How to build a powerful marketing machine | Emily Kramer (Asana, Carta, MKT1)

Marketing is often viewed as a "dark art" by technical founders and product leaders. It is frequently treated as a series of disconnected activities—blogging, ads, events—rather than a cohesive system. However, for companies scaling from seed to Series A and beyond, marketing must be approached with the same rigor and architectural thinking as engineering. Emily Kramer, who built the marketing functions at Asana, Carta, and Ticketfly, argues that successful marketing requires moving beyond generic advice and adopting structured frameworks for hiring, strategy, and execution.

Key Takeaways

• Think in terms of Fuel vs. Engine: Before hiring, diagnose whether your startup lacks "fuel" (content, story, creative) or an "engine" (distribution, operations, tracking).
• Hire "Pi-Shaped" Marketers: Early marketing hires shouldn't just be T-shaped; they need to be Pi-shaped (π), possessing broad general knowledge with two deep spikes of expertise (e.g., Product Marketing + Growth).
• Adopt the GACS Framework: To align teams and reduce wasted effort, every major initiative should start with a brief covering Goals, Audience, Creative, Channels, and Stakeholders.
• Measure Impact, Not Activity: A red flag in marketing leadership is a focus on output (e.g., "we wrote 10 blog posts") rather than funnel metrics and conversion rates.
• Clarify the Hand-off: Just as there is a Sales-to-Marketing handoff, Product-Led Growth (PLG) companies must rigorously define the Marketing-to-Product handoff.

The Core Diagnostic: Fuel vs. Engine

Founders often struggle to articulate what kind of marketer they need because they focus on titles—Brand Marketer, Demand Gen, Growth Hacker—rather than business needs. Kramer suggests simplifying the entire function into two distinct components: Fuel and Engine.

Defining the Components

Fuel represents the value creation. It encompasses the content, the messaging, the design, and the story. It is the "what" that you are selling and saying. If you have a clearly differentiated product and a compelling story but nobody knows about it, you likely have plenty of fuel.

The Engine represents distribution and operations. This is how the fuel reaches the right audience. It includes marketing operations, tracking, paid acquisition, SEO technicals, and email automation. If you have traffic but low conversion, or a massive email list but no compelling content to send them, you have an engine but no fuel.

forget the product marketing content marketing partner demand gen growth like forget all of it and just think of marketing as you need fuel and you need an engine... the question is where do you have the biggest challenge right now?

Diagnosing Your Bottleneck

To determine your first hire, you must identify the primary constraint to growth:

• The Fuel Problem: You don't know your positioning, you lack case studies, or your website copy is generic. In this scenario, hiring a Demand Gen expert to run ads is a waste of money because the destination (the message) isn't ready.
• The Engine Problem: You have great blog posts, a solid product, and happy customers, but your traffic is flat. You need someone to build the distribution channels and operational infrastructure to scale that message.

The Hiring Framework: The Pi-Shaped Marketer

A common mistake in early-stage recruiting is hiring a specialist who is excellent at one narrow thing, or a senior executive from a massive company (like Google or Salesforce) who has forgotten how to build from zero. Early-stage companies need generalists, but "generalist" can be too vague.

Kramer introduces the concept of the Pi-Shaped Marketer (π). While a T-shaped person has broad knowledge and one depth, a Pi-shaped marketer has broad knowledge and two distinct spikes of expertise.

The Three Primary Archetypes

Generally, marketing talent falls into three buckets. Your ideal first hire should spike in two of these, or spike in one and be highly proficient in another:

1. Product Marketing: Experts in positioning, audience research, and launches. They sit between the product and the market.
2. Content & Community: Storytellers who excel at writing, brand voice, and engaging users.
3. Growth & Demand Gen: Data-driven operators focused on funnel optimization, paid acquisition, and SEO.

The "unicorn" candidate—someone expert in brand storytelling and technical SEO—rarely exists because those skills use different sides of the brain. However, a Product Marketer who understands Growth (the strategy of what to say + the mechanics of distribution) is a highly effective archetype for a first hire.

Operationalizing Strategy with GACS

Friction between product and marketing teams often stems from a lack of alignment on the "why" and "how" of a project before work begins. To solve this, Kramer utilizes the GACS framework (pronounced "gaps"). This serves as a marketing brief that must be approved before execution starts.

Breaking Down GACS

• Goals: What is the specific objective? Is it brand awareness, leads, or product adoption? How will we measure it?
• Audience: Who is this for? Be specific. "Everyone" is not an audience.
• Creative: What is the unique angle or hook? How does this stand out from competitors?
• Channels: How will this be distributed? Writing a blog post is not a distribution strategy.
• Stakeholders: Who is the Directly Responsible Individual (DRI)? Who needs to review? Who is merely informed?

By forcing teams to answer these questions upfront, you avoid the common scenario where a product team builds a feature and throws it over the wall to marketing, or marketing creates a campaign that product feels misrepresents the roadmap.

Navigating Product-Led Growth (PLG)

There is a misconception that Product-Led Growth means the product sells itself and marketing is unnecessary. In reality, PLG usually requires more marketing early on because you lack a sales team to perform manual discovery and objection handling. In PLG, the product is the channel, but marketing drives the traffic.

The Marketing-to-Product Handoff

In a sales-led organization, the tension point is usually the handoff from Marketing Query (MQL) to Sales Opportunity. In PLG, the critical friction point is the Marketing-to-Product handoff.

• Marketing typically owns the website, the value proposition, and getting the user to the "Sign Up" button.
• Product typically owns the in-app experience.

The danger zone is the onboarding flow. If the messaging on the landing page doesn't match the experience inside the application, users churn immediately. Whether this transition is owned by a Growth PM or a Product Marketer matters less than ensuring one clear owner exists who is responsible for the conversion rate across that threshold.

Red Flags: Activity vs. Impact

When evaluating marketing performance—or interviewing potential marketing leaders—the most significant red flag is a focus on "busy work" over outcomes.

our goal is to write 10 blog posts this month... no that's that's not a goal... the goal should be traffic or and the conversion rate from that traffic or the sign-ups that come from that

Great marketing teams are impact-focused. They can articulate their "big bets"—initiatives that could lead to step-function growth—distinct from their "keep the lights on" work. Furthermore, they track quality, not just volume. Driving 10,000 signups is useless if the conversion rate to active users drops to zero. A competent marketing leader constantly monitors conversion rates throughout the funnel to ensure they aren't just filling a leaky bucket.

Conclusion

Building a marketing machine is not about hiring a "magician" who can generate viral growth overnight. It requires a structural approach: diagnosing whether you need fuel or engine, hiring Pi-shaped generalists who can strategize and execute, and implementing rigorous frameworks like GACS to align teams. By respecting the craft of marketing as a discipline of both art and science, founders can build engines that drive sustainable, long-term growth.