Anne Chaconas isn’t brave, she just has a lot of practice putting herself out there. As a marketing leader, Anne has run her own firm and earned positions of increasing responsibility at a variety of tech companies. She recently joined ClockShark as the VP of Growth, where she and her team own the entire cycle of marketing, sales, and customer success. Tom and Anne talk about loving your customers, step 3 of the 12 Steps of Product Management. And Anne explains how marketing a business is like setting up a profile on a dating app.
Anne Chaconas likes vanilla, but she doesn’t want to be vanilla. She’s visually “out there” in most tech leadership spaces and wears her beliefs on her sleeve. Anne explains that knowing yourself and being honest alienates some people but keeps the people who matter most close, forming your tribe. She hopes that her visibility in tech spaces invites other people like her to see themselves in the same spaces.
Tom asks Anne if the purpose of marketing is to generate sales. She calls “total bullsh*t” and leads a conversation on building love, trust, and consistency through marketing, making connections to dating apps and parenting. Anne explains why gambling with trust is such a dangerous game. Tom and Anne talk about empathy in corporate governance, the three rules of parenting, and why Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion make some people so uncomfortable. Tom asks Anne the impossible question: How do you define love? And then he asks her about God. In the end, Anne brings it all back to a few simple rules: shut up; listen to what people need; and help them achieve it if you can.