 3 | 6 | 1 | 0 | Emily details the internal collaboration operating cadence at Asana, including Areas of Responsibility (AORs), Roadmap Week, and the GACCS marketing brief. Lenny praises the concrete nature of the frameworks. | |
| Evaluating Marketing Impact: Overcoming 'Content Splattergy' | 4 | 6 | 3 | 1 | Lenny asks how product teams can tell if their marketing team is actually effective versus underperforming. Emily critiques 'content splattergy' and explains why activity goals (e.g. publishing 10 blog posts) are red flags compared to impact goals. | |
| Leveraging Functional Marketing Expertise in Angel Investing | 5 | 4 | 1 | 0 | Emily discusses how functional marketing expertise opens doors in angel investing. Lenny actively contributes by citing his own investing experience across 150+ portfolio companies. | |
| Lightning Round: Book Recommendations, Media, and Interview Tactics | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | In the lightning round, Emily playful turns the favorite interview question back onto Lenny. Lenny holds his ground and explains the variation he prefers for evaluating candidates. | |
| Admired Marketing Peers and Industry Leaders | 2 | 3 | 2 | 0 | Lenny asks about admired thought leaders; Emily jokingly balks at the term 'thought leader' before naming respected marketing peers and wrapping up the conversation. |
Statements from this episode (23)
Kramer: Business model experience matters more than industry experience when hiring marketers
“I think having the right, the same business model experience is almost more important than having like industry experience or experience with that audience. And I think often people are like, I need someone who's, you know, marketed to HR or marketed to, you k…”
Kramer: Interactive tools and templates outperform blog posts in content marketing
“And I think people have this limited view of contents where they think blog posts and blog posts are one part of content. Like content should be tools, resources, templates, like calculators, those kinds of things do better in all the cases.”
Kramer: Founders who write early content need growth engine hires
“Sometimes founders are really great at making the original sort of content and writing the early positioning, and they're the best suited to that. And they just need someone to help them get that stuff out. And that's when they need an engine person.”
Kramer: Startups should hire 'Pi-shaped' marketers with two depth spikes
“You want to hire pie shaped marketers and not pie, like a dessert, but pie, like 3.14, where the pie symbol has two vertical lines. So like a T, but it has an extra line. And it's because you want the first marketer to be an expert in one of those three areas …”
Kramer: Marketers skilled in both content and growth are exceptionally rare
“Really hard to find someone that's Content marketer that's also really good at growth. Like that pie shape marketer exists a lot less frequently. Maybe it's someone who's like really amazing at content distribution or like really amazing at FDO, but they don't…”
Kramer: Demand gen focuses top-of-funnel while growth marketing is full-funnel
“Demand gen is probably more top of funnel and growth marketing is probably more full funnel at its simplest form, but it's definitely different there.”
Kramer: First marketing hire should usually be a growth-literate product marketer
“The most common archetype that I say you want to hire is, is, is a product marketer, even though I joke that everyone's like setting a product marketer, but it's actually understanding what that is first. That understands growth marketing as well.”
Kramer: Big company product marketers have an overly siloed view of marketing
“Because what happens at later stage companies or at public companies is when you're a product marketer, like you don't see what's going on in the rest of marketing at all. Like you have a very siloed view of it.”
Kramer: Hiring Big Tech veterans as early startup marketers is a mistake
“I see this mistake all the time. Like you don't want to go out and hire someone super senior who's like only worked at a public company. Like that's the wrong person. And often VCs are, you know, sort of lead investors that aren't in a certain niche. Like they…”
Kramer: Do not hire marketers during bespoke founder-led sales
“Marketing is really good at accelerating growth and sort of doing things that scale sort of like one to many. So if you're still in the very like bespoke, like founder led sales, founder led marketing, like I'm doing discovery with each of these potential cust…”
Kramer: Product-led startups need to hire marketing earlier than enterprise models
“I think you need them earlier in product growth models because you're not gonna hire a salesperson then. So it's more like thinking about go to market holistically and saying, Like, you know, do I need one or two people here? And what is that? And so if you're…”
Kramer: Early B2B brand ownership splits between product marketing and design
“Usually the person that in B to B, the person that kind of owns the brand is, is the positioning story side of brand is owned by product marketing. And the design side of brand is either just sort of like owned by the product designer at first, or like working…”
Kramer: B2B marketing teams should hire dedicated brand marketers at 10-15 people
“Eventually like on B to B teams, when I've run teams class, you know, like 10, 15 people. I'll have a brand person that is working really closely with the designers and kind of like making sure, sure that everything that we're producing on sort of like the con…”
Kramer: PLG companies need marketers driving inbound and web conversion
“For PLG, I think you want to have a marketer that is responsible for getting into the pro people into the product. That's a marketing profile. That's using all these channels. That's driving inbound. That's focused on web conversion making sure your website co…”
Kramer: Product PMs should own in-product experimentation over marketers
“The product experiments and the product tasks, that's a person with a product skill set because they know how to work with other PMs. They know how to work with engineers and marketers don't.”
Kramer: Marketing-to-product handoff is critical for PLG user experience
“We talk about like the marketing to sales handoff all the time on the go-to-market side, but there's a marketing to product handoffs, and that's the handoff that's really important in PLG. And if that feels weird to a user, like it's two different teams inside…”
Kramer: Product-led growth requires larger early marketing teams, not fewer marketers
“I think that product led growth is a misnomer. I think people will do anything they can possibly do and not call marketing marketing. I think we always see this. And so I think that product led growth really means not as much sales. Which means product plus ma…”
Kramer: Hardcoding websites or using marketing-inaccessible CMS is a huge problem
“The website is something that's gonna need to be updated, like, 5000 times, and it needs to be on, like, Webflow, preferably at this point, or CMS that's easy to update, and if it's, like, built into the code base, that's like, or it's on a headless CMS, or it…”
Kramer: Companies need clear lists of ownership beyond job titles
“Having clear ownership is what this comes down to, but it's one thing to have clear ownership, but it's like quite another tip for other teams to know like who that clear owner is. So I think having a clear list beyond titles and just like who owns what is rea…”
Kramer recommends using the GACCS brief before major marketing projects
“This is just a marketing brief that, that I recommend you do before you make anything and make anything big in marketing or do any big projects. And it's just, what are the goals? What's the audience? What's the Creative or unique angle or like what's the like…”
Kramer: Marketers are often poor at internal company communication
“I find that marketers, even though they're often good at communicating with the audience, they're not good at communicating internally.”
Kramer: April Dunford's 'Obviously Awesome' is essential reading on positioning
“I think April Dunford's obviously awesome is sort of becoming one of those books that every marketer should have read on positioning.
It's really helpful.
Even if you're not like a product marketer or doing positioning, I think it's really helpful.”
Kramer: Website hero sections must state product, differentiation, and target audience
“And like, also if you're like writing positioning at your company, or if you're on marketing your company and you can't tell me what the product is, why it's better, who it's for, like,
Go figure that out.
Like that's what the homepage of your website should c…”