Here at Immersive Labs, we’re focusing our priorities on the next phase of our scale-up journey: building out our marketing team. But what is it really like to work here? What does it take to be part of one of the most exciting marketing teams on the planet?
This is part three of our Marketing Leadership series, featuring Lucian Lui, Chief Marketing Officer; Kristine Hunt, VP, Revenue Marketing; and Russ Miller, VP, Product Marketing. If you missed the previous parts of the series you can find part one here and part two here.
In this final part of the series, they talk about career advice and exciting business challenges that have struck them since joining Immersive Labs. We hope this series has brought you some great insights about the team and let you understand what you could bring to the table.
What piece of advice do you wish someone gave you at the beginning of your career?
Russ: Be more vulnerable and feel free to ask for help. At the beginning of your career, you’re not going to know everything (you won’t at the end either!). There’s this natural tendency to want to prove yourself and show that you can add value. But know that there are holes in everyone’s capabilities and skills – and that goes for everyone, right up to the CEO of every company in the world. Don’t be afraid to be upfront about what your development areas are, what you’d like to improve, what you can improve yourself, and what you might need help with. I believe everyone should be more open, particularly with their mentors, their manager, their advisors, and their peers. That will help you learn and progress faster than trying to figure everything out by yourself.
Lucian: The best advice someone gave me was to invest in both the work and the relationships you build. Early in your career you can get very far by overachieving and getting a lot of things done. Later in your career you start seeing that that’s only one component of it.
If you haven’t invested time in relationships – with your teammates or groups outside of your own world – then your ability to influence and to get things done gets severely limited. It’s important early on in your career to not just focus on doing great work, but also how you build constructive, positive relationships where people are excited to work with you.
Kristine: As a woman coming up in the tech world, it would have been wonderful for someone to sit me down and say, you know what? It’s okay to say no and it’s okay to push back. However, make sure you’ve got the business case as to why and what the best solution would be in your back pocket. It’s okay to disagree, but ensure that you’ve done the due diligence. Understand what the other best course of action is, or be willing to have a conversation as to why you don’t believe that way, and be able to work it out by hearing other people’s points of view.
What is the most exciting business challenge you and the team are working to solve today?
Kristine: The biggest challenge is creating a category for the product and to make sure that we’re getting it in the market in the right way, so people can understand exactly what we’re doing. A lot of that is shouting to the rafters that in this day and age, we all need to be resilient, and Immersive Labs can help with resilience across your organization. There’s a lot of messages in markets, so the challenge is cutting through them. I believe that with the leadership team that we’ve brought to the table, Immersive Labs is ready for that. We’re ready to shape the rest of the team. We’ll listen to our customers and get the insights to bring back into the market and do our best to cut through the noise. People will come away understanding the amount of resilience they can have with Immersive Labs.
Russ: For me, it’s part of the reason why I joined: building a category. When you do that, you’re fundamentally saying that the way that the world views an issue has been missing something. There’s a new way you need to understand the problem – a problem people might not have even known exists, or didn’t know was possible to solve. It’s about convincing people or having them understand that there’s something out there that changes the way that they think about their world, even if they’ve been in their industry for decades. It’s explaining to them that there’s a different way of thinking about their challenges. It’s a very hard thing to do, but it’s also very rewarding.
Lucian: It’s a good thing we’re all in agreement! It would be more concerning if we all came up with different business challenges! We’re here for a reason, and that challenge excites us all. So how do we build that category? What’s the story that we’ll be able to look back on years ahead? We’re at the beginning of creating something that will really make a difference for customers in ways that are new, innovative, and different. If it was easy, anyone would do it, right? Yes, I’m excited. We’re all excited to take that on.
What’s really struck you about Immersive Labs since you joined?
Lucian: There’s a common passion and belief in the company and the mission. No doubt companies go through lots of growing pains and there’s going to be challenges throughout, but the people here are super excited about the vision of where this company can go. They’re excited about the products we’re building and excited about how it helps customers. The passion here is something that seems very authentic to the organization.
Kristine: I was struck by the fortnightly stand up. I love that it’s only 25 minutes, but so much information is shared and it’s very accessible for everybody. I feel like we’re all at the same seat at the table and I truly appreciate the feed of information coming to the entire workforce. It truly feels like a family, and so for me, that really was the first thing that struck me. I thought, oh wow, this really is very special.
Russ: The team dynamics at the leadership level are pretty exceptional, and that starts with James Hadley and his enthusiasm. I’ve noticed that everyone has their own unique perspective that works well together and it doesn’t feel like they’re competing priorities. Everyone works together to figure out what our company goals are and how we can achieve them. And it feels good to be part of a team like that.
We hope you enjoyed this final peek into the world of our marketing leaders. Immersive Labs is actively hiring in our marketing teams. View all the available roles on our careers site to become an Immerser yourself!
