The Product/Marketing Connection by Instacart VP of Brand & Marketing, Laura Jones

Hi, thanks so much for having me.

Yeah, well, so excited to be here. And reflecting on the journey, I think I can kind of boil it down to having been somebody from a young age who was right-brained and left-brain equally, kind of interested in analytical and creative pursuits. I think the story of my career has been very much trying to find roles where I can flex both sides of that muscle. That manifests academically in majoring in economics but spending a lot of time doing studio art, and working early in my career as a strategy consultant and going to do painting classes at night. It all kind of came together for me when I went to business school at Stanford and spent the majority of my time there at the d.school, really finding a way to integrate that creative and analytical approach into a holistic way of thinking about problem solving. That led me into a career first in product marketing and now as a marketing leader at Instacart.

Yeah, so to me, brand is a subset of marketing, but not limited to just the marketing discipline. When I think about building a brand, I think about the aspect of upper-funnel marketing plus the manifestation of that brand across the entire customer experience. So really thinking about not just that upper-funnel mass media campaign, but what happens when someone hits the product: how is the brand expressed in the product, and how do we develop a relationship with that customer, create a community, retain them, and eventually turn them into an advocate? So the brand piece touches marketing but spans a bit beyond it. That's manifest in the work where the creative team is developing core aspects of our product experience from a design standpoint, helping to bring the brand to life in various touch points that go beyond typical marketing channels. On the flip side, I think about marketing as that full-funnel experience: not just the top-of-funnel brand piece, but also our performance marketing, product marketing, and CRM organizations. So really thinking about the full experience of getting a customer to be aware, getting them activated, engaged, and retained. They're related disciplines, but a Venn diagram where they overlap but are not exactly the same thing.

Yeah, it's a really great question. My journey at Uber was exactly the one you described. Initially, product marketing sat in product. I came over to Uber with an incredible product leader I'd worked with at Google, and initially we built out product marketing in the product org. Our goal was really to drive product adoption. Once Uber reached a certain state of maturity as a company and hired its first CMO, we brought together all the marketers into a single marketing org and moved from thinking about each product in a silo to really thinking about their place in the customer journey, making sure we were serving as that connective tissue between the upper-funnel brand messaging and what the product team was building, so the story of the company was a holistic one. I always think it's a huge miss when product and marketing are operating in a disconnected fashion. You have two of your biggest investments as a company pointed in opposite directions: your tech team, which is usually a large portion of your head count and resources, may be pointed at one roadmap, but your brand media or media spend is pointed in a different direction. That can end up with disconnected customer experiences or less effective marketing because you're not focused on telling a single story across the entire company and to your customer, and being clear what you stand for. So product marketing is that connective tissue to say: who are we building for, what should we be building, how do we make people aware of that, and how do we take that message and put it into the biggest, loudest messages the company is distributing via marketing channels? That's the real value of product marketing.

Yeah, absolutely. When I offer career advice to younger marketers, I really think of those as the three legs of the stool. You want to have somebody who really develops that core growth demand gen muscle and understands how to use channels to grow business and bring customers in. You want to have somebody who really understands brand and how to tell a compelling story and create a cohesive experience. And then you really want somebody to understand product marketing and how to articulate a clear value proposition to an audience and thread that across the entire experience.

Yeah, 100%. So Instacart is groceries on demand. Our heritage as a company has been being the market leader in taking that on-demand e-commerce model and bringing it to one of the largest purchase categories out there, which is grocery. Now, as we evolve as a company, we're starting to diversify into other verticals, looking at convenience and non-grocery retailers, starting to deliver from places like Sephora and Best Buy. But I think we're most famous for being grocery delivery. It's certainly a story that is deeply interwoven with our experience over the past two years with the pandemic, seeing huge growth in the category and really taking this company from an earlier, more niche product to something that is on the path to being a mass beloved product.

Yeah, great question. It's evolved. I've been at Instacart for six months, coming off of six years at Uber. As the team itself has evolved—when I started, the team I was running was under 30 people, and through the evolution of the org, teams coming together, we're now almost 120 across all of marketing. The process of scaling the team has been different on a monthly and even weekly basis, depending on what problem we need to tackle. Early on, I invested a disproportionate amount of time in setting the vision and strategy, working closely with our market intelligence team and research team to understand market dynamics, where the opportunity is from a TAM standpoint, and the business case for why we need marketing. Once we outlined the jobs to be done for marketing at the company, I thought about what we should do and how to bring ourselves to the world, spending time articulating our brand vision and brand strategy. That was chapter one: vision and strategy. It had two impacts: giving the team a rally cry, helping us feel a sense of identity and purpose, and building credibility with leadership by showing why we exist, what we'll deliver for the business in terms of revenue and growth over the next three years, and the level of investment needed. Chapter two was capability building: once we had our mandate, head count, and budget, we went through and identified the capabilities needed to run a world-class marketing organization—everything from product marketing to brand marketing to co-marketing, CRM, creative, and now the performance marketing team has come over. On a week-by-week basis, I go deep with each of these teams, assessing where they're at, what they're great at, where they can continue to develop, and what resources we need to apply. Now we're through the first half and back to planning, revisiting the broader strategy and how it aligns with corporate strategy. I'll continue to spend more time with newer teams that have just come into the org to do that same org assessment and capability building, even attending weekly reviews to get pretty deep in understanding the problem space and working with functional leaders to identify and execute on plans.

Yeah, I think it's been less about any specific skill and more about having a really strong problem-solving framework. For me, that was unlocked during my time at Stanford, when I spent a lot of time at the d.school and developed a framework around user-centric design. It helped me understand how to define a problem and approach it in a systematic way that was effective, providing a blueprint knowing that no matter how big a problem is, there's always a way to approach it in a structured way. Anytime there's a specific skill or domain expertise, there are so many options in this tech-enabled world to either upskill yourself or find somebody who has that skill. So for me, it's been largely about gaining confidence that I can solve bigger and bigger problems, work with bigger teams and budgets. It's been an iterative approach of applying that framework, seeing where it works and where it doesn't, and building confidence that no matter how big the problem, if you have a structured way to approach it, you'll eventually get to a great solution.

Yes, that is a big and hard question. Even at this stage in my career, maybe especially at this stage, I am very much actively grappling with it. It's so important to have a constant learning mindset. To me, it's a lot about creating the conditions for learning: giving yourself that on-the-job challenge component that motivates you to actually learn, and then having the resources to do it. I've definitely fallen into the trap of buying a book about a skill or taking a class without the motivation to fully engage or internalize it. I felt this way about the channel performance marketing piece. I had wanted to learn about it, but it really took going deep into a channel and having that on-the-job need to learn something that motivated me to go take the class or read the book. So it's that combination of intent and a little bit of a forcing factor: 'Okay, I really need to deliver.' I really admire people who have the discipline to acquire the skill before it's needed in that moment, but for me, that just-in-time approach has been really powerful and has enabled me to diversify my skill set over time.

Yeah, no, and I do really think it's about having the confidence to take the challenge and raise your hand and say, 'I will do this thing, and even if I don't know about it, I am confident I can learn that skill.' That was a big unlock for me: realizing that it was okay to sign up for something I wasn't already a total expert in, knowing I could learn those skills. That is a big unlock in a career: realizing you don't have to know everything or have all the answers; you just have to have the will to acquire those skills and get those answers through a learning process, and have the confidence that you can do that and get smarter and better.

Yeah, I think I like to say, 'Only do what only you can do.' That's advice I've given to too many people. Places where I tend to go a bit deeper: earlier we talked about those strategic deep dives. I really like to spend time with teams understanding their strategy in detail, how they've set goals, why they've set those goals, and what strategic frameworks they've applied to get to the plan they've developed. Going deep on strategy and understanding the 'why' behind what a team is doing is great because it enables me to say, 'Great, relying on the strategy we have and great talent, the execution is going to be impactful and effective.' So that's one place I tend to go deep and want to make sure I personally understand so I can speak to it intelligently. The other piece is on the creative and visual side, because I think it's important for a brand—both marketing and product—to have a cohesive look, tone, and feel. It's important to have a consistent set of eyes across the most visible touch points. I really value creative review and try to spend a lot of time with our creative team and product design team to make sure that when we're putting our product and story into the world, it feels like it has come from a cohesive and thoughtful perspective, and everything looks and feels like the Instacart brand we want to be. I value the ability to look at every asset, not wanting to go too deep into the channel stack, but anytime we're doing something net new that will have a high level of impressions, I really want to look at it and have a discussion with the creative team to make sure it's the best we can produce.

Yeah, it's a great question, and it's something I've learned as I've scaled as a leader. I can track in my career a time when I was managing a team of four, then 10, then 20, then 50, then 70, and now 120. I've gone on that journey of learning how to scale myself and empower and grow people. As the leader of a team, the most important quality is that people trust and desire you to be their leader. If you're not a good leader, if you're not helping people feel empowered and masters of their craft, you're going to lose them. So figuring out how to empower people to be the best at their craft has been something I've intentionally focused on. Practically, it's best practice to come in with a curious mindset, understand why somebody made a decision—whether it's creative or an experimentation framework—and understand the intent and thesis behind the work. Taking a questioning and learning mindset allows everyone to be the master of their domain, but also ensures that constant bar-raising of making sure we're all approaching decisions in a principled way. This is even more important for creative because it can be so subjective. That's where having things like brand guidelines or shared design principles becomes very important, because it moves it out of the realm of purely subjective preferences to a world of: 'Hey, this is what we're trying to accomplish, this is how we want to show up in the world, and is this meeting those bars?' If yes, then it should be that domain expert's decision on the exact shade of green, because we're all aligned on the principles and how we got to where we are.

Oh, I love this question because I feel like it's something I've obsessed over, especially at Uber. Over six years, we built this team—at a peak of 65 on the product marketing front—all through organic growth, all hand-hired by the team. It was a time when we needed to scale hiring but wanted to keep a really high bar. We thought deeply about it, and the way I would summarize it is evidence-based hiring. I really overvalue work product that I can observe and assess independent of a candidate's profile, because to me it's so indicative of what this person will be producing. I tend to place a little less emphasis on a behavioral interview. While I still value getting to know people, I'm much more interested in when we give someone a prompt or piece of homework and give them time and space to approach it: what do they come back with? Or when we look at their portfolio—and by the way, we look at portfolios not just for creatives but for all our strategy roles as well, including brand and product marketing. We have people present case studies speaking to both the brief and the creative output and impact. That combination of either live jams or written homework with a specific problem focus, where we can observe the work process and product, and then speaking to past work, why decisions were made, owning successes, failures, and learnings—for me, that's been really critical. There's so much risk for bias if you're just scanning a LinkedIn profile: what school did this person go to, what company did they work at? Somebody might be a really great interviewer but not really down to do the work. This evidence-based mode is really helpful to level the playing field and see what people are made of.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, I think it goes back to the earlier conversation about raising your hand to try new things and being confident that you can learn new skills, even learning them on the job. There are so many disciplines and sub-disciplines in the world of marketing and product. It's easy to say, 'Oh, I'm good at this thing, I'm just going to keep doing it.' What I wish I had done earlier and would encourage others to do is to say, 'Maybe I've mastered the discipline of product marketing; now I will go try growth marketing or brand marketing or product.' At Uber, I had probably five or six PMMs who went on to become PMs, and in some cases they were really excellent PMs because they understood how to drive adoption and root work in customer insights. So just not being afraid to take a risk and learn something new, even if you're not going to be perfect at it on day one, knowing that you are a learning organism, that you can go out and feel confident taking things on—I think that is the thing that will differentiate people who have a faster or slower career trajectory. So confidence and lifelong learning would be the takeaways I would offer to myself and to anyone else.

Thank you. Have a great one.