Christine Royston Is Rewiring Marketing, One Broken Workflow at a Time

Christine Royston's first marketing lesson arrived while she was still in sales. She was selling financial software to Wall Street firms and banks, close enough to revenue to hear every objection but too far from the international career she wanted. So she did something practical and mildly inconvenient: she went back to school. An international MBA became the hinge. Marketing offered the customer contact of sales, plus a mixture she found difficult to resist - strategy, creativity, and analysis.

The decision sent her outward. She had grown up in Virginia, outside Washington, D.C., and studied Asian Studies at the University of Virginia. Graduate school at South Carolina's Darla Moore School of Business led to work in Brussels and Shanghai. Europe and Asia supplied more than attractive stamps in a passport. Royston later described the recurring lesson as learning to drop assumptions about people, process, and how life works. For somebody who would spend a career scaling global marketing programs, cultural humility turned out to be useful operating software.

Her formal education looks, in retrospect, like a rehearsal for the job she eventually built. The undergraduate degree looked east. The MBA specialized in global marketing. A 2003 certificate at ESCP Business School added intensive French language and business study; a later Stanford program centered executive women leaders. Her public profile lists some ability in French, Japanese, and Chinese alongside English. None of that makes a campaign automatically travel well. It does make “global” harder to use as decorative corporate wallpaper. Markets contain people, local habits, and different reasons to trust.

The apprenticeship

Big companies taught scale. Smaller ones made the fingerprints visible.

Royston built her marketing foundation in demand generation and campaigns, moving through Cisco, Salesforce, the cybersecurity company Imperva, and Dropbox. The sequence matters because it exposed her to different kinds of machinery: hardware and software, security and cloud applications, direct sales and freemium products. She learned how large organizations repeat a program across regions. Then she moved toward smaller and midsize companies where cause and effect were easier to see.

At Bitly, where she served as vice president and head of marketing from 2018 to 2020, the work included rebuilding marketing and communications and launching self-service SaaS plans. It was an early expression of a theme that keeps resurfacing in her career: the interesting work happens where sales-led and product-led growth meet. One motion values the considered enterprise relationship; the other invites the product to make its own argument. A marketer must be bilingual.

Udemy made the stakes larger. Royston joined in 2020 as vice president and global head of B2B marketing. During her tenure, Udemy Business moved from $100 million to more than $450 million in annual recurring revenue. She led marketing through the company's IPO, a rebrand, and a sharper focus on business customers. This was growth with paperwork, market scrutiny, and a changing identity attached.

“I want to speak the same language as the rest of the business. How is marketing helping to drive growth?”Christine Royston, Revenue Engine Podcast

It is a revealing question. Marketers have an ample private vocabulary: reach, engagement, attribution, share of voice. Royston is not allergic to those measures, but she wants the conversation to arrive at pipeline, bookings, retention, and customer value. Brand and demand operate on different clocks; both deserve investment. The CMO's task is to show how each one moves the business, without reducing every good idea to a coupon code.

The workflow is the strategy

An org chart can stay still while the work learns to move.

Royston joined Wrike in April 2024. Her early plan was tellingly social before it was numerical: meet the global team, then customers and partners, then become a product expert and power user. She had chosen a company whose product manages work, which creates the delicious hazard of marketing a tool to professional marketers. They can see the pitch coming. Royston says that when she encounters genuinely good marketing, she flags it for her team. A difficult audience becomes a quality-control department.

Inside her own department, she found the familiar production line. A brief entered one function, passed to another, and emerged after a succession of handoffs. Each person might be collaborative and capable, yet the customer could still experience the fragments. Her diagnosis was structural. Planning and reporting function by function encourages everyone to optimize a piece while nobody quite owns the whole.

The remedy was not a grand reorganization. Royston grouped people into cross-functional pods built around an audience or outcome. Paid media, demand generation, communications, and other disciplines enter the problem earlier and shape it together. The formal org chart remains. The flow of work changes. This is management by preposition: less work passed to somebody, more work made with somebody.

This model also supports Royston's favorite word for the modern CMO: agility. Quarterly planning once put marketing life into neat boxes. External conditions have declined to respect the boxes. Her preferred alternative is always-on orchestration, a rolling system that can absorb feedback and pivot without waiting for the next ceremonial quarter. Agility, in this telling, is not frantic movement. It is preparedness with fewer bureaucratic elbows.

The pod idea also gives product marketing a useful honesty test. Wrike is a horizontal platform sold across functions and industries, but horizontal language can dissolve into a mist of benefits. Royston favors vertical and functional stories: campaign operations for a marketing team, product-life-cycle operations for a manufacturer. The platform remains the same; the customer's problem gets to keep its proper nouns. Each pod knows which outcome it serves, and broad capability acquires a local address.

After the AI experiment

Speed is useful. Direction is a human responsibility.

In early 2025, Royston asked the Wrike marketing team to improve efficiency by 10 percent with AI. The team quickly exceeded the target. Adoption moved through recognizable stages: individual experiments, an internal company AI portal, productivity objectives, then tools introduced across the department. The number made a tidy proof point. The more important development was a change in the question, from “Can we use this?” to “How do we scale it without becoming generic or reckless?”

Royston's answer begins with process. Automating a broken workflow merely lets the disorder arrive sooner. Teams must understand how work moves, decide where judgment belongs, and only then choose whether to build or buy a tool. She uses AI as a daily thought partner and expects hybrid roles such as go-to-market engineers and content engineers to become more common. Still, she reserves a conspicuously large desk for the human faculties: empathy, timing, curiosity, cultural awareness, and the instinct to know when a technically competent message is emotionally vacant.

“Your team's ability to read between the lines, to connect emotion with action, to embody your brand's identity in everything they create is a clear human advantage.”Christine Royston, on human instinct and AI

Her argument has sharpened as synthetic content has multiplied. Polish, once a proxy for care, is now available by the yard. A brand therefore needs a point of view earned from experience, not merely a clean arrangement of plausible sentences. Royston connects credibility to business outcomes: customer engagement quality, brand perception, third-party references, retention, pipeline. Trust may take longer to show itself than a click, but buyers bring it into every decision.

Her rollout philosophy gives employees a role before it gives them a rulebook. Let teams experiment with relevant uses, collect their feedback, and make the purpose visible. Small successes turn an abstract mandate into a tool somebody can judge. Review does not disappear after adoption, either. Brand guidance, bias checks, and quality checkpoints stay in the workflow. The point is not to make people admire the technology. It is to help them recover hours for work requiring attention and choice.

There is a pleasing continuity here. The young salesperson stayed close to the customer. The international student learned to abandon assumptions. The demand-generation leader learned to count. The CMO now asks systems, people, and machines to work in company. Royston's public persona is practical rather than prophetic. She prefers experiments with review points, ambition with a metric, global scale with local stories.

The career belongs to its owner

Curiosity is the plan between plans.

Asked for career advice, Royston has put the responsibility plainly: “You own your own career path. You cannot wait for somebody to offer help.” Her own path supports the line. When sales did not supply the international opening, she made one. When moving from giant companies to smaller ones promised more visible impact, she changed scale. When AI began altering the work, she gave her team room to test it and asked them to measure what happened.

This is not a biography of dramatic reinvention. It is a record of deliberate adjacency: sales to marketing, campaigns to organizational design, automation to credibility. Each move preserves something from the last. Revenue remains near. Customers remain in the room. The world gets wider, the workflows more complicated, and the questions more exact.

At Wrike, Royston is trying to make a global marketing organization behave less like a relay race and more like a jazz group: different instruments, one piece, attentive timing. AI can help with the tempo. It cannot decide whether the tune has anything to say. That decision, happily and inconveniently, still belongs to people.