PagerDuty owns a piece of language most software companies would happily lose sleep over. To be paged is to be urgently wanted, usually by a machine, usually at an hour when the machine ought to know better. The company’s name became shorthand for the alert that pulls an engineer into a failing system. It is vivid, useful and a little cruel. Katherine Post Calvert’s work begins with that memory, then asks it to carry more.
Calvert joined PagerDuty as chief marketing officer in May 2022. Her assignment covered the familiar CMO territory - product marketing, demand, field work, operations and corporate narrative. Her present title, Chief Marketing and Growth Officer, is a clue to what happened next. She now oversees global brand and demand generation, the high-velocity commercial sales teams in North America and EMEA, new-customer acquisition, pipeline and PagerDuty’s scaled product-led growth motion.
The remit joins the promise to the purchase. It places the story people hear, the product path they enter and part of the sales organization on the same sheet of paper. For a company trying to grow beyond the category it helped define, that proximity is practical. PagerDuty began with on-call management. Its current pitch stretches across incident management, AIOps, automation, customer service operations and AI agents. The pager is still there. It is simply no longer the whole sentence.
The useful distance
An English major among the dashboards
Calvert earned a bachelor’s degree in English with High Honors from the University of California, Berkeley. Enterprise software is full of executives trained to build systems or count them. Her education trained her to notice what words make systems mean. That is useful distance for someone whose career has moved through financial technology, professional networks, customer engagement and digital operations.
She worked in executive communications at Pfizer early in her career, then spent years at Advent Software, moving through public relations and marketing leadership to become CMO and senior vice president. Advent made software for investment managers, a business where precision matters and glamour is optional. In 2015, SS&C agreed to acquire it for approximately $2.7 billion. PagerDuty’s account of Calvert’s career places her on the executive team that brought Advent to that valuation.
There were later leadership roles involving LinkedIn Learning and Outcome Health, plus advisory work with digital wealth platform Marstone. The industries changed. The underlying problem did not: a complicated product needed a narrative that could survive contact with salespeople, customers and a balance sheet.
“When we use the same vernacular as the business - bookings, retention, and deal velocity - that is where we shift from being executors to becoming a true strategic partner.”Katherine Post Calvert
It is a revealing choice of nouns. No impressions. No vague awareness. Calvert’s preferred vocabulary forces marketing into the company’s common ledger. Bookings show whether interest arrived with intent. Retention shows whether the promise survived use. Deal velocity shows whether the story helped a decision move. Marketing earns a strategic seat, in her formulation, by speaking about the business rather than merely speaking for it.
Two companies enter
The chorus gets a name
The clearest example of Calvert’s kind of work came after Vista Equity Partners combined Spredfast and Lithium in 2018. One company was known for social-media management; the other for online communities and customer care. A merger can happen in legal documents overnight. A shared identity takes longer.
A merger translated into one idea
social marketing
communities and care
one customer chorus
Calvert, CMO of Spredfast and then the combined company, became chief architect of the Khoros identity. The name drew on the Greek chorus, the group that observes the action and helps an audience understand it. It also carried an echo of choreography. For a platform meant to bring customer conversations across social channels, care teams and brand-owned communities into view, the metaphor worked hard.
At Khoros’s first combined customer conference in 2019, more than 500 leaders gathered around a road map joining marketing, care and community. An IDC account noted something unusual: customers had already adopted the young name with affection. Names do not integrate software, calm customers or reconcile cultures. A good one can give everyone the same verbal doorway into the work.
Calvert’s broader theory also emerged there. She argued that customer experience should be marketing’s “north star,” and that marketing leaders could champion it across the company. In a later conversation about growth marketing, her definition was similarly expansive: growth marketing is the customer experience. Acquisition brings someone to the door. The experience determines whether they stay, spend more and speak well of the place.
The cape problem
What Lego Batman knew about scale
Calvert is willing to borrow a metaphor from less solemn shelves. In 2017, after taking her children to The Lego Batman Movie, she wrote that she had unexpectedly found “a brilliant meditation on the difficulty of scaling a heroic leadership style.” Batman’s solitary competence works until Gotham’s problems outgrow the cape. The city is saved when the hero accepts that teamwork is not an insult to heroism.
Her corporate version is pointed. A heroic founder or executive can carry an early company through force of instinct. As complexity rises, the habit becomes a bottleneck. Durable leadership harnesses a wider set of perspectives and talents. It is an amusing argument because Batman makes the management literature easier to swallow. It is also consistent with Calvert’s career: mergers, brand changes and cross-functional growth motions are team sports disguised as org charts.
She has a similarly dry line about personal narrative. “I find most marketers share my weakness: I can sell the heck out of anything and anyone but myself,” she told an Empowered CMO gathering. The confession is funny because the expert storyteller becomes shy precisely when she knows every trick in the shop. Her public biography supplies an indirect solution: let the pattern of work make the case.
“I find most marketers share my weakness: I can sell the heck out of anything and anyone but myself.”Katherine Post Calvert
Outside the office, an alumni biography lists reading as many books as time permits and promoting rosé as a year-round beverage. The two interests suit an English graduate and a brand builder. One collects stories. The other refuses an arbitrary positioning constraint.
The alarm after the alarm
Making resilience a boardroom word
At PagerDuty, Calvert inherited a product whose original benefit could be dramatized in a single noise. Her team’s “Operations Intervention” campaign used the visual language of instruction manuals and emergency communications, plus a sharp yellow called Volt, to tell companies that their old operational habits needed attention. Calvert was credited with the PagerDuty and agency team behind it. The humor was brisk; the business claim was sober. Failing systems now interrupt revenue, reputation and customer trust, not just an engineer’s night.
That argument has become more financial. PagerDuty’s 2026 State of AI-First Operations survey found that some responding organizations lose more than $1 million per hour during IT incidents; 34 percent lose at least $500,000. Calvert described operational resilience as a board-level priority and argued that AI-first operations can speed incident workflows, restore service sooner and give teams less time fighting fires.
The shift is important. An alert is a technical event. Resilience is an operating capability. Learning after an incident is an institutional habit. Revenue protected during disruption is a boardroom outcome. Calvert’s marketing work connects those levels without pretending they are identical.
Her expanded title makes the connection measurable. Product-led growth invites a customer to experience value before a traditional sales process does all the explaining. Commercial sellers then carry the conversation across smaller and mid-market accounts. Brand gives both motions a memorable frame. If the pieces disagree, the customer feels the seam. If they align, the company can grow without asking each new buyer to decode the organization first.
There is still a pager in the story, and there should be. Strong brands rarely escape their origin by disowning it. They use the origin as a first chapter. Calvert’s career has been a series of first chapters written under pressure: an acquisition, a merger, a new name, a broader category. At PagerDuty, the famous alarm gets the reader’s attention. Her job is to explain the action that follows - people and machines coordinating, service returning, a team learning, the next alarm perhaps never sounding at all.
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