The assignment that changed Megan Goett's career did not arrive with a marketing title. It arrived after an investment bank cut staff in 2001. Three managing partners from a successful team left to form a boutique, and Goett went with them. At the large bank, specialists had handled presentations, websites, and brand work. At the small firm in New Jersey, those specialists did not exist. Someone had to make the slides, shape the message, and build the digital presence. Goett became that someone.
At first, the extra work felt like overload. Then it felt like recognition. She liked creating a brand from an empty page. She liked the combination of practical structure and creative choice. The experience gave her a new vocabulary for the work that energized her, and her career turned toward marketing.
Two decades later, the canvas is larger. Goett is Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Cboe Global Markets, the exchange operator behind products including VIX volatility measures and SPX index options. Her remit is global branding and marketing strategy across a business that spans derivatives, equities, data, clearing, and market access. Yet the early lesson remains intact: when the organization is complicated, somebody has to make the whole thing legible.
01 / The accidental apprenticeshipA career hidden inside the extra work
Goett makes a clean distinction between a job and a career. A job is a near-term exchange of work for a paycheck. A career is the longer path, aligned with interests, goals, and values. The jobs along the way are experiments. They reveal what holds attention and what kind of problem feels worth returning to.
Her first official experiment came in high school at The Gap. She learned to fold clothes, operate a register, answer to a manager, and sit through a performance review. Becoming a "Keymaster," with the authority to approve refunds, felt like a real promotion. Restaurant work added another education in service. Those experiences seem far from an exchange floor, but Goett still uses them to define marketing: understand what a person needs, tailor the interaction, and help.
“To me, marketing is all about providing exceptional customer service.”Megan Goett
That premise matters in finance, where expertise can harden into an internal dialect. A familiar investor may hear "SPX" and understand a toolkit for managing exposure. A newer investor may hear three letters and stop. Good service does not pretend the complexity is absent. It designs a route into it.
Goett carried that approach into J.P. Morgan Asset Management, where she became Executive Director and Global Head of Mobile and Sales Enablement. Two managers there became sponsors, not simply mentors. They gave advice, but they also advocated for her and moved her into roles that stretched her. She later connected that experience to a lesson she heard Morgan Stanley executive Carla Harris discuss: mentors can guide a career, while sponsors use their standing to create opportunity.
At Morgan Stanley Investment Management, Goett's scope widened again. She led a global staff across digital product management, business intelligence, advertising, brand, strategy, user experience, and design. Morgan Stanley named her a managing director in 2021. By the time Cboe recruited her in 2023, she had spent roughly 20 years inside financial services and had learned the business from several angles: banker, builder, digital operator, and brand leader.
02 / Brand architectureUse the products as proof
Cboe presented a builder's problem. Expansion and acquisitions had created a broad set of businesses, each with its own customers, products, and language. Goett described the company she entered as a "house of brands." The individual rooms were visible. The architecture connecting them was harder to see.
Her answer was not to hide the names people already recognized. It was to make them do more work. VIX and SPX could become proof points for the corporate promise. "Home of the VIX" places a familiar financial marker inside a larger story about Cboe. The product earns attention; the corporate narrative shows the ecosystem around it.
The branded-house blueprint
The practical insight is easy to steal. When a portfolio grows crowded, a corporate story should not float above the products like a slogan. It should explain why the products belong together. Goett calls the method "using our products as proof." The phrase is compact because the strategy is concrete.
Cboe's 2025 global campaign, "Life is Better With Options," made the same move at the category level. The campaign began with an everyday truth: people like having choices. It used scenes of limited, repetitive alternatives to make the absence of options feel immediate, then connected that feeling to the ways investors use options for risk management, income, and more precise market views.
The line carried a double meaning without relying on a technical lecture. The education could then continue through Cboe's Options Institute and product explainers. In May 2026, the campaign received the Financial Communications Society's Judges' Choice Award, Best in Show Consumer, and four Gold awards. The recognition belonged to a large client and agency team, with Goett among the named client leaders.
A retail activation at Robinhood's first HOOD Summit showed the idea in physical form. A wall of plain white sneakers represented limited investing choices. One custom pair, vivid and distinct, carried the options message. The interactive journey recorded an 81 percent completion rate among attendees and a 17 percent increase in Cboe index-options usage. The work later won Bronze at the ANA B2 Awards.
03 / ProximityMoving closer to the market's pulse
In early 2026, Goett moved to Cboe's Chicago office after more than 25 years building her career in New York. Her farewell included a small detail that tells its own story: colleagues recreated a mini whiteboard with notes from her children. She wrote that New York would always be her professional home, but she wanted to be closer to the people driving Cboe's momentum.
The move also placed her near the most physical expression of the brand: Cboe's trading floor. In April, CNBC began daily live coverage from a dedicated set there under a multi-year collaboration. The arrangement puts breaking market news, volatility, and options activity inside a working exchange environment. For Goett, the floor is both operating infrastructure and a visual shorthand for Cboe's history.
Her public comments about the partnership return to education. As retail interest in options grows, she argues, access to market intelligence has to grow with it. A live camera cannot replace careful learning, but it can bring the machinery of a market into view. The floor becomes a classroom with a pulse.
That educational instinct also shapes how she talks about newer products. In 2026, while discussing Cboe's entry into prediction markets, Goett emphasized a regulated, client-first approach rooted in financial products rather than spectacle. She framed binary outcomes and vertical spreads as extensions of options logic, with research and market understanding still central. The words she used were telling: safe, guarded, client-first.
“The way we're doing that is by using our products as proof.”Megan Goett on Cboe's corporate narrative
04 / The human detailsCityscapes, commas, and respect
Away from the brand diagrams, Goett likes to build LEGO sets with her children. Her preference is not the expected spaceship or famous vehicle. She likes historic buildings and miniature cityscapes: barbershops, corner delis, apartment blocks, and a detailed school with its own cafeteria and art room. Her children call her a Master Builder, which is also the playful job she says she would choose if work could be purely fun.
The hobby feels unusually aligned with her career. A cityscape works because each small structure keeps its identity while contributing to a larger place. Brand architecture asks for a similar balance. So does leading teams across markets and continents.
She also has strong feelings about the Oxford comma and misspelled names. Punctuation can change meaning; a correctly spelled name signals that another person received your attention. These are tiny acts with operational consequences. In a business that runs on precision, detail is not fussiness. It is respect made visible.
Goett's career is a sequence of structures assembled at different scales. The Gap taught accountability. A boutique taught self-sufficiency. J.P. Morgan showed what sponsors can unlock. Morgan Stanley expanded her command of digital products and brand. Cboe gave her a global system to connect.
The common thread is not a slogan. It is the builder's habit of looking at a complicated set of pieces and asking what would make the next person understand how they fit. In markets, as in cityscapes, the useful work is often the connection.