"I wanted to go back to working leaner, faster, closer to the product"
Big companies teach you scale. They also teach you distance.
In many large organizations, marketing drifts away from the product and the customer. You’re managing stakeholders, slides, approvals, and quarterly planning cycles—often without seeing weekly feedback from the market.
Smaller companies flip that completely. You’re closer to the offer, closer to customer reactions, and closer to the decisions that shape what gets built and how it gets sold.
That proximity does three things fast:
- Sharpens positioning because you see who truly cares (and who doesn’t).
- Accelerates learning because you can test and adjust in days, not quarters.
- Rebuilds operator empathy because you’re forced to understand the product like a real user.
Jenny’s underlying point: the best marketers can zoom out like strategists and stay grounded in how the work actually lands in the real world.
"I would not recommend spending a single dollar on marketing without aligned priorities."
This one should be printed and taped to every CFO’s monitor.
Because in industrial markets, misalignment doesn’t just “reduce performance.” It creates chaos: budget whiplash, stalled launches, finger-pointing, and campaigns that die halfway through the learning curve.
Sustainable growth requires cross-functional agreement on what matters, especially between finance, sales, product, and service. Marketing can’t be the only team trying to play the long game.
Jenny’s alignment checklist looks like this:
- Build trust with finance by speaking the language of the P&L, not impressions
- Tie marketing goals to shared commercial metrics, not vanity activity
- Align across functions before spend, then review often enough to stay honest
Culture matters here, too. M&A, matrix orgs, and change fatigue can drain teams. Leaders have to protect time for real planning, not endless status calls. When that happens, marketing stops being “the campaign team” and becomes what it should be: the connective tissue that makes growth coherent.
"It's all about the hustle."
Startups work under pressure. Time is short. Cash is precious. Everyone wears several hats.
That creates both strain and sharpness. You cannot hide in process. You must move. You must learn. You must sell.
But Jenny’s version of hustle isn’t chaos — it’s urgency with focus. It looks like:
- Staying close to customers and hearing their words, not just survey data.
- Learning the product well enough to use it like a real user.
- Sharing what you learn quickly, so the whole team adjusts.
Because chances are limited, first impressions matter a lot. A poor launch or weak pitch can slow the whole journey. So teams need openness and constant communication. That said, the same hustle mindset helps inside big companies too, just at a different scale.
"AI is the great equalizer."
AI is changing the economics of marketing work.
Smaller teams can now do things that used to require entire departments: faster research, quicker iteration, more content variants, better reporting, better synthesis, faster testing. And when AI is wired into workflows (not just used as a novelty), it shortens the distance between insight and execution.
But Jenny’s warning is implied: AI isn’t the strategy. It’s the accelerator.
The trap is treating AI like a trend to talk about. Instead, Jenny advises businesses to use it carefully, repeatedly and with discipline. Teams can do this by piloting specific use cases and keeping what performs, dropping what doesn’t and building the winners into team’s workflows.
Innovation still starts with people. The best marketers act like entrepreneurs. They bring curiosity, clear thinking, and action, even in slow or rigid settings. There is no single career recipe. Big firm first, startup first, or your own business. What matters is that you keep learning, know how you learn best, and move when the environment no longer lets you do your best work.
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