Hi Iterable Community! I'm happy to be here and excited to start chatting. Looking forward to your questions!

This question was shared in advance from John Tabari at ClassBento: Why did you join Iterable? What excited you most?

Answer: I wrote about this a bit in my Q&A blog, which you can access here, but to dig into the details a bit…I joined Iterable because I’m passionate about what I do: marketing. I wanted to return to my roots, and work more closely with marketers who are in the trenches, serving and connecting with consumers.

Iterable checked the box on the “working closely with marketers component”. Frankly, my engaging with the Iterable Community in this AMA is proof that my plan really worked! But Iterable has also afforded me the opportunity to interact more closely with the technology aspect of marketing, and challenge me to approach problems marketers are facing today from the perspective of the CTO as well as the CMO. I have a new perspective and can bring that understanding back to my core audience - our customer Community of marketers.

How would you select talent? We had a situation that a talent didn't perform that greatly a few months after he got hired. Wondering what advise would you provide during the interview process.

Hi Catherine Chan, thanks for your question. Yes, bad hires do happen to everyone, to every organization, and at every level. There is no perfect formula. When that happens, the kind (and right) thing to do is be straightforward with the individual and manage them out, or help them navigate to a new role. Chances are they are not happy with the job either.

On the front end, I try to focus on interviewing for values and attitude more than experience. The traits of how you work and how you approach difficult questions is far more important than experience in a role!  For example, Growth Mindset It's one of Iterable's four core values, and it's always been one of mine. I hire for intellect, curiosity, and a hunger for learning. Most skills can be taught. What you can't teach is what's most valuable - ambition, interest, and, yes, hard work.

More tactically, I can home in on two things I look for:

1. Has the candidate done their homework? It’s important that I hire the curious and the craft. IT’s unbelievable how many conversations I have had (at ALL levels) when I can easily see that someone hasn’t even looked at our company website. Does it require effort to do research? Yes, minimally. At a basic level, it’s a courtesy that I hope every candidate affords the person on the hiring side of things.



2. Are they self-aware? I’ll ask different iterations of the “strengths and weaknesses” question to find out. It’s interesting what you can find out when you ask a candidate to share where they have failed, and what they learned from it. We’ve all stumbled at one point in our career. I mean, we’re only human! But can you own up to the fail and tell me how you have grown because of it?




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Another question shared in advance: Have you changed your management style in your career span? 

Answer: Yes…and no.

Here’s what hasn’t changed: I learned early on in my career that you have to earn people’s motivation and commitment. It’s probably because I worked in the nonprofit space, where the drive to “do” doesn’t come from a padded paycheck. It comes from care and commitment to a cause. You can’t just order people around. That’s bad leadership in any circumstance, and dictatorship (especially in this day and age - hey, it’s not the 50s anymore!) simply doesn’t work. Instead, you can get discretionary effort by investing in your workforce, and encouraging employees along their journey. Being an advocate NOT an autocrat will afford you buy-in. Your ROI will be discretionary effort, which is incredibly valuable.

Here’s what has changed: As an early manager, I was (I hate to admit it) a micromanager. I simply didn’t afford the people I work with the benefit of the doubt. My early philosophy was that people - at any level - started out with a score of “zero” on my trust barometer. They’d have to earn my trust. But after many…painful lessons… I caved. The issue was that asking people to earn your trust is cumbersome and time-consuming. For some people, starting out at square one is debilitating. And a handicapped team is not a helpful team. So I learned from my mistake the hard way. Now, the people I work with start out with my full trust. 100%, glass-totally-full. The assumption is that people are amazing. That I will work for them in the future. That approach allows me to scale faster.

Responding to a question submitted from Kara Sheil at Speedway Motors: Are there plans to continue improving the reporting side of Iterable, and what does that look like?

Answer: Yes, absolutely! There’s a lot more coming, but I can say that one of our priorities for the coming year is to not just improve the reporting side, but build on our reporting to enable data digestion, deeper insights and analytics, and predictions and forecasting. Our AI is the power behind that capability. We want to make you smarter. We want to provide you insights you can act on. So yes, we will continue improving the reporting side of Iterable - but we’re not going to stop there.

A question submitted by Catherine Chan in advance: What are the things that work to empower employee growth while meeting company KPIs?

Answer: This question has no straightforward answer. Every employee needs something different to grow and contribute to company goals! But, a few of the more general processes or policies I weave into our team:

• Alignment: It’s incumbent on me, as a CMO, to help each individual on the team connect the dots, and map their individual goals and values back to the company goals. There needs to be personal connection and buy-in to incentivize action that yields impact at the enterprise level. 



• “The why” - “Find Your Why” is a staple of motivational speaker Simon Sinek’s instruction. Everyone has a “why”, Simon says. Do you know yours? I agree with Simon wholeheartedly. It’s important for your team to know the “why”. “Why” are we doing something? “Why” are we investing in this, or spending resources on that. Everything is a journey, but reminding everyone what we’re working towards - our company “why” - helps us get there.



• Celebrating wins - big and small. Not everything is going to be a “moon landing” level milestone. Not everyone is going to wildly outperform, or blow a KR out of the water! Highlight the day-to-day victories and small, behind-the-scenes goals met is empowering. It reminds us of the work the entire team is doing to get us to the next level.



• Perspective - The reality is that employee growth can mean very different things to different individuals. Growth is an individual experience. In the pandemic, when we are all remote and working in disparate environments, we (leadership) need to expand our definition of growth and find new ways to support it. This may mean flexible work hours, providing opportunities to learn new skills, and community service. The single father working in rural Connecticut has different needs and requires different support than the fresh-faced college graduate who is jumping into their first job at the company.




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Sharing one last question submitted in advance: Will a detailed development pipeline be published for your customers to understand what advances are coming up, plan for them & track their progress towards production release?

Answer: Yes, we do share our internal roadmap with some customers. It's not often mass distributed. Part of how we stay competitive is our rapid release and innovation process. We are constantly recalibrating, readjusting, and (yes) iterating. We acquire feedback from customers through small deployments and beta testing, and we learn. We edit. Sometimes, we go back to the drawing board. And this process helps us stay cutting-edge and agile. We are working towards more visibility. 

Thank you for attending our AMA with Iterable’s CMO, Adri Gil Miner. We hope you found the answers you were looking for today. If we didn’t get to hear from you and you still want to ask a question, feel free to post it! We'll get to it soon.