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"Emily Coleman: How do I write a case study so that the person I deliver it to, they could use it in their LinkedIn profile? Because I know that engineers, developers, that persona, they don't often think about brand building in that way. And so for me, that's my job. I'm like, how can I help make you look like the genius so that you want to share this as you move throughout your career?"

[0:24] Sunny Manivannan: Welcome to the Peerbound podcast. I'm your host, Sunny Manivannan. I'm so excited for our guest today, Emily Coleman, who is the senior manager and the leader of the customer marketing and advocacy function at LaunchDarkly. So we at Peerbound use LaunchDarkly, and we love the product. And so I know they have at least one happy customer. In fact, I know that they have hundreds and thousands of happy customers all around the world. And I'm so excited to hear about Emily's journey into customer advocacy, her early background, and all the cool things that she's doing now at LaunchDarkly. Let's get into it. Emily, welcome.

[1:00] Emily Coleman: Thank you, Sunny, for having me. Super excited to be here too.

[1:04] Sunny Manivannan: Great to have you. I wanted to start with the early days of Emily Coleman’s sort of career. You are an English major from BYU. Tell us a little bit about that. Have you always loved reading and writing from an early age? What sparked your interest in language?

[1:21] Emily Coleman: Yeah. So as a kid, I wanted to be the president of The United States. That was my career goal. And as I went through high school and thought about what I wanted to major in, I really wanted to be a lawyer. And so I originally chose my major along those lines.

I majored in public relations with a minor in business management, and I promptly dropped out. I just could not hack it. In college, I had undiagnosed ADHD. I had a lot going on, and I hated the program. I hated public relations. Just nothing about it really spoke to me. So I took a break. And it wasn't until I had started actually into my career, I had a boss that was really insistent that I go back and finish my bachelor's degree.

Because of my age, I was attempting to make upward mobility in my career right after the 2008 crash. And I was really struggling to make any kind of inroads in my career development because I did not have a 4-year degree. So he encouraged me to go back. And when I went back, I had the option basically of reentering that public relations program and doing a couple semesters to finish up what I had left because I'd actually got my associate's degree at the time I graduated from high school, so I already had a 2-year degree, and I was trying to finish up these last 2 years.

And as I thought about that, I decided I really wanted to go back and do something that I loved. Because at this point, the degree did not matter so much. What it was didn't matter because I already had the job experience.

So I was like, I'm gonna go back and do something that I love, and I loved English literature. I had always gotten A's in those classes. I was like, I know I can pass those. And I got a minor in editing, which was under our English language department.

So I also took a number of English language courses, and it was a fantastic experience. Being in the humanities at BYU was just, like, such a great experience, and I would not have done it any other way. I even encouraged my daughter: major in something that you love. Don't worry so much about what that means for your career. You can figure that out. My English literature degree taught me how to think critically and has been super valuable in every job I've ever had just because of the skills that it gave me.

[3:59] Sunny Manivannan: First of all, super inspiring journey. I mean, we're just scratching the surface of your career so far. I'm already inspired by just the challenges you had to overcome to get to that point. And the advice of actually doing something that you're interested in, I think, is just so relevant—more relevant today than ever before.

[4:16] Emily Coleman: Yeah. Especially in the age of AI. I think there's a lot of talk about what does AI mean for different degrees or different job responsibilities. And I firmly believe that humanities are gonna be as important as ever because regardless of whatever happens with machine learning, AI, and all of that, we still need folks who can think critically. And those degrees, I think, are just unmatched in being able to provide that and that holistic outlook about how do you think through problems.

[4:46] Sunny Manivannan: 100%. And, yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think as you were talking about your journey to becoming an English literature major, I was thinking, and chuckling a little bit internally, about how in this world of AI, we're all just parsing words every single day. And there's already an explosion of words that are about to hit our eyeballs. And it's only going to get worse. Right? There's going to be videos. It's all messaging coming at you, and your brain has to be super well trained to be able to parse out what's real, what's not real, what are they trying to sell me, what do I actually need, and so on. So everything you're saying is spot on.

So you go back to school. You do end up getting that 4-year degree. You already have some work experience. So does the presidency of the United States dream still live with an Emily Coleman? Take me through that time. Do you go back into politics?

[5:39] Emily: Yeah. So when I left the first time, when I dropped out, I ended up working for a politician, a member of Congress here in Utah. This was, again, I started that in 2009. I was young. They had no business hiring me for that, but I think they hired me because I was cheap. And I had never done anything like that. Like, I did not have a degree in political science. I did, however, really love politics and government. I did that. That was the thing that I did with my dad. So I did a lot of conventions and campaigns. I was doing campaigns from the time I was, like, 10. It was something that I always wanted to do and ended up getting a job as an office manager.

So I was still, I was not in DC. I was still at home in Utah in the district office. One of the things that was my responsibility was answering phones. I was the customer service line for the federal government, and that was a baptism by fire for sure, especially post 2008. It was a very interesting time.

The other part of my responsibilities were casework. So I was responsible for being a liaison between constituents and federal agencies. So if someone came to us with an immigration, Social Security, veterans affairs, any problem that involved a federal agency. And oftentimes, like, these were very desperate situations. By the time they got to me, they had exhausted every resource, and my job was to get it unstuck. I had contacts within federal agencies, and I basically worked to try to solve those problems. That became the most rewarding part of that job for me. I was not involved really much in legislation. All I was doing was answering phones, attending meetings on behalf of my boss, and doing this casework. I did that and then moved to a different congressional office, basically full time as a caseworker. I managed a caseload of about 300 to 350 cases a year.

[7:41] Sunny Manivannan: That's a case a day. More than that.

[7:43] Emily Coleman: Yeah. It was a lot. I had to become an expert in how immigration policy worked, like how from the State Department, Homeland Security— I had to understand the entire Social Security Administration flow through disability. It was a lot, but it was so rewarding because when you were actually able to make something happen for somebody, it was life-changing.

I'll tell one story about that. I don't think I'll ever forget. I had a man who was from Uganda, and he had come here and was working at a hotel, and he was here on an asylum visa. And he was trying to get his family here. So his wife and his children were still in Uganda. They were separated, and he just could not figure out a way to get them here to the US. And we were able to make that happen, like, get that asylum visa processed for his family, and they were able to come. And he brought his kids all dressed up in their Sunday best to take a picture with me because they were so excited and so grateful to be here. And it was, like, one of these things that you're sitting there going like, you know, this is just part of what I do every day.

[8:58] Sunny Manivannan: Totally.

[8:59] Emily Coleman: But it was so meaningful because this family was together and they were safe.

[9:02] Sunny Manivannan: Totally.

[9:03] Emily Coleman: And they were so happy. And I remember I saw him at that hotel a couple years later, and he recognized me immediately and was like, oh my gosh. How are you doing? And it's just one of those things that, like, the stuff that I was doing there was actually changing people's lives.

[9:20] Sunny Manivannan: Totally. I mean, yeah, that's an incredible story. And, you know, those 350 cases, every single one of those, you're restoring people's faith in government. Right? Just, hey. This thing actually works. And here, yes, it's not as fast as you want. It's not as efficient or effective as you want, but it does work. And there are people that are on your side in the government who are trying to make this work. Yeah. For you specifically. That's incredible.

[9:44] Emily Coleman: Yeah. And it didn't matter which party. Like, none of that mattered in my job. You know? It was just because that just wasn't part of it there. I was there to represent and serve the people in my neighborhood because I lived in the district where I worked.

[9:58] Sunny Manivannan: That's incredible. So you do this for a few years. At what point do you discover tech? And how does that happen? What got you into the technology industry in the first place? And I don't remember if your first job was directly in customer advocacy, but would also love to learn more about how you got into customer advocacy through that.

[10:22] Emily Coleman: Yeah. So I decided to make a career switch because I needed more money. The federal government did not pay enough.

[10:28] Sunny Manivannan: A good reason for all of us. Yes. We've all done that.

[10:31] Emily Coleman: I was like, I think it's time to break out into the private sector. There were also... I mean, I don't think I have to explain to anybody why leaving the House of Representatives was a good idea at that time. It was about 2014 that I left. So I found a job.

Initially, I was like, okay. I wanna be a copywriter. I have a degree in English literature, so I guess it kinda makes sense, and a minor in editing. So I'd like to do that. So I got a job working for a physician-owned healthcare group here. They were working on a rebrand. So they were originally called Central Utah Clinic. In Utah, Central Utah kind of indicates a more, like, rural area, but they were really along the main population corridor, and so they needed a name that better reflected who they were. I was brought on to help with that rebrand and redo a lot of their content strategy. Communications was kind of the role there. That was incredibly fun. And the rebrand was a lot of fun. The rebrand is still there today. So every time I go to that clinic, I'm like, yeah. I was part of renaming this.

[11:32] Sunny Manivannan: Cool.

[11:32] Emily Coleman: It taught me a lot about that. And then I moved into tech again just because that was growing a lot in Utah at the time. It still is. There's a lot of companies that are headquartered in Utah, and so it felt like a good move. And I ended up getting a job at Pluralsight. That was my first tech job, and it was as a copywriter. I'll be completely frank. That was kind of an unmitigated disaster.

[12:01] Sunny Manivannan: You gotta have one of those to be amazing at that career. If you don't have that, you haven't earned your stripes.

[12:06] Emily Coleman: Yeah. It just did not work out for a lot of different reasons. I joined because I was planning to do content for a particular segment of their audience, designers, engineers, and even, like, video games. That was kind of the persona I was writing for. But almost immediately after I joined, they merged me into a different department.

Then I got moved into writing about a lot higher tech stuff. So at that time, they were having me write some email content about people who are using Azure. And I didn't even know what Azure was at the time. And I was like, I have no... and the ChatGPT wasn't around, so I couldn't even pretend like I could write about this type of stuff. These were for network systems engineers, just stuff that I was like, I have no clue. I don't have any idea. I had no concept of what this was on any level. And so I got fired from that job for a lot of different reasons, but some of it probably was just I could not hack it fast enough to get up to speed on whatever it was they wanted me to write about.

So after that, I decided I don't wanna do copywriting anymore because it's too subjective, and I didn't really love writing for 8 hours a day. What it did is give me some exposure to some other roles within marketing that I was kind of unaware that existed. And I was like, I wanna have metrics that are not based on vibes. You know? Does somebody like this? Because it's really difficult to understand. Everyone has a different opinion about what makes good copy.

[13:39] Sunny Manivannan: Totally.

[13:39] Emily Coleman: And I was like, I can't be at the mercy of that anymore. I decided I wanted to work for a company that was big enough that I could kind of disappear because being fired kind of shattered my confidence a lot. I had emerged out of this congressional role, and I was in my twenties. I was like, I can do anything. And then I got fired, and I was like, I can't do anything. Like, do I even deserve to work kind of thing? So I was looking for a company that I could kind of just put my head down and do a job and go home, especially because my daughter was quite young at the time. And I was like, I just need something that feels stable.

[14:17] Sunny Manivannan: Yep.

[14:18] Emily Coleman: And so I found SolarWinds. And, honestly, it was a great fit in that respect. For the first, probably, 3 years or so, I was doing sales enablement. I was in customer marketing. I was writing a lot of sales enablement emails. I was running a lot of sales enablement programs and didn't really have any sense of how my job connected to any kind of greater purpose. But I was like, that's fine. No job firing me. Yes. I probably spent the first couple of years throwing up before every one-on-one because I was so nervous that, like, this is the one where they're gonna fire me.

It took those 3 years to, like, rebuild that faith in myself that I knew how to do stuff. Then the customer marketing org at SolarWinds reorged, and I got a new boss. And she saw something in me and began to push me back into this direction of being more visible. She encouraged me to take on lifecycle marketing at SolarWinds, and we launched a big project to redo how we were thinking about emailing customers. And she just did not let her foot off the gas with me even at times where I felt uncomfortable, like, where I was like, I don't wanna present in this meeting. I don't want people to see what I'm doing. She just kinda forced me to show up and do it.

I did that for a couple of years, and then she asked me to start their customer advocacy program. This was in 2022. So SolarWinds had gone through some interesting transitions in that time, and they needed some help with customer advocacy, creating case studies, creating some kind of a reference program. All of that was on the table, and she asked me to do that, and I accepted. So that was kind of the whole journey into tech and how I ended up in customer advocacy, specifically. It was a winding road, but I got tons of experience in about every other aspect of customer marketing while I was at it.

[16:23] Sunny Manivannan: Awesome. Awesome journey. And I was smiling and laughing a little bit along as you were talking about the sort of confidence issues. Right? Like, you're feeling super confident when you came out of that job with, you know, the congresspeople. And you could do anything, and you had done anything. You had the track record, then you come into this job, and they basically hire you for a different job than the one they had you doing. Right? You know, it's completely different, but it can have an impact. And the only reason we're able to laugh about it now is because it's so far in the past and has shaped you to be the leader that you are today. But I will say there's a lot of people that we know that are going through this right now.

[17:01] Emily Coleman: Yeah.

[17:01] Sunny Manivannan: And we've gone through over the last 2 years, and it's incredible to hear you talk about and reflect on this experience in your career knowing that, you know, people are going through this right now.

[17:13] Emily Coleman: Yeah. It's tough. I wish I hadn't wasted so much time believing that it was my fault. But at this point, there's not much you can do about that except recognize that when you become a manager, that when you do those types of things, they have an impact on people and to do better. And to recognize that a lot of times when you get let go from jobs, it doesn't actually reflect on—it definitely does not reflect on—who you are as a person.

[17:38] Sunny Manivannan: Definitely. And I think, yeah, if I could have you scream that from the rooftops everywhere, I absolutely would. And perhaps we will, at least on LinkedIn in our smaller corner of the LinkedIn universe. But I think that's such an important message, Emily. So thanks for sharing that. It's cool.

Okay. So let me ask you about SolarWinds. It's a big company when you join. You're able to make an impact. You're starting to grow in confidence, and you have a manager and a leader who sees something in you and is pushing you out of your comfort zone, which is clearly new, into more growth. What was it like working at a big company? When did you feel like you got a grasp of what the company overall was trying to do? If somebody's at a big company right now and trying to sort of pierce through and grow their career, what advice would you give them?

[18:20] Emily Coleman: Yeah. I would say that early career stage, especially because I was still relatively young at the time that I started at SolarWinds. It probably took me a good 2 and a half, 3 years to really understand what the company did. SolarWinds had, like, 60 plus products and, like, 7 distinct product lines, and I was working within a really small narrow niche of them. It took me a little while to get a better sense of what was happening with the space.

One of the best things that I did is I started to get a lot more curious about how it actually worked. I didn't limit myself to feeling like I couldn't understand it. I drew on a lot of the stuff I learned in Congress that when I showed up, I had no idea how any of these processes worked either. Like, I did not know how an immigration application worked. I didn't know how a visa worked, but you can figure it out. And so I was like, I can figure it out. I'm looking at customers who are using this stuff, and they figured out how this works. And so I certainly can learn. And so I got really curious about what is it that we do and how does it actually help customers and even getting pretty deep into, technically, what is it doing? And so asking a lot of questions.

For a big company, I would say it helped because I did have that initial sense of being able to get my toes in first. Again, I was a little scared of the whole business of what they were doing anyway because that's what had burned me at Pluralsight was the network and systems engineer stuff. Immediately going into that, I actually in my interview, I was like, yeah. I'd written for this persona knowing that I had failed so epically at it. But I was like, see, I had experience in this, but, like, it was all bad, but they didn't know that. So I felt like that was gonna be kind of the end. There were a lot of things about working for a big company that I really loved. And that, like, if I made a mistake, it wasn't gonna take down the company. It wasn't going to have this massive impact. And where I was in that development of confidence and career, and that's kind of exactly what I needed, was just to be able to watch and learn from a lot of other people rather than being responsible for all of that.

[20:27] Sunny Manivannan: That makes a lot of sense. Every time I hear SolarWinds, you know what I'm gonna ask you. I'm gonna ask you about the SolarWinds hack. And I wanna ask you from just the perspective of being the customer advocacy leader when that happens. Right? You're the sort of, and all of us in this function are the happy go lucky, everything-is-great-with-customers people within that company. And now there's this big hack that impacts every customer. It's a huge deal. It's in the news, global news. All customer advocacy leaders go through company crises at various times, and they are part of the response team whether they want to be or not. What was it like for you? What advice, if any, do you have for people who might be in a similar situation either now or coming up in the future?

[21:12] Emily Coleman: Yeah. So I'll clarify that I started the customer advocacy program in 2022, so it was a couple of years after that breach had happened. I was still in the customer marketing team. And I'll say, you know, we had, I feel like, a lot of really talented people doing crisis response there. And that was everybody down from, like, comms and PR to folks on the phone doing support and, you know, customer success managers and account executives.

That was a really tough time in that I went from working for a company that no one heard of. I remember I was in Iceland one time, and I had a water bottle that had SolarWinds on it, and I left it at the security checkpoint. And I was trying to explain that, like, I needed this water bottle that had SolarWinds on it, and this poor Icelandic man was trying to explain to somebody that I actually meant the auroras. And I was like, no. I don't mean the auroras. Like, I don't mean aurora borealis. I don't mean the northern lights. I mean, like, actually SolarWinds. Yeah. He was like, you're stupid. She just doesn't know. She's American.

So no one knew what SolarWinds was to, like, everybody knew. My parents knew what SolarWinds was all of a sudden, and that was horrifying because my dad's a college professor. And so he still doesn't really know what I do, but he's like, don't you work for this company? And it's like, you know, SolarWinds exposes all of the US government's data and the Russians. I was like, oh, man. I thought I got out of this drama when I left Congress, and then I'm, like, right back in it. But it was unique in that there was so much communication that had to happen so quickly.

And then in the aftermath, after other breaches have happened, you know, bigger breaches have happened. Now we're two years later, and it's like, okay. We have to build a customer advocacy program and develop case studies for a company that folks don't really want to say that they're using because it could make them a target. That was playing customer advocacy on hard mode. For sure.

[23:24] Sunny Manivannan: That is really challenging.

[23:26] Emily Coleman: When it came to doing case studies, I just basically started as small as possible. I took anybody who would give me the story. I worked with our MVPs, and I was like, it doesn't matter to me how small this company is. I'm not looking to get any blue chip logos. I just want to start telling some stories about how customers are using it. And I think by the time I left, we'd really crossed some of these big hurdles. People were excited to talk about how they were using the product again, but it was challenging. And I had to really get people to trust me that I was not there to make them a billboard for SolarWinds. I was trying to talk about the cool things that they were doing that were going unnoticed. Because especially in IT, no one notices what's going on with IT. No one pays attention to it until something breaks. And then everyone's paying attention to it. It's a job that when you're doing it well, it's just expected, and you only get attention when things are not going well.

[24:29] Sunny Manivannan: Yeah. 100%. Man, love the love the story of that time and, yeah, congrats to everybody on the team who was there and on getting through and moving forward. That's cool.

I wanna ask you about LaunchDarkly, which is where you are now, and you've been there for now almost a year. Tell me about what prompted you to make the switch away from SolarWinds, which had been, you know, a great opportunity, got your confidence back, and accomplished some amazing things in some very challenging times. What made you say, okay. It's time for me to go try something different?

[24:58] Emily Coleman: Yeah. I'd been at SolarWinds for 7 years at that point, and so it was a very long time. SolarWinds had been really generous in helping me pay for an MBA, so I did an MBA during that time. They also offered a benefit where after you'd been with the company for 5 years, you got a 4-week sabbatical. So I took a 4-week sabbatical. I was in the middle of my MBA when I was actually eligible for it, so I didn't take it then.

But after I graduated, I spent a month on a road trip with my kid and my partner. We drove from Utah in a little teardrop camper all the way from Utah, and we ended up in Upstate New York and all the way in Boston and then drove back in the space of about a month.

And during that time, I thought a lot about what I wanted to do next because I was considering taking a larger leadership role within SolarWinds or it was time to move on. And I felt at that point that I wanted to try something different with a smaller company. I was also looking at companies that were more geared towards, like, engineering and DevOps. I'd learned that I really liked that segment a little bit more than I did traditional IT. And so I wanted to work with engineers, developers, you know, some of these builders, which is a market that SolarWinds was in a little bit, but I wanted to do it more. And LaunchDarkly, in particular, I had been at reInvent, AWS reInvent, in 2022, so November, December 2022. And I remember I was just walking around looking at the different booths, and I saw LaunchDarkly's booth, and I got a pair of socks. And I did a demo with their team. And after I left, I thought I wanna work here. Like, I wanna work somewhere like here. This is the kind of place that I wanna work. They all seemed like they were having fun. And, like, I thought the product was really cool. I understood it as somebody who was late and gently involved in tech. And I was like, this looks like a place that is on the up and up. I'd like to work here.

And so when I started looking for companies to apply for, I was looking for companies that were really similar to LaunchDarkly. But it, like, just so happened that while I was looking a job for customer advocacy opened up at LaunchDarkly. And I mean, I'd probably within, like, a couple hours of that job posting, I had submitted my resume, and I wrote this cover letter that was like, listen. You have to at least interview me because I know so much about your product. I really wanna be here, and I'm really excited about what you guys are doing. Like, I'm not just saying that for this cover letter. Please at least interview me. And they did. And so, like, completely cold. I did not have a connection at LaunchDarkly.

[27:47] Sunny Manivannan: No way. So no second— wow.

[27:50] Emily Coleman: I'm like no connection.

[27:52] Sunny Manivannan: That's, like, inspiration number four already in this conversation that you just wrote this cover letter that was as fire as heck.

[27:59] Emily Coleman: Do it. I was like, I really want this. And I said that in my interview too. I was like, look. I was at your booth at reinvent last year, and I feel like this is some place that I can really make a difference. I can do something for you here. And my manager at the time, Tia, she hired me, and I still am kind of like sometimes I look at my email address and it says that at LaunchDarkly at the end, and I'm just like, I can't believe that actually happened. It's honestly still kind of a pinch me type of thing. So I'm like, I can't believe that I'm here because it's just like, I can't believe it worked out that way.

[28:33] Sunny Manivannan: Super cool. By the way, it is a cool product. Like I said, we're a happy customer, and we're a tiny startup. Right? And so there's, yeah, thousands, if not tens of thousands of companies that are super happy customers and an incredible product. Very cool.

I wanna ask you about one or two last things at LaunchDarkly. So you recently revamped what is every customer advocacy manager's, like, probably number one thing that they would fix if they could: their customer stories page. And walk me through that process. Like, when you got in, you clearly had a vision for what you wanted to fix, and this was on the list. How did you even get started with a project like this? Walk me through what inspired you to end up with the page that you have now, which looks stunning. Walk us through that process.

[29:16] Emily Coleman: Thank you. I'll say the design and everything is, like, so much owed to other teams, that web development design team. You could never do these things without those people. But what I wanted to do was make a page that had a different variety of content. I think we often just stick all of our case studies on there, and that's kind of it. Our existing page had just a few filters, but I was like, I know that this page is gonna be a very top-of-funnel type of page for people.

So knowing that B2B buyers are doing, like, 70, 80 percent of their research before they ever hit one of our reps, I'm like, I need to have as much information and as much breadth of information for them to go through as possible. We also need to make it easier for them to see outcomes. And I also wanted some flexibility to do some testing. So that was kind of where we started from. And I had a lot of different thoughts or ideas or inspiration, like a bunch of different companies that were doing something that was really similar to what I wanted to do.

So I basically put all of those together in a mood board situation where I was like, I really like the way they've done the menu bar here. I really like the way they've done the scrolling hero here. I really love the cards. I love how the cards kinda flip. I like having motion in it so that when you mouse over it, it flips and you can see a quote. And also just, like, connecting the people who were doing these case studies with us, like, making them a little bit more front and center. So that's how we ended up with the design that we did, and I really like the way it's worked out.

And one of the things we're gonna hopefully work on doing soon-ish is I wanna be able to test personalization with it. So if you visit that page and you're in financial services, in the hero, it will show you financial services logos and find our financial services, like, our Ally case study first.

[31:18] Sunny Manivannan: Amazing.

[31:18] Emily Coleman: Those are the kinds of things that we're testing a little bit, you know, how can we surface some of this stuff earlier? And the next phase will be actually redesigning the case study page itself, so, like, where the content lives. But first off, you just gotta make it, like, organized.

[31:36] Sunny Manivannan: Totally.

[31:36] Emily Coleman: You have to think, like, how would a customer wanna navigate this? What would they be looking for? They're gonna be looking for how do they look like me? Industry, company size.

[31:44] Sunny Manivannan: Totally.

[31:45] Emily Coleman: All of those things.

[31:46] Sunny Manivannan: And I love that you have metrics, but it's also, you know, there's a lot of photos of people, and these are real customers. And you're representing your customer's brands in an authentic way, which I think is really meaningful as well.

[31:59] Emily Coleman: Yeah. I mean, that's the whole goal for me when it comes to a case study is that this should be something that they can use. I often try to think about how do I write a case study so that the person I deliver it to, they could use it in their LinkedIn profile. They could use it on their resume. They could use it as part of their portfolio. Because I know that engineers, developers, that persona, they don't often think about brand building in that way. It's just not something that they're connecting.

And so for me, that's my job. I'm like, how can I help make you look like the genius so that you want to share this as you go move throughout your career as this is something that I did? And that should always be the purpose because the fact that it's on our website, it's implicit that they used LaunchDarkly to do, you know, whatever. We don't need to spell that out. What we need to spell out is, like, how did they make this product work for them?

[32:51] Sunny Manivannan: Totally. Love that. The last question I want to ask you about is we haven't talked about AI. I feel like I'm almost obligated to, but I want to with you especially just because you've experimented so much with AI. You're a writer by just desire and passion and training as well. Not to mention AI is really changing this function in a major way. I'll start with asking you this first question, which is what have you tried that has worked really well for you in terms of incorporating AI into your workflows? And where do you think the hype is too much and the stuff doesn't actually work well?

[33:32] Emily Coleman: Yeah. So where it's worked best for me is, I would say, almost leveraging tools that are not supposed to be for customer marketers, like, and turning them into a customer marketing tool. Pocus is a good example of this. That's supposed to be, like, really an SDR BDR tool. We have all these cool signals in there. And so I'm like, can I use that to find customers that would be, like, give me signals that they're ready to leave a G2 review? And then that's my list that I use to invite people to do G2 reviews. That was relatively successful.

I'd say also I've started developing some custom GPTs, which are not difficult. I mean, you can use ChatGPT to help you vibe code your custom GPT. So you actually don't have to have a lot of knowledge in how to do it. You just have to be willing to dedicate some time to experiment with it. So I built a couple custom GPTs. One is I've sort of all the little tidbits of strategy knowledge or content knowledge, I've put into a library of content, and that's the knowledge base for it. And so I use it as, like, a brainstorming type of thing for some interesting ideas for, like, I've got this really cool story. How do I also turn it into something else? That's been working really, really well.

Also using some of the portfolio functions and pitting AI, like, LLMs against each other. So if I'm doing a brainstorming, I'm, like, telling Gemini, hey. You know? Or I'll tell ChatGPT, I need you to create a brief for this. If you were going to give a copywriter, you know, this brief to write it, then I give that brief to Gemini and I say, okay. You're a copywriter, and this is the brief you've been given from the client. And then I have them kinda go back and forth. So it's just kind of, like, having fun with it because it's, you know, they all have different strengths and things that they do well.

In terms of what is overhyped, I would say, to be honest, content creation is a little overhyped with AI. I don't think that's where we're gonna end up. Yep. I say this as a copywriter, not to say that humans are always better. I think the whole point of an LLM for me is that it makes me a little faster. But I am seeing just so much straight copy-pasted from ChatGPT that I think is going to go away pretty quickly. People are gonna be creating authentic content that does not have an emoji for every bullet point, headlines that don't have a couple words and then a colon and then a sentence. There's some tells that are coming out of content created by LLMs right now that I think are gonna need to adjust how we think about it. Because soon, we're just gonna be inundated with so much LLM content that I imagine some of these big, large language models, even, like, when you're doing Google searches and they give you that preview.

[36:27] Sunny Manivannan: Totally.

[36:28] Emily Coleman: They're gonna start solving for what sounds like it's written by a human. And so for me, that's a big one. But the real power of it for customer marketing, the insight coming down is that it's gonna allow us to use so much data that we already collect to be more thoughtful in how we approach not only just upsell, cross-sell types of campaigns. Like, really understand intent, I think. And understand intent not from the perspective of, like, I want them to buy more, but understand intent for what is gonna make this customer's experience better.

[37:07] Sunny Manivannan: Yep.

[37:07] Emily Coleman: I think if we approach it that way from what I do with advocacy as well, it's like, I already know that this customer's had a whole bunch of Gong calls. I've got a success plan from a customer success rep. I've got all of their product usage data. I have all of this stuff. I should be able to come to this customer with a 90% written draft and have, like, a 15, 30-minute interview to get a few quotes, and then we're ready to publish. And, also, to better recognize signals when someone might be a good fit for some of these things that I need to do that are taking me a ton of time. Finding somebody to do an analyst interview takes forever because you're like, okay. I've got this list of people who, like, a year ago told me that they might be willing to do it, but, like, half those people aren't with their company anymore. And, like, a couple of them have an escalated support inquiry, and one of them is in the middle of a big expansion or renewal deal, and so we shouldn't touch them. All of that is, like, manual effort that I have to find out by going somewhere else.

So being able to say, okay, these are people both who've expressed in the past that they would be willing to do something like this, but people you may not even know about yet that are having all these conversations and interactions with your product, with other people within the company that would also be a good fit. Because for me, it's less about giving somebody, like, a list, a checklist of, like, do you wanna do this, this, this, and this? Then coming to them and saying, hey. I've got this kinda cool opportunity. Like, even Sunny, I did this with you recently with our award that we were, like, going for. Right? If I come to you and say, hey. I've got this thing. Would you be willing to either get on a quick call with an analyst or fill out a quick survey for us? You're gonna be so much more likely to be like, oh, yeah. Of course. I'll totally do that. And it feels so much more organic than me being like, hypothetically, at some point in the future, would you be willing to show for us? And it's just like they're gonna be like, no. I'm not gonna do that. I don't have time because the opportunity is not actually there in front of them. So it's this real opportunity for just-in-time recognition of when somebody's ready to do something and kind of expand or become an advocate for you.

[39:17] Sunny Manivannan: Yeah. It's awesome. There's so much of what you said that I completely agree with, especially around how are we as human beings just going to figure out, okay, this is AI generated. You know, the em dashes is the other big tell now. Yeah. Everybody's controversial em dash usage and which is painful for me because I used to use dashes all the time and now I no longer can. But that's okay. But, you know, that's a really interesting point around how do we start to tell what's human-created versus AI generated. And I think this idea of finding signals and bringing all these signals together for you in real time at the right time is what is going to drive a lot of value, not just the basic content creation which ChatGPT can do a mediocre job with us today.

[39:58] Emily Coleman: Yeah. Because it's, like, does it matter? Like, does writing the email matter? For me, it's like the real time saver is finding out who I need to send that email to. That's right. I don't necessarily need help writing that email. I just need to know who should I be contacting right now? Who's ready for me to have that outreach? That is where I think the real power is gonna be.

[40:16] Sunny Manivannan: 100%. 100%. Well, Emily, I think I said this at the beginning of our call when we were prepping, and I'm standing by it now. We could have 3 more episodes. I could just keep talking to you about this. There's so many more topics I wanna cover. We'd love to have you on in a future episode. And to anybody listening, this was just a really inspiring episode. And there's so many just actionable tips from you as well as just more philosophical insights on how your career has progressed. It’s such a joy to have you. Thank you so much for being here.

[40:42] Emily Coleman: Yeah. Thank you so much, Sunny.