AMA: Shopify Director (Head of) Global GTM & Demand Generation, Tamara Niesen on Influencing without Authority

The [long] answer to this is part art, part science. Whether you are in a product led growth role, or creating demand for a sales led go to market organization, knowing your customer (KYC), developing compelling narratives and messaging, and leading with data are essential. But HOW you lead with these is equally important. It’s easier to do the KYC and data piece, the HOW is an art that takes time and credibility. General rule of thumb is to build trust through genuine curiosity and understandin ...Read More

There are more of them! Identified stakeholders, approvers, owners need to be clear, and having a consistent framework to work allows for better documentation, tracking, alignment which in turn would ideally ensure projects are aligned to greater company goals and priorities. Identifying who should be involved right at the ideation stage makes this a lot easier. I.e. if it’s a product launch, product teams should be identified and brought in early to the project. Sometimes you learn this by maki ...Read More

Empathy, humility, data that supports greater business goals: Empathy: Giving feedback, especially to those who don’t report to you should be done objectively, but with tact and respect, make suggestions, use clear, simple language, data and insights where possible. Humility: Help all boats rise, if you don’t know the answer to something you are providing feedback on, collaborate with the individual to work towards a solution, or bring in others to help. Be a teammate. Jumping in and critiquing ...Read More

I am focused on B2B marketing to create, drive and capture demand with the end goal of creating a pipeline for sales teams (well, ultimately to acquire customers!). From my perspective, the pillars that feed into the strategy for driving pipeline include: Knowing our target audience Creating compelling narratives, value propositions, and messaging Developing best in class point of view content to educate the market while establishing our brand as trusted thought leader in the space Integrated ca ...Read More

Context: I work in a relatively matrixed organization and see a lot of stakeholders across the organization come together to deliver on a shared goal, mission, or solve a problem. See below for my lengthy, tactical response.  In short- the key to successfully navigating the pivot from collaboration and ideation to execution and accountability is to establish and align on clear goals and priorities, identify a SINGLE champion, break the project down into manageable tasks for workstream leads, and ...Read More

This is a bit tricky, especially if the feedback provider is an exec. One of the tactics that has helped me in the past is to outline what is in scope versus what is not. Be clear on this and have your approvers align to it. When suggestions that are out of scope and could impact your timelines, reference that initial proposal/project brief, “great suggestion, we would love to incorporate that in the next phase, edition, general availability, etc. but it is not in scope for this phase of the pro ...Read More

Last year I led a mission that was outside of my discipline. The greatest challenge of leading without authority in my career: I was successful because we had alignment at the exec level that ‘it’ was [one of] the most important things we needed to accomplish.  When we asked leaders and individual contributors from across the organization to join and contribute to the mission, we ensured the goals, expectations, timelines, deliverables were clear. If the individuals had conflicting priorities, w ...Read More

Understand how each of you are wired. Personality tests are helpful here, especially as it relates to how someone makes decisions, and how they like to receive or give feedback. And then, I prefer to rip off the bandaid, meet face to face (screens are okay too) and share objective feedback. If you need to work together to be successful, it’s worth the time and effort to understand the situation, behavior and impact each of you has had on each other. Both parties need to accept the feedback, even ...Read More

Escalate. Do not hesitate to escalate. I know this can be uncomfortable, and you don’t want to throw any team members under the bus.  Something I learned from one of my leaders is “clean escalation”. You identify the problem, document the problem statement and possible paths forward with all the respective tradeoffs. It’s crucial that this is data driven, supported by proof points and is 100% objective. If it’s objective, it’s less awkward, and the most important step before you escalate: write ...Read More

Build relationships and build trust- get to know the people you want to influence- we are all human and want to do great work with people we know, like and trust- invest in this. Listen- you may not agree with your stakeholders, but understand their perspectives, what drives them- incentives, how they are compensated, goals, career aspirations, super powers. Communicate- clearly, often and transparently. Oh, and don’t use fancy language, $1000 words or tech jargon (sorry if any of my responses d ...Read More