Senior Director, Customer Experience Strategy
Nicole didn’t plan to become a model for cross-functional customer marketing. She was told she needed to be more cross-functional to get promoted, and she took it seriously.
At Zendesk, she spent six years turning community and customer marketing into one system. Not separate teams passing content around, but a tight operation. Community sat with product. Customer marketing sat with community. Everyone across success, sales, marketing, and product worked together.
That work didn’t just level up the program. It leveled up her career. The credibility she built led to a Senior Director role overseeing all three.
How to find the right entry points for cross-functional work, even when your plate is already full. Nicole shares how she evaluated which partnerships were worth building and which would drain more than they’d deliver.
What an integrated community and customer advocacy function actually looks like in practice. Not the org chart version. The day-to-day reality of how Nicole structured shared ownership and embedded team members across the org.
How to design cross-functional programs that serve everyone’s goals, not just yours. The programs that stick are the ones where both teams walk away with something real. Nicole shares how she designed for that from the start.
Why cross-functional work is the single best career move a customer marketer can make right now. Moving laterally to move vertically, and how Nicole used this exact path to land a Senior Director role managing three functions she didn’t originally come from.
How to make the case for cross-functional investment to a skeptical manager or leadership team. If you’ve ever been told to just focus on your core role, this one’s for you.
