Navigating the Data Forest: Building Conviction in a Digital Age with Lena Waters & Eric Weber, Grammarly

This episode features an interview with Grammarly’s Chief Marketing Officer, Lena Waters, and Eric Weber, Head of Data. Lena leads marketing strategy, focusing on delivering the brand promise to customers, driving demand for products, and growing revenue to scale the company.  Eric leads teams of data scientists and software engineers who are responsible for improving how to measure and iterate on the product to create the best communication assistant. 

In this episode, Kailey, Lena, and Eric discuss their collaborative approach to aligning business and customer priorities, the implications of a cookieless world on marketing attribution, and the balance of data insights and human judgment to drive meaningful customer experiences.

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Key Takeaways:

• Leaders should have a clear understanding and conviction about their business goals and use data to test and refine their hypotheses, instead of relying solely on data to dictate actions.
• The key to navigating a cookieless world is to focus on fundamental marketing principles and broader customer understanding, rather than obsessing over the loss of precise individual data.
• Creating a culture where leaders and team members feel empowered to make informed decisions ensures that teams leverage data effectively to drive meaningful business outcomes.

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“I think as leaders, we have to think about that decision-making environment that we're creating for our teams so that they do have the right resources, but we're not overloading them with false expectations of we have to try everything. We would drown. We're looking for, I think, clarity. We're not necessarily looking for everything.” – Lena Waters

“You're going to have to have conviction and a hypothesis and a belief about what is true, and you should still use data to try to refute that or gather evidence against it. But, you're going to have many fewer situations where the data's going to be like, ‘Here's the path forward.’ Guess what? That's not going to happen. I think the more that we embrace that, we're going to be more successful in one or two years when a lot of this visibility is actually gone.” – Eric Weber

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Episode Timestamps:

‍*(03:14) - How data and marketing work together at Grammarly

*(05:30) - Trends impacting customer experience

*(22:45) - How Grammarly is measuring effectiveness in a cookieless world

*(29:13) - How marketers can address the overreliance on data and dashboards

*(36:34) - How Grammarly is using AI

*(43:32) - Lena and Eric’s advice for upleveling marketing and data strategies

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Links:

Connect with Lena on LinkedIn

Connect with Eric on LinkedIn

Connect with Kailey on LinkedIn

Learn more about Caspian Studios

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Sponsor

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