Most software announces itself with a screen. Government software announces itself with a result. A property record appears. A court filing moves. A payment clears. A resident gets an alert before the storm does its worst. When the machinery works, hardly anyone pauses to admire the machinery. This is the peculiar stage on which Lisa Hasen now works: essential systems, intensely specific buyers, and an audience that would prefer the product to feel almost invisible.
Hasen became Chief Marketing Officer of Catalis in March 2026. The title places her over brand, communications, demand generation, and go-to-market strategy. The actual assignment is more interesting. Catalis serves more than 7,000 state, provincial, county, and municipal agencies across North America, providing software and integrated payments across courts, records, taxes, regulatory programs, and citizen engagement. It is not one tidy product with one tidy customer. It is a civic toolbox, and someone has to explain why the tools belong together.
Her first public note from the new job skipped the ornamental language. She described technology that helps governments automate workflows, accept payments, and engage citizens. The verbs do the labor. Automate. Accept. Engage. They concern what public servants can get done, not how many fashionable nouns a software company can fit on a slide.
“Catalis has a strong foundation, a meaningful mission, and a clear opportunity to strengthen how it brings its value to market.”Lisa Hasen, on joining Catalis
A career in the verticals
Hasen arrived at government technology by way of two other specialist worlds. At Daxko, she worked on software for health, fitness, and wellness organizations. At CARET, she led marketing for technology used by legal and accounting professionals. Those markets look unrelated from a distance. Up close, they share a temperament. Their customers have their own vocabulary, workflows, pressures, and healthy suspicion of anyone who has learned the industry from a search-results page.
This is vertical SaaS, a category built around depth rather than universality. Its marketers cannot simply promise efficiency and retire for lunch. They must know which efficiency matters, to whom, and on which Wednesday afternoon it becomes urgent. Hasen’s career has been an education in that specificity.
Progressively senior marketing roles in software for health, fitness, and wellness organizations.
Marketing strategy and revenue enablement for legal and accounting technology.
Brand, demand, communications, and go-to-market work across government technology and payments.
The Daxko chapter was long enough to contain several careers. In 2010, Hasen was recognized in the company’s Achievers Club, an honor for the top 10 percent of team members, for her work as a market manager in the association market. By 2013, she was Director of Go-to-Market Strategy and the named contact on an acquisition announcement. Later came senior director, executive director, and vice president roles. The sequence suggests the useful patience of an operator who stayed close enough to one business to see campaigns become systems and systems become revenue.
A former Daxko colleague credits her with helping build awareness, attract prospects across the country, and support millions of dollars in recurring-revenue sales. He also describes her as considerate in projects, with a knack for bringing a fresh view to familiar work. That combination matters. Pure consideration produces lovely meetings. Pure velocity produces wreckage. A marketing leader needs enough of each to get a complicated group to the same destination.
Brand with its sleeves rolled up
At CARET, Hasen’s remit joined marketing strategy to revenue enablement. The phrase is corporate but the idea is practical: marketing should give a sales team something useful to say and give a potential customer a reason to keep listening. She moved from Vice President of Marketing to Senior Vice President, while appearing in legal-industry sessions about staffing, employee satisfaction, change management, and the technology stack inside a modern firm.
Those subjects reveal an expansive view of the buyer. A law firm does not experience software as an isolated feature list. It experiences the product through people, habits, training, leadership, and the awkward interval between deciding to change and becoming competent at the new thing. Hasen’s public work at CARET repeatedly sat in that interval. The marketing question was also an organizational question: how do you help a team work differently without insulting the work it has already done?
Marketing is full of pressure to enlarge numbers until they burst. Hasen’s record is more persuasive at its actual size: the top tenth at Daxko, nearly two decades in B2B software, and thousands of agencies in Catalis’s customer community. Reality has already brought adequate punctuation.
Her appointment also widened the meaning of “customer outcome.” At Daxko, the far end of the software might be a member checking into a community center. At CARET, it might be a lawyer serving a client. At Catalis, it can be a citizen paying a tax bill, searching a land record, receiving a community notice, or moving through a court process. The buyer is an agency; the lived experience belongs to the public.
The company begins inside the company
Catalis describes Hasen as a believer that sustainable growth starts from within. It is an unfashionably domestic notion in a profession addicted to funnels, channels, and acquisition. Yet a brand is partly the aftertaste of internal decisions. A confused team produces confused language. A brittle culture eventually reaches the customer, usually just after the contract is signed.
Hasen’s public service outside work makes that emphasis feel consistent rather than decorative. She served six years on the board of the Greater Birmingham Humane Society, including fundraising, program, and capital-campaign work. She later joined the board of Firehouse Shelter, chairing its fundraising, marketing, and communications committee. Through Momentum Leaders, she graduated from a women’s executive leadership program, helped shape conference programming, and became a mentor.
Begin with what the customer needs to accomplish, then make the product intelligible in that language.
Market authority and pipeline are not rival ambitions when both are anchored in customer outcomes.
Engaged teams and coherent culture are operating conditions for sustainable growth.
Colleagues remember decisiveness, attentive listening, a ready laugh, and chocolate-chip cookies.
The cookies come from a colleague’s recommendation, which may be the most revealing document in the file. He remembers Hasen taking command, absorbing everyone’s input, adding her expertise, and driving the group toward a plan. Then he mentions her laugh and baking. It is a miniature portrait of executive life as it is actually lived: judgment, coordination, deadlines, and a plate placed on the conference table before morale becomes a line item.
There is discipline outside the office, too. A speaking biography lists strength training among her interests, alongside good food and time with family on the lake. The trio has a pleasing lack of personal-brand optimization. Effort, appetite, idleness. A balanced scorecard designed by a human being.
The first clues of a new chapter
Three months after announcing her Catalis role, Hasen was recruiting a digital content manager. The job would own the corporate website and work across search visibility, conversion, and top-of-funnel growth. This was an early clue about the marketing system she intends to build. Content should be compelling, but it should also be findable. A website should explain, but it should also convert. Ownership should be clear enough that good intentions do not disappear between departments.
She has also publicly returned to an old marketing argument: specialist or generalist? Artificial intelligence, she wrote, keeps changing her view. The question is especially apt for her new company. Catalis needs fluency in the narrow details of courts, tax, records, payments, and public works, while the brand above them needs a generalist’s eye for the shared pattern. Too much specialization and the company becomes a filing cabinet. Too much generalization and it becomes a cloud of pleasant words.
The buyer is a government agency. The person waiting for the payment, record, notice, or decision is a citizen.
Hasen’s degree from Rhodes College was in International Studies and Spanish. One should resist turning every diploma into destiny, but translation has remained close to her work. Specialized software companies are small countries with dialects of their own. Marketing at its best does not flatten those dialects. It carries meaning between product builders, sales teams, institutional buyers, and the people living with the result.
The government-technology story can easily become abstract: digital transformation, integrated solutions, modernization. Hasen’s more durable opportunity is to keep returning those nouns to verbs. A clerk completes the workflow. A municipality receives the payment. A family finds the notice. The citizen gets on with the day.
That makes this chapter broader than the previous ones, but not alien to them. Hasen is still marketing vertical software. She is still connecting brand to demand and demand to revenue. She is still building a team before asking the team to build a market. Only the far end of the chain has changed. It now reaches into thousands of public offices and, from there, into ordinary life.