Episode Summary
Stephanie Cox, VP, Sales and Marketing at Lumavate talks with Tristan Pillegrino about her journey as a marketer. She reflects on the challenges of making her opinions and ideas heard earlier in her career.
She recounts her progress along a path of personal growth from that early career experience, which led to her ultimate adoption of a professional philosophy grounded in proactively tackling problems independently, without permission.
Stephanie reflects on her former sense of relentless determination to achieve perfection on all projects, and the problem with striving to maintain that personal standard over time, especially in terms of the trade-off of speed and quality. She discusses the evolution of her mindset from commitment to incessant pursuit of perfection in outcomes to a principle of iterative stages of development. Stephanie compares the objectives of achieving top quality and providing rapid results and talks about how the switch to focus on incremental improvement through processes of iteration has transformed her project management and team leadership methodologies.
Guest Profile
- Name: Stephanie Cox, VP, Sales and Marketing
- Company: Lumavate
- Expertise: Branding, messaging, content marketing, demand generation, website, email marketing, social media, mobile apps, SEO, paid ads, network communications, sales resources, marketing development strategy and vision, native mobile, global mobile messaging, project management, marketing technology team leadership, among other industry skills.
- Industry Leadership: Host of Real Marketers podcast, previously called Mobile Matters, launched its second season in August 2020 (postponed from its March launch target in sensitivity to the COVID-19 and BLM crises). The program focuses on mobile marketing and sharing best practices. Guests have included brands such as Amazon, Google, Simon property group, Lowe's, and others.
- Agile Philosophy: "I ask for forgiveness, not permission. I don't have the patience for a bunch of red tape."
Key Insights
- Autonomously taking initiative causes people to take you more seriously at work. "I think I just really got fed up one day with constantly asking permission to implement an idea or do what I thought was best. I realized I didn't need to ask permission, and so I just stopped. And, my thought was that at some point, if doing this is a problem, someone will tell me to knock it off. Well, spoiler alert, no one tells you to knock it off when you do great work. In fact, they actually start paying attention to you."
- Perfectionism is counter-productive. Adopt an iterative approach of shipping as fast as possible, then make changes, refine things. Make speed the priority over elusive attainment of perfection. "I told the team I picked yesterday as the timeframe to flip it over, really because I knew if I didn't give us a date, we would just constantly want to work on it forever. It would never be good enough."
- Find a balance between quality and speed. "So, there's this balance between speed and quality — between still doing good work while doing it fast enough to learn from it and to make it better and realizing that you are never done with anything."
Episode Highlights
- Asking permission vs. taking independent initiative
“I would have these really good ideas and they would be ignored, and then someone else who either was of a different gender than me, or was older than me, or had more experience, or was just honestly sometimes louder in the conversation and more boisterous would say the exact same thing. And everyone was like, “Oh, we should do that.”
That really was like the catalyst for me, I think. Taking the bull by the horns and saying, I do know what I’m doing. I need to stop asking people, and do what I think is best for the company. If someone has a problem with it, they can talk to me about it. I didn’t lose any of that Midwestern nature, I’m still super polite and humble, but I really just started realizing my own self-worth.”
- Work environments and women's socialization
“I really do think part of it is just how we’re raised. I think some work environments are more welcoming to both genders and treat everyone really equally and hear ideas the same, but I think regardless of the work environment you’re in, a lot of times women come into situations where we’ve been taught to speak a certain way.
We’re taught to be a good girl, which means, you’re not going to speak up, you’re not going to start an argument. But, I think there are ways to be polite and respectful while also advocating for yourself and what you believe in. Finding the balance of the two that works for you personally is something I wish more women felt empowered to do.
I think that’s a problem for my entire generation and the generation younger than me.”
- Recognizing and overcoming perfectionism
“In my first role about a year out of school and I was in charge of brand management. My boss at the time had written a really stellar performance review, but as one of the areas for growth wrote, Stephanie can often be focused more on perfection. And while she always meets her deadlines, I wonder if we could deliver earlier if she wasn’t so focused on being perfect.
I remember reading it and getting really angry. But, it really helped me start to realize — and it took years for me to get there — I have ridiculously high standards for myself. I started realizing the stress of perfectionism I was creating for myself. It wasn’t something that my company or my boss was demanding of me. I had to let things go. It’s not like they didn’t still get done, they just didn’t get done exactly the way that I had imagined in my mind.
The first time I was in a situation where I was forced to let things go, we still just absolutely blew our numbers out of the water, and so I realized maybe there’s something to this, maybe I need to let go of this perfectionism. I realized, I am killing myself when I really don’t need to be. For example, a lot of times when you spend so much time focused on a website, spending so much time trying to get it right, by the time you launch it, all of the data and perceptions that you used to create it are outdated, because you’ve spent so much time trying to get there.”
- Using iterations to deliver, instead of waiting to achieve perfection
“I thought: What if the deadline is Friday and I can deliver something that’s 90% of what my ideal state is? On Tuesday and we can spend Wednesday through Friday getting data and then start iterating on it. I’ve always been a big believer that you don’t know what you don’t know.
So, until you get out there and until you have data that starts coming back, all you have is a lot of assumptions or a lot of things that you’re using based on previous data. If you’ve done digital for a long time, you learn that something can work extremely well for six months and then stop working one day. So, I just really started pivoting to a mentality of let’s ship it.
Let’s get it 90% there, and let’s just ship it, and let’s learn, and let’s iterate.”
- How to set the right goals for iterations
How do you know when something is 90% there and it is good enough to get in front of people? “I think this is one thing that so many marketers still don’t do well, which is figure out what is your goal. What’s the primary goal? You might have secondary goals too. But, what’s the primary thing you’re trying to do? And, at the end of the day, it’s ready when it can do that primary thing.”
- Benefits of B2B Podcasting
“In the first season of Mobile Matters, not a single guest that came on was a customer. We did that intentionally. You got to see Lumavate’s name and our podcast name tied to Google, Amazon Lowe’s, Crayola, MGM hotels, some of the biggest brands in the world. It really does help elevate you from a brand-awareness perspective.”
- Importance of sharing industry knowledge and information
- Having information about failure promotes success
- Community building for marketers
