Today, we’re going to talk about the evolution of consumer technology and the impact of AI on marketing with Melissa Waters, Chief Marketing Officer at Upwork. Melissa has been instrumental in some of the most significant industry shifts, from digital music at Pandora to ridesharing at Lyft and more. Today, she’ll share her insights on the intersection of AI, consumer expectations, and branding.
About Melissa Waters
Melissa has been the driving force behind some of the most significant consumer technology behavioral shifts, from the rise of digital music at Pandora, to ridesharing at Lyft, to telehealth at hims & hers and social media at Meta. With Melissa being at the forefront of these industry shifts, she can share her expertise on how AI is reshaping consumer expectations and how the marketing and branding industry is pivoting in response.
Resources
Upwork website: https://www.upwork.com
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Transcript
Note: This was AI-generated and only lightly edited
Greg Kihlstrom:
Today, we’re going to talk about the evolution of consumer technology and the impact of AI on marketing with Melissa Waters, Chief Marketing Officer at Upwork. Melissa has been instrumental in some of the most significant industry shifts from digital music at Pandora to ride sharing at Lyft and more. Today, she’s going to be sharing her insights on the intersection of AI, consumer expectations and branding. Melissa, welcome to the show.
Melissa Waters: Thanks so much for having me, Greg. I’m so happy to be here.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, really looking forward to talking about all this with you. Before we dive in, could you give a little bit of background and maybe share a little bit of your journey through, you know, I mentioned a few names that I’m sure everyone is familiar with, and, you know, just kind of your journey through some of these tech giants and, you know, how these experiences have shaped your approach to marketing at Upwork.
Melissa Waters: Oh, yeah, no, I appreciate that question. I have definitely had a journey. I started my post business school career in consumer packaged goods. And then once I found the tech sector, I quote unquote, found my people. So I have really loved and thrived in the entrepreneurial environment of the tech industry in Silicon Valley and the boom that we’ve had over the last couple of decades. So I’ve been really fortunate to sit at the intersection of building and scaling businesses in the tech sector, whether that is my earliest days at Flip Video back in the day, if anybody remembers that. I remember, yeah. Disrupting the camcorder space to my time building the marketing organization at Pandora when we were just introducing and mainstreaming digital music to the mass market. to introducing ride sharing at Lyft, the introduction of telehealth and telemedicine and hims and hers, and of course, being part of kind of the social media mecca at Instagram and Meta. So all of that culminated in so many amazing lessons and experiences that have really allowed me to apply all of that learning to the last chapter that I’ve had here at Upwork, which has been a real pleasure to be part of this new world of work
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, that’s great. So yeah, definitely bringing a wealth of experience here to talk about some of these things. And I want to start with a topic that certainly, these days it’s a familiar topic, but there’s always more to dive in here and talk about, and that’s AI’s impact on consumer expectations. And I want to just talk a little bit and start by, how do you see AI currently reshaping consumer expectations?
Melissa Waters: Yeah, it is such a great question. And it’s so I think for all of us marketers who’ve been around for a little bit and have seen so many of these different sector changes, you know, this one feels particularly, I think, important because of just it being a big platform change that we’re all going through. But when I look at it and I look over the course of my career, and many of us have been kind of leading through these chapters as well, you know, we have been doing this transformation on some level across the last couple of decades, whether that was digital or social or mobile. You know, we have adapted to this kind of being a normal way of life for a while. It’s how we search for information, you know, this kind of digital social first thinking. It’s how we search for information, how we connect. how we shop, how we listen to music. I mean, the list goes on. It’s just how we live our daily lives. And I think that AI, you know, challenges perhaps like the norms that we’ve all come to with that social mobile digital kind of life that we lead in perhaps shifting it going from us having to go find and scour and source to delivering a more immediacy of personalization at scale. And I think that’s really interesting and exciting. When I think about the tax that I carry every day on trying to search for things just to go about my daily life, I’m excited about what AI can do and the value it can bring to synthesize, to curate, to personalize, to bring things to me in a different model and modality, perhaps, than than we’ve become accustomed to. So I’m hopeful that it feels more like a tool to us versus something that is just another technology and actually has real consumer value and continues to drive that value to customers every day. I’ll just give you one small example of just a way that I see this coming to life. And we just are literally watching this roll out this week. But we just at Upwork launched, we have a research institute, which is just a magnificent organization delivering reports and insights and great synthesis of research to our customers, which who are business decision makers. So these are people who sit in leadership roles across all manner of different businesses and sectors. And we just put out this 30 plus page report this week on our work innovators and what it says about the kind of characteristics and capabilities of companies that see themselves as innovators in the world of work. And rather than just delivering a paper, which, you know, as great consultants, you know, we tend to want to do, right? We’ve done all this great research. We’ve delivered this amazing report. We actually built an AI research assistant that sits on top of that report so that you can query it. You don’t have to sit and slog through, you know, dozens of pages. You can say, Hey, tell me, I’m going to take a quiz and tell me about how I rank on being a work innovator, or I want to know the synthesis of an insight, or I want to ask a specific question. So that’s just to me, an example of, you know, we are awash in data. We are awash in information. We are the most data rich we’ve ever been as a, um, as a society. And yet that can also feel quite paralyzing. I think when you feel like there’s just too much out there. And so I’m hopeful that AI, you know, can really help deliver more value to consumers and customers who feel really awash in data.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Yeah. I, I totally agree. And, you know, when, when big data was the buzzword of the, of, of the year or years or whatever, you know, it was, it was something to start being able to collect all that data, but to your point, just kind of the promise of that was that we could do personalization. Right. But then we tried, personalizing and, you know, personalization at scale just wasn’t really as doable as it is now with, with some of the AI tools available. So I, I, I share that the optimism you could say, as far as like, I think there’s so much possibility to, to really realize all of these like ideas that we’ve, I’m sure had all these years to be able to, to do better, you know, whether it’s one-to-one personalization or even just, you know, other methods, but I kind of feel like the time is now to really start doing stuff like that.
Melissa Waters: I totally agree. I think we’ve had this desire for a long time. And it’s finally the desire and the actual technical capabilities are finally coming more in line.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. So, you know, as I mentioned some, and you mentioned some of the brands that you’ve worked with, and some really, you know, disruptive technologies and business models and things like that. So certainly you are, I would imagine you’re not a stranger to the pivot, so to speak. But, you know, speaking along those lines, and you know, looking at AI and what you were just talking about as far as consumer expectations, what does this mean in terms of, you know, how are marketers and brands pivoting to kind of adapt to using AI in the most effective ways?
Melissa Waters: Yeah, it’s such a great question. I think that marketers have, you know, because we sit at the intersection in between, you know, technology and a consumer and we are, our role is designed to both help shape what is built and how that product goes to market and how it resonates with customers. And being that voice of the customer in the room with products and then being, you know, kind of the representative of products into the room with customers, like that is our job. So I think that marketers who have been sitting in this intersection of all this technology change, to your point, are really adept at pivoting and you know, being nimble and agile. That said, I would say that AI, at least, you know, in me, my personal kind of party of one point of view on this, and also working with my team on it, and having conversations with other CMOs and marketers, it feels as though we’re on kind of pivot hyperdrive, right? I mean, it definitely, and I think the reason for that is because it is applicable to across everything. It’s not just like one vertical of transformation, it, is infused in everything. So it’s now affecting kind of every way in which every modality by which we do marketing. So just a few things top of mind for me as I think about some kind of thematics on this front. I think it can dramatically reduce time to market. So we’ve obviously are trained to really test and understand things before we put them out in market. And I think that this allows us to test and do research and adjust campaigns and things in real time. So being able to respond to trends, being able to be nimble and kind of test a position before it goes out or test work before it goes out has just been pretty awe-inspiring to be able to see the speed with which we can do that development. So I really appreciate the time to market improvements. I think to the point we were talking about earlier around personalization, you know, yes, this is something that you still we still have to get right with our data. And yes, we still have to pipe data properly. And yes, we still have to do a lot of work to make sure the infrastructure is there. But it is possible now to do more and more with personalization at scale. And so I’m excited about continuing to see how we get better and better at this over time. And then the other thing which feels both you know, kind of maybe an obvious thing to say, but it’s pretty amazing to actually notice the speed with which it’s impacting things right before my eyes, is this concept of blurring the lines of specializations. You know, marketing, I always say this, is such a sea of specialization. You have so many different kind of archetypes and specialized roles. And it really takes emphasis on integrated teamwork to be able to kind of cross all those lines of specialization and getting a piece of work out into the world.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah.
Melissa Waters: And what I see is that because you can use AI to help enable very specific tasks, whether that is paid media planning, or content creation, or data analysis, or making a piece of creative work, if all of that is augmented and assisted by AI, it really is reshaping, you know, a marketer’s role and their ability to kind of play outside of their perhaps specialized lane. And I see this happening in real time on our team where people are fearlessly experimenting with ways in which they might be able to kind of cross over into territory perhaps that they didn’t think that they had the skills to do. And that has been really fun to be able to watch people expand their skills. So I think a long-term pivot for us is going to be having a mindset around agility, a mindset around fearless experimentation, and also feeling like marketers can step outside their roles and take on kind of that big picture strategic thinking to say, hey, how can I enable myself to be a better data analyst or be better at content creation is really fun to watch people expand their skillset.
Greg Kihlstrom: So the next thing I want to talk about is kind of building, building on what we were just talking about, but you know, digital transformation, you know, another one of those things that, that we’ve, we’ve talked about quite a bit, not only on this show, but just in general, and you know, certainly there’s some great and some not so great statistics about their success, but you know, that, that aside, even you’ve certainly seen some, you know, you, the brands that were mentioned that you’ve worked with, they may have started as startups, but grew to significant organizations. And as we all know, as organizations get bigger, some things get easier, some things get a little harder as well. And so I’m wondering, From a digital transformation standpoint, and you know, what are some of the lessons that you’ve learned from seeing some of the significant digital shifts at companies that you’ve worked at, like Lyft, Pandora, Meta?
Melissa Waters: Yeah, such a great question. And I’ve been really fortunate to work in very digitally native organizations and kind of the epicenter of technology and innovation. So I’ll just caveat with that. It hasn’t It’s been less of transformation and more about hyper growth. And that said, you know, the minute you get used to one platform or one modality or one way of bringing work to market to your customer, something changes. So I will say, you know, I think being nimble is just the hallmark of the work these days. So when I think back at my early days of Flip or Pandora, you know, social media was just becoming mainstream. It was, you know, I’m dating myself, but it was just kind of coming into the fore. And so Experimentation has always been something that we’ve really had to focus on in my marketing organizations from the earliest days was, you know, how do we get engaged in a new platform? How do we try to reach people in new ways? And even in the platforms today, I mean, fast forward all these years, people are still, you know, very experimental, you know, coming from meta most recently and Instagram where, you know, we were really at the epicenter of the creator economy and still are, you know, that business obviously still is. Creators, I think are so amazing to watch because they are experimenting every day with how to grow their audiences, how to develop their audiences. And so I just think that culture of experimentation has to be at the forefront. And what comes with that is an experimental mindset of staying nimble and having a certain amount of fearlessness. and having great curiosity around what’s resonating with folks and being really data-driven. You look at the numbers and you’re like, what works? What doesn’t? Why? How do I do more of something that works? How do we do less of something that doesn’t? And staying really great at listening to your audiences. And if you think about the way marketing used to be, delivered and, and business value was delivered to customers, you had to kind of see what they bought at the grocery store, wait until you got the data back, study it, and, you know, kind of pivot your, your product strategy. And now people are doing that in real time on social platforms every day. So I think that this marketing cohort of marketers at this point, and our marketing leadership at this point, are no stranger to being nimble and experimental, but I don’t think that’s going away at all. I think the only difference that I see in the world of AI is that it’s less visible, you know? digital, social, mobile, you know, it’s very, very visible to everybody. And AI is less visible. And so I’ve found myself wanting to reach out to more and more marketing colleagues to get POV on how they’re using different tools and technology and kind of not doing more knowledge sharing because you have to actually go seek that out because you can’t just see it as easily.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, so then how are you, you know, how are some of these things influencing, you know, as CMO at Upwork, you know, how does this influence the way you’re approaching things? And even to, you know, to throw in the component of AI since, you know, it’s AI itself, of course, is not a new thing, you know, it’s been around for decades, but AI, the way it’s being used now is pretty new and novel to many, if not most. you know, how does that kind of influence the way that you, you know, your strategies at Upwork?
Melissa Waters: Yeah. So we, we have really embraced AI, um, from the earliest days. I mean, yes, it’s been part of our platform for a long time, as you said, the technology for sure. And kind of the concept of machine learning and the concept of, you know, kind of the tech behind it. Yes. But I would say it’s like the front layer, you know, the kind of the consumerization of AI is where we’re living right now. Right. And internally, this is something that we have really embraced as we see it as a tailwind for us, not a headwind. And so we have, I think it starts with culture, we have really embraced it from the beginning, one of our values is build and break fearlessly. So from the earliest days of the consumerization of AI, and something that we felt like we needed to really ensure was We were fostering an internal culture of experimentation and experimenting in our product and delivering value to our customers. Both of those dimensions were very important. So that obviously some people run headlong into that and say, yes, sign me up. I want to do a lot of experimentation. And some people naturally are really hesitant about experimentation or hesitant about doing things in new ways. So we’ve really tried to lean into building a culture of experimentation, a culture of permission, celebrating early adopters, celebrating their both wins and losses, failures, being able to talk about what didn’t work. And I think that helps foster that culture of permission because you’re saying, hey, it’s not about perfection. It’s not about getting it right. It’s about trying. And so that spirit of, you know, kind of leaning in and staying curious has just been at the forefront of our culture.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. And so as far as impact goes with generative AI in particular, certainly there, as you mentioned, there’s, there’s been a lot of ways Upwork’s been using AI already. But, you know, when it comes to generative AI, do you see this as Is it a gain in efficiency and maybe people can focus on some other more strategic things which helps? Or do you see it as truly impacting the business, maybe even the business model and the services offered? How big do you see the impact on something like generative AI having on the business model?
Melissa Waters: Yeah. Yeah. So I’ll give you a couple of, there’s, there’s a couple of things I’ll comment on here. I think there’s like an internal dynamic because you, you mentioned, you know, do you see it as a productivity gain or do you see it as a business model shift? And so I think it’s important to kind of highlight that nuance because I think it’s both. And I’ll give you a couple of examples of how I think about the internal impact and then, you know, happy to chat also about the external impact and kind of how we’re delivering for customers. But internally, you know, I’ll just speak to my marketing department because obviously that’s where I live and breathe every day. And just a couple of examples, you know, that I think are really pertinent in that I’m sure many departments are already doing, but I’ll give a couple of examples in case it’s helpful for people to brainstorm. You know, our content marketing team is definitely, you know, at the forefront of all of this. And we’re using chat GPT and other tools. We’ve also been using 11 labs and increasing productivity of the content library creations. So the actual what we make, we’re also transforming a lot of our articles, you know, into video scripts and things that can be produced in different multimedia channels, that is really helping us with our content efficiency. Our enterprise marketing team is using Reggie AI to customize our outreach and that’s scaling our production 40% and improving conversion by 17%. And our creative team is using mid journey and other tools for creative concepting and video production. So those are just three examples across my own team and every single one of our departments. you know, is really leaning in and, and we do a lot of show and tell at our, our meetings and our Slack channels. We do a lot of knowledge sharing and we, if anybody’s stuck on anything of ways that they want to innovate on their particular program, we have culture carriers in our team who will go in and help, you know, unstick people on, on their experimentation. So it’s really fun to be able to do this as a collective group and feel as though people are embracing, you know, new technologies and in ways that help them feel like experimenters, which is really fun. Yeah. And then as far as externally, I mean, our, our business, we are a talent marketplace. We operate in 180 countries. We operate across 125 categories of work. We’ve got over 10,000 skills on the platform. So if you just think about the, and we cross almost every sector of businesses and with so many dimensions of work, right? So just think about the absolute nuance and dimensionality of this platform. We see AI as a real opportunity to help improve delivery, efficiency, and all the things that help people be successful. So when a client comes in and says, I need to get a piece of work done, but I don’t actually know how to get started, or talent come in and say, here’s all my skills. And here’s what I can do. But I need to find the right clients and the right jobs. We see AI as just such an amazing technology that allows us to make this process a lot easier for folks. So we recently launched Upwork Chat Pro, which is a GPT-4 powered app that helps freelancers get started and create and complete projects more efficiently. In the spring of this year, we do a twice a year product update and our Upwork updates spring launch, we launched UMA, which is Upwork’s mindful AI, that’s what it stands for. And it’s a companion that guides clients through the Upwork journey and freelancers through the Upwork journey of getting started, getting work done, getting it completed and delivered. And it’s kind of the brain in the matching and hiring process that allows people to get started. So that’s kind of where we’ve been to date. This fall, this month here in October, we announced that We’re really moving and migrating away from, you know, people think in a marketplace of the kind of transaction of hiring. And we really are known for having long range relationships on our platform, people coming in doing more complex work. This is not really just a transactional platform. And so we’re seeing the value of Upwork being able to deliver more outcomes, not just the hiring process. And so if we’re moving from on-demand hiring to on-demand outcomes, well, what does that mean? That means that Upwork and UMA can sit across that whole journey of getting work done and deliver a lot of value in saying, oh, you need to build a website. You might have come in looking to hire a developer, but really you might need a whole team of a designer and a developer. a marketer, or, you know, content creation, etc. And we can actually help you with the outcome, which you’re trying to deliver, not just simply hiring a developer to get started. So UMA is really bringing more dimensionality to those driving those on demand outcomes. And we think that that’s going to be a huge value for our customers. Yeah. Happy to comment also on, you know, the kind of, I think you touched on business model and, and, you know, do we see this as something that is fundamentally shifting our business model? Um, I think that maybe I answered that through the kind of what we see as these outcomes, but just another component that I’ll share with you are the category of AI and machine learning. So the, the kind of, we categorize all of our different talent by, you know, our ontology that allows us to be able to do our best matching. And that category of AI machine learning is currently the fastest growing category on our platform. And we continue to see a really significant rate of premium work in that category. And our internal data shows that 54% of our freelancers are using AI tools. which is more than double the freelancing population as a whole and about 5x what the average FTE at an average company says, claims. So, you know, whether it’s a fundamental shift in our business model and or the opportunity for Upwork to just evolve to match what’s going on in the market, I think it’s really amazing to see that transformation happening in real time.
Greg Kihlstrom: Going back a little bit to how you’re working with your internal teams, you gave some great examples of some things that you do at Upwork. I wonder if you could maybe share some advice for leaders listening out there that want that same kind of experimentation and curiosity. What would your advice be to leaders that want a little more experimentation with AI
Melissa Waters: Yeah. Yeah. It’s, um, it’s such the right question to ask. How do I get started? How do I foster this? What do I do? I feel paralyzed by just so much change always. Um, so I think it’s the right question to ask. And you use, I think stated the magic word and the question around curiosity, because I think that’s the underpinning of it all. And I think it starts with building a culture of permission, really. I witnessed such a range. I feel like when the consumerization of AI really hit the scene in a big way and became headline news every day to a point where people were really processing what this means for all of us, the range of the response to FUD, the fear, uncertainty, and doubt dynamic that happens when something new pops on the scene, the range of folks and personalities, you know, really became clear where you have some people who, like I said, run headlong into change and some people who get paralyzed by it. And the breakthrough that we had on our team was to really emphasize a culture of permission to experiment. And we named our theme this year, Stay Curious. And that was one of our working principles at Upworks. We really adopted that theme and said, Listen, we want everyone to stay curious about this. We want everybody to lean in. And if you’re stuck, and you’re paralyzed, and you don’t know how to start, or you’re really worried and scared, Don’t do it alone. Don’t go alone. Call your buddy. Here’s the handful of people that we were really showcasing as kind of people who are really fearlessly leaning in. And we’ve had an awesome culture on our team of people in doing this experimentation together. So I think it starts from creating first a culture of permission and naming it and saying you have permission to experiment and be curious about things. Two was just establishing internal alignment, like us being able to say, okay, we’re going to do this. And we’re going to do this together. And we are all aligned that this is important. I was bringing in people from the outside talking about type of technology and kind of other use cases outside of our business. So we really adopted this not only in our own, each division of marketing was kind of had an agenda around how are they’re going to experiment, But we were also trying to get, you know, inspiration from the outside. And so there was just true alignment across the organization that this mattered. And that came from the top, our CEO was doing the same thing. And we were showcasing a lot of this work across our departments across the business to the other thing, which, you know, is really real. And I give a lot of kudos to our legal and public affairs teams and government affairs teams that really looked at policies and how other people were taking a look at the policies around AI. And that helped us with frameworks, and it helped us with onboarding the right tools and making sure we were legally protected. So marketing would be out front saying, hey, we want to experiment with all these tools. And our legal team was right there with us saying, here’s what we can enable you to do. So it was really helpful to have clarity around policies and tools and technology. And then the fourth thing I would say is just Showcasing and showing the wins. What I was saying a minute ago about experimentation with AI is not something that is overseen and overheard. You don’t see it the same way you see somebody posting something on TikTok or Twitter or Instagram or whatever. it has to be showcased or it has to be talked about because it’s not as visible. And so we wanted to create kind of a forum by which people could highlight their successes and failures and kind of, I tried this and look at this weird thing that happens. Like, it’s okay. And it was great to be like, the technology is maybe not always there just yet. But it’s going to get there really fast. And I’d rather not be late to the party, I’d rather be, you know, watching this happen in real time versus, you know, having to come from behind later. So I hope all those, you know, kind of four areas are helpful. But that was those were the four things that that really worked for us.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, no, that’s I love all of those. I think that’s all great. You know, what the the one that stuck out to me for for some reason, maybe underappreciated in some circles, but the partnership with legal, to be honest, is, I think, maybe undervalued until you run into issues, right. So I think that’s, that’s a really Yeah, that’s a really amazing thing to be able to have that, that kind of partnership, as opposed to it being kind of a back and forth. And less of a partnership, we’ll just put it that way. So that’s, that’s, that’s great to hear. I want to get to one last thing, maybe just ask, ask one question about it. Because, you know, I have the CMO of Upwork on the show, I want to talk a little bit about the world of work here. You know, we’ve been through some massive changes, you know, ever since the pandemic in particular. And, you know, I think now we’ve, we face a little bit of a You know, if there was ever such a thing as normal, you know, maybe there’s a little bit of a return to normal. But I just wanted to get some of your thoughts on, you know, some things have changed and maybe they’re changing back. You know, what are some of the things that are not really returning to normal in this world of work? And, you know, how should leaders be thinking about that?
Melissa Waters: Yeah. Hey, we’ve gone through such a shift and such a change and we’ve all become, I think, a lot more open to new ways of doing things, or many people have. You know, the pandemic triggered a big shift and a rapid shift. Obviously, we all lived through that. And it was a tremendous amount of anxiety around, you know, quote unquote, new normal. And we also proved to ourselves that we could do hard things, you know? It shifted to remote and hybrid work. And I think the main emphasis that seemed to happen in that time was really a focus on where people were working. Where are people located? How are we all working together? And here we’ve lived in a remote first culture for a long time. So, you know, we are obviously wildly biased because we’re a very successful company that has been able to get here, you know, remote work, you know, model. But I think that deeply this generation, it’s very important to not just kind of, we don’t look at it simply as, you know, Upwork. We also study our customer. We study, um, market trends. We study, frankly, generational trends. And I think it’s so much more or less about where and much more about how and why people work. How are they getting work done? Why are they working? And we saw this big shift in, especially, you know, generations that are coming up now. in which people are not just looking for a job and willing to go anywhere to do that job and work in whatever environment the job dictates. But they’re really looking at work that aligns with their lives, you know, integrates in their lives in the right ways, is aligned with their values, helps them have growth. And in doing so, it’s really reshaping the world of work and reshaping how people think about their relationship to work. And so I think companies that are still stuck in a place of, you know, let’s go back to the old or maybe missing the opportunity to say, let’s just design for the future because the future is not, you know, like the we’re not going totally back to a situation in which everybody, you know, commuted in suits to, you know, big office buildings, like it’s still not there. And I don’t think it ever will be there. Because I think this generation and the workers that we need to engage, it’s not just retain or acquire, but really engage, are asking for a different relationship with work. They’re asking for you know, a different kind of more, um, you know, flexible dynamic that they say, I’ll get the work done and you allow me to be successful in working the way I want to. And I think that businesses that don’t embrace that are really not taking full advantage of, you know, kind of a market opportunity. You asked me.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Yeah. I love that. Totally agree. I think that’s, amazing insights there. Well, thank you so much for joining today. One last question I’d like to ask everybody before we wrap up here. In your role as CMO at Upwork, what do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do that consistently?
Melissa Waters: Yeah, I one of the things that I have just grown to weave into my time and make more formal over the years, because it’s something I always did informally, but it’s something I’ve started to do more formally is a lot of mentorship. And in mentoring people who are coming up in their careers, people from different backgrounds, people from different industries, people in different roles, it has been a lot of fun for me to stay really connected with new talents as they develop. And I can bring wisdom from chapters of my life that I have lived through But really, I get to learn from them and stay close to them on what they’re facing, what they’re seeing and what they’re bringing to the roles. You know, I feel like in a good 10, 15 year age difference, you know, there’s there’s so much value in learning from people who are approaching marketing and business with a fresh set of skills. So whether it is being a mentor, I’m also a board member. So being, you know, kind of volunteer for different things in the marketing community, I try to stay very connected to different facets of business and facets of marketing, which allow me to feel like I’ve got my ear to the ground and staying in tune with what’s on people’s minds and what’s changing. So I really value my ability to be mentored, reverse mentored, so to speak, by my mentees.
