The Collect Call That Changed Mychelle Mollot’s Career

The phone call came from a gas station in rural Manitoba, which is not where most executive careers announce themselves. Mychelle Mollot was away on field work when she needed to reach Mike Laginski at Cognos for an interview. No polished conference room waited nearby. She found a pay phone and called collect. Laginski told her to come in when she returned. Cognos needed people who could understand technology and communicate it; Mollot had trained to read what lay beneath the ground and explain what the evidence meant. The company hired her on the spot.

She had studied engineering geophysics at Queen’s University and begun in gold exploration, including work in the Yukon. Software marketing was not an early ambition. Yet Cognos was expanding quickly, and the combination it sought was already hers: technical judgment, writing and the appetite to make a complicated thing legible. Mollot entered through product management, moved into product marketing and kept following the next interesting problem.

“My whole career changed in that one moment.”Mychelle Mollot, on the gas-station interview

The anecdote has the tidy shape of destiny only in retrospect. What mattered after the call was repetition: learn a new function, connect it to the last one, then widen the field again. Product marketing led to market strategy, analyst relations, public relations and corporate positioning. Mollot would later describe her choices as interest-led rather than title-led. There is a mild rebuke in that distinction. Titles are neat; curiosity makes a mess of the org chart, and sometimes builds a better executive.

A quarter-century inside the Cognos machine

Mollot stayed with Cognos from 1989 until 2014, the final years after IBM acquired the Ottawa software company in 2008. By then she had held technical and marketing positions across the business, including vice-president of business-intelligence product marketing and vice-president of market strategy. An IBM conference biography from the acquisition era put public relations, corporate positioning and analyst relations under her remit. These are different crafts, but they share a governing question: what does the market need to understand?

The acquisition itself was a marker of how far the local company had travelled. IBM agreed to buy Cognos for roughly US$5 billion, folding an Ottawa success into a global organization. Mollot did not leave when the name on the building changed. She moved deeper into the larger system, carrying knowledge of the product, its market and the people who had built both. That continuity is easy to underrate. Acquisitions are usually narrated through purchase prices and product portfolios; the durable value often sits with people who can translate an old company’s strengths into a new company’s language.

At IBM she led worldwide marketing for Business Analytics, then marketing for WebSphere and Mobile Solutions. The numbers around those jobs were large. Her current CrashPlan biography says her experience spans companies from about $5 million in annual recurring revenue to enterprises producing $6 billion annually. Scale changes the meetings, the resources and the blast radius of a decision. It does not repeal the need for a sentence that makes sense.

Cognos also supplied a durable professional network. When Pierce Ujjainwalla joined the company after university, Mollot was several levels above him, managing a marketing organization of roughly 200 people. He remembered her team as unusually analytical and digitally fluent. Virtual conferences appeared in its playbook as early as 2007. Years later, after Ujjainwalla founded the marketing-production company Knak, the hierarchy reversed in a pleasingly Ottawa way: the former junior employee invited his former executive to advise the startup, then hired her as its chief marketing officer.

The large-company executive goes small

Leaving IBM for smaller software companies required more than shrinking the budget. At Klipfolio, Mollot served as CMO and head of product management from 2014 to 2017. At Solace, where she arrived later that year, she built a marketing department and a sales-development operation during almost six years of growth. Ujjainwalla later recorded the before-and-after figures: marketing grew from five people to 27, sales development from six to 19, while Solace expanded from about 200 employees to 800.

Those figures matter because they describe construction, not inheritance. Small companies expose every gap. Strategy, hiring, positioning, measurement and the weekly operating rhythm sit close together. Mollot’s description of her day divides the work into thirds: execute the current strategy, analyze performance, plan for what comes next. It is less glamorous than the mythology of brand leadership and far more useful. A CMO has three clocks running, and none agrees to stop while another receives attention.

Knak was a different kind of return. Mollot joined its advisory board in 2020. In 2023 she became CMO, drawn in part by an Ottawa company she could help grow and by founders who understood marketing from the inside. Ujjainwalla called her arrival a milestone for a startup nearing 100 employees: experienced leaders are costly, and asking one to join is asking her to accept the company’s risk as well as its promise.

Their working relationship carried an extra assurance. Mollot had watched his early reputation form at Cognos. He had seen the systems her team built. Long memories can be a local technology cluster’s quiet capital. The org chart may flip, but observed competence keeps its value.

“Your skills are more transferable than you think.”Mychelle Mollot

The spreadsheet needs an idea

Mollot’s engineering inheritance appears most clearly in her refusal to separate marketing from its machinery. She has argued that marketing-operations professionals already possess much of a future CMO’s kit: analytical ability, technology fluency, process design, cross-functional alignment and leadership. They understand the hub and the spokes. The missing experience is often creative judgment.

Her formulation is crisp: “A proficient campaign without creativity is not going to be successful. Creativity is the difference between good and great.” Process can deliver the email on time. Data can show who opened it. Neither guarantees that anyone cared. For operators hoping to lead marketing, she recommends getting close to creative work: sit in on brainstorming, watch a brief become an idea, and notice how leaders connect emotional response to business intent.

Plainness is not a lack of imagination. It is what remains after a thought has been understood. In an interview about enterprise email production, Mollot described complex automation systems that had become bottlenecks because only specialists could operate them. Her pitch for no-code software began with the human consequence: let the people creating the message make it, instead of placing every revision in a coding queue. Some Knak customers, she said, cut production cycles from six weeks to hours or minutes.

The same instinct suits her current subject. CrashPlan sells backup and recovery across endpoints, servers and cloud applications. The engineering beneath data resilience is intricate; the customer’s question is not. Can the organization recover what matters when something goes wrong? As CrashPlan’s CMO, Mollot leads market strategy, channel marketing, growth strategy and execution, and revenue operations. It is a broad operator’s remit for a product whose value becomes clearest under pressure.

Ottawa remembers its builders

Mollot was born and raised in Canada’s National Capital Region, and her work beyond employers has stayed close to it. Public biographies list board or advisory service with Invest Ottawa, Unito, Trustiics and TouchBistro. She joined The Ottawa Hospital Foundation’s board in 2021 and appears among the community leaders supporting its long-term capital campaign. At a Christie Lake Kids fundraiser in 2023, she spoke about giving children from lower-income families access to the extracurricular experiences her own children had enjoyed.

The professional and civic circles overlap. Former Cognos colleagues have gathered to support Ottawa causes. A technology network assembled over decades becomes a fundraising network, an advisory network and, sometimes, the place where a new job begins. Mollot’s career is personal evidence that a city’s software industry is not merely a list of companies. It is a set of people who remember one another’s work.

Away from the conference room, she has described a preference for the outdoors: biking, kayaking and skiing, often with family. The detail fits the geophysicist who never quite disappeared inside the marketer. Her professional subject changed from physical terrain to organizational terrain, but the method still begins with observation. Find the signal. Understand the system. Explain what it means.

A pay phone is now a museum piece. The transferable skills behind that call are not. Technical industries still need translators. Growing companies still need operators who can move between the spreadsheet and the sentence. Executives still become more useful when they follow an adjacent interest instead of guarding a narrow title. Mollot’s path from gold exploration to data protection sounds improbable only if a career is supposed to be a straight line. Hers is better understood as a series of connected questions, each interesting enough to answer.