🎯 How did you get your start in (tech) marketing?

Teodora V _Warsaw Dynamics_

Hi fellow marketers! 👋

 

This week, we are hopping on the time machine to go back to the start of our career journey. Do you remember your first touch with the marketing profession? Was it a pursuit goal or a lucky coincidence? 💫

 

Everything nowadays is built on marketing: the way we shop, the way we dress, even our daily decisions, and how we talk to people. We want to market ourselves as the intelligent, kind, and capable people we actually are (or hope we are, haha).  

 

To kick it off, here is my funny story about how I found myself in this position and why I am still here. 

I got my full-time job when I was 18. I joined a recently launched online bookstore, and I was responsible for various tasks, starting with the basics like putting up books online and moving up the chain with responsibilities like picking the orders from our providers, assembling and packaging, and so on.

It was a continuous learning curve, and the more time I spent there, the more I realized how your most important marketing is how you treat your customers (one time, we had an order from the building next to ours, so I delivered it myself in 5 minutes. I still remember the happy surprise from our customer.)

I was fascinated by clever and witty marketing, and I moved through jobs wanting to be the person to create "the next smart idea that boosts our marketing and makes customers happy."

 The software job hit me while working as a photographer and graphic designer (which I deeply loved).

My dear ex-Botron friends stole me from my current position and threw me to the hungry tech wolves. So, my journey is more of a lucky coincidence than a real pursuit, but I've never been happier like here in the Atlassian Ecosystem.

Ever since I started working in tech, I have applied the same principles and approach I learned from the start: focus on delivering high-quality content and being useful to your customers. Happy users and solid feedback worth more than a thousand ads  

 

... and here is the 18-year-old me, ready to spend the night packing orders so the customers receive them on time.

 

Your turn! I can't wait to read about how you stumbled across marketing, especially marketing in tech (more points for attaching embarrassing photos like I did 🤓).

 

 

Kristen Roth

What a story, Teodora! And thanks for sharing that photo of 18-year-old you! 🤩

Mine has also been a windy road that started with science, led me to marketing, and then over to tech...

I graduated from college with a degree in Microbiology, always having been fascinated by science. 🧪 While I absolutely loved studying science, I wasn't prepared for the work-life reality and how repetitive and monotonous most of my lab work would end up being day after day (unfortunately, my internships spending several hours a week working in a lab did not adequately prepare me for what it would look like doing the same work for 40+ hours a week).😵‍💫 After a few years of working in labs, I came to the harsh conclusion that I was not cut out for this type of work and needed a job where I'd have a little more variety in my day-to-day! 

I started casually browsing around for other types of jobs and came across a listing for a marketing agency looking for a science professional to help them market scientific research equipment. The job required zero marketing experience, and what they were after was someone familiar with the types of products they were helping their clients sell - and that was me! I spent a few years there learning how to be a marketer, was introduced to Confluence and Jira, and became interested in Atlassian. When I was ready to leave the nest of my first marketing job, I started looking for open roles at Atlassian, which led me to where I am today! 

Thanks for kicking off this convo, Teodora! I always love hearing these stories! 

(I need to spend a few minutes later today looking for some old photos to add to my story! There have to be some! 😂)