Kari Hanson likes a market with a large, well-dressed opponent. At SailPoint, the names across the ring included Oracle and IBM. At Spiro.ai, it was Salesforce. Now, as chief marketing officer of Robin, she can look toward Microsoft, Zoom and a thicket of legacy workplace tools. Her taste is revealing. She is less interested in polishing an obvious category than in arriving when the nouns are still unsettled and the buyer is still learning how to describe the headache.
The headache today is the office. Once, it ran on sturdy assumptions: people arrived on roughly the same days, sat in assigned places and asked a person at a front desk when something went wrong. Hybrid work replaced that choreography with a weekly improvisation. Desks must be booked, rooms negotiated, guests expected, catering summoned and floor plans revised. An office can be half-empty and still feel inconveniently full.
Hanson's work is to make that muddle legible. Robin sells workplace software, but she has pushed its story beyond room and desk booking toward “workplace operations,” a category broad enough to include the people, services, space and data required to run a modern office. It is a marketing job in the old sense of the word: decide what market you are actually in.
The technical person inside the storyteller
The career began with a small technological marvel and a change of direction. Hanson entered Bentley University as a computer science major. In an early class, she built an executable file that would put an animated image into an email, around the moment email attachments themselves were becoming novel. Her professor introduced her to the marketing department. By junior year she had a public-relations internship at a technology company, and the combination clicked: founders, unfamiliar products, fast-moving markets and the privilege of explaining what had just appeared.
She spent eight years at technology PR agency Lois Paul and Partners. The assignments included startups emerging from stealth in Wi-Fi and digital rights management, technologies that now sound ordinary because somebody first had to make them comprehensible. Hanson later joined ZoomInfo, where she helped reposition the company for a broader market and directed communications for the spinout of Bizo, which LinkedIn would eventually acquire. She calls this short chapter her “splash and dash,” a phrase with more bounce than the usual executive timeline.
Then came SailPoint. She joined in 2008 as roughly the twentieth employee and stayed for more than a decade, ultimately becoming vice president of corporate marketing. The company was selling identity software into a field dominated by larger incumbents. Hanson helped build the marketing function, worked through the development of the identity governance category and stayed through SailPoint's 2017 IPO. It was the sort of education that leaves no tidy diploma: analyst conversations, customer evidence, repeated explanations and the long wait for a category to harden around the problem.
We didn't fight on the term because no one really cares. At the end of the day, it was really the definition of what this category includes.Kari Hanson on category creation
That sentence is a useful antidote to category theater. A coined term can look handsome on a slide and remain inert in the world. Hanson cares more about owning the problem definition. When a startup repeatedly says, “we approach this a different way,” she sees a clue: perhaps it should stop competing on an inherited field and redraw the field itself. The redraw still needs timing, third-party validation and customers willing to describe the value in the same language. Vocabulary follows proof more often than it produces it.
Read the pipeline, not the folklore
After SailPoint, Hanson discovered that public-company red tape did not suit her. She moved to Boston AI startup Spiro.ai for about five years. The company challenged Salesforce with an AI-led CRM pitch aimed at manufacturers. When that chapter ended, she planned a summer away from work. Then conversations with Robin began. First human resources, then the chief executive, then the rest of the leadership team. She found herself filling pages with what Robin ought to do in marketing. A vacation lost an argument to a list.
At Robin, she did not arrive demanding a rebrand. The visual identity was strong. The story beneath it was selling the product short, and the internal story about the customer was misleading. Colleagues said Robin sold to office managers and seldom to facilities. Hanson looked at the pipeline. Larger deals routinely involved facilities leadership. The office manager was often the daily user; the boss was the buyer. One distinction unlocked a chain of decisions: elevate the product into a platform story, focus the ideal customer profile on mid-market and enterprise organizations, and speak to a buying committee that might include facilities, IT, real estate and finance.
“We sell to office managers”
Facilities shapes larger deals
Enterprise platform story
She applied the same impatience to measurement. Hanson believes marketing should own pipeline creation. Her team moved away from counting marketing-qualified leads and raised the threshold: the prospects passed to sales should fit the ideal customer profile and have scheduled a demonstration. Once the team carried a number closer to revenue, its behavior changed. People volunteered which tools to cancel, which vendors no longer earned their fee and which activities produced motion without progress.
Activity can be comforting because it is countable. Hanson's version of accountability asks whether the count is attached to a buyer, a meeting and a plausible deal.
This numbers-first posture sits comfortably beside her instinct for language. Her children tease her for being a math geek. She tells new marketing leaders to understand margins, runway, customer lifetime value and burn rate, because fluency in the business makes budget decisions better. In the same breath, she calls clear writing clear thinking and argues that it creates leverage across positioning and leadership. A spreadsheet finds the contradiction. A sentence lets the whole company see it.
The tax hiding in the meeting room
The most interesting phrase in Hanson's current notebook may be “office coordination tax.” Consider a professional-services firm occupying eight floors. A client meeting can require the right room, visitor clearance, technology, catering and several calendars. Meanwhile an employee wanders for a desk and another hunts for an internal meeting room. Each workaround is small enough to tolerate. Together they become labor, delay and frustration hiding in plain sight.
Hanson has called quantifying that burden her current “holy grail.” The ambition fits her method. A fuzzy category becomes persuasive when its pain can be counted. The office coordination tax turns workplace irritation into an economic argument: how much time does an organization spend making its space usable, and what could a connected system give back?
People aren't buying for AI; they're buying for what AI can automate.Kari Hanson on the message reaching workplace buyers
That distinction keeps Robin's AI story tied to the work. Buyers are interested in automation and consolidation: fewer disconnected tools, fewer repetitive workflows, less wandering and less manual coordination. Hanson is frank that cost savings are not her favorite marketing tale; she likes to have more fun. Yet a marketer's private taste must occasionally bow to the sentence the market is ready to hear.
She is equally wary of AI's effect on marketing itself. Faster content production has also produced lookalike noise and distrust. Her answer is operational rather than nostalgic: clean the data, let systems qualify and summarize, preserve human judgment where relationships carry stakes, and make the creative idea worth amplifying. One sharp image, statistic or argument can beat another 800 words assembled because the machine made them cheap.
Monday, with coffee
Hanson commutes into Boston two or three times a week and likes it. Monday is the marketing team's anchor day. Traffic is kind, colleagues gather, and the week begins with the people who must make the story repeatable. Robin uses Robin to run the office, which gives the marketing team the useful discomfort of living inside its own promise.
She has two middle-school-aged children, and outside work she describes a calendar of sports, theater and attempts to keep up with the latest video game. In a lighter Robin video about what draws people to an office, Hanson chose free coffee easily. Healthy food mattered. A box of kittens would be decisive. The category architect is not above bribery by small mammals.
There is a tidy management idea beneath the joke. Hybrid work is rarely won by mandate or by an abstract hymn to culture. People make specific calculations about a trip, a meeting, a meal, a quiet room and who else will be there. The modern office is an enterprise system operated by humans who can still be swayed by coffee. Hanson's project is to respect both halves of that sentence: measure the machinery, then remember the whims.
Her career has moved from explaining emerging technologies to defining the problems around them. The recurring move is neither magic nor mere messaging. Look past what the company says. Read the evidence. Find the buyer. Name the burden. Repeat the useful sentence until the market can say it back. In the messy middle of hybrid work, that is how a room-booking tool begins to look like an operating system for the office.