customer-engagement
(38)
Jason Lyman Wants Martech to Earn Your Attention
The Customer.io CMO built his career on measurement, trade-offs, and customer evidence. Then he set out to make marketing software feel worth noticing again.
Paige Mantel Learned Marketing by Answering the Phone
Before Paige Mantel shaped brands, product strategy and an AI roadmap, a mentor sent her to the call center. Three decades later, she is still building technology around the radical discipline of listening.
From Snowshoes to Strategy: Ryan Swearingen’s Career in the Work Between Teams
Before he was coordinating marketing strategy at Twilio, Ryan Swearingen was leading an outdoor-recreation club through a Yosemite winter. His career since has followed the same practical pattern: organize the expedition, equip the team, and make the complicated route navigable.
Hannah Kelly Is Turning the Reservation Into a Relationship
At Resy, Hannah Kelly is making a case that the smallest rectangle on your phone can lead to something much larger: discovery, loyalty, and a table people remember.
Kelsey Hersey Markets the Moment Between a Screen and the Outdoors
The Brandt CMO has built a career around an unusual brief: use data, design and government technology to help more people step away from their screens and into the outdoors.
Ken Yeung Bet the Company on a Simpler Conversation
A former trading-platform engineer learned that sophisticated technology can still be the wrong answer. Wati grew when Ken Yeung and Bianca Ho traded long bank sales cycles for a tool small businesses could understand, buy and use.
Kris Rudeegraap Put a Dog Toy Where Another Sales Email Would Have Been
A bark on a sales call became a dog toy, then a product, then a company. Sendoso's co-founder has spent a decade turning small observations into a system for earning attention.
Henson Tsai Bet Everything on the Wrong App - Then Learned to Listen
A failed food app emptied his savings. A hotel pitch went nowhere. Henson Tsai kept the two engineers, changed the customer in a day, and built SleekFlow by treating rejection as data.
Chris Koehler Is Rewriting the CMO Job for an Audience of Humans and Agents
Twilio's marketing chief built his career by refusing to stay in marketing's lane. Now he is betting that curiosity, customer empathy, and a generalist's range will matter even more when software starts choosing on our behalf.
Betsy Palmer Makes Financial Action Feel Possible
From the Reagan White House to a newly independent financial brand, Betsy Palmer has built a career around one difficult craft: turning institutional complexity into a reason for people to act.
Juan Casian Learned to Listen at Internet Scale
After building a fintech from a college problem, weathering two Y Combinator rejections and learning to lead beyond the code, the Boom AI co-founder is betting that the next useful interface is an honest conversation.
Anand Valavalkar Learned to Hear the Money in a Missed Call
Before Twine became an AI revenue engine, its central insight lived inside a high-school contracting business: every unanswered ring could be a customer walking away. Anand Valavalkar has spent the years since turning that small-business lesson into software.
David Edri Is Teaching Business Software to Put on a Show
After two decades across social networks, ad tech and presentation software, the emaze.ai CEO is betting that the next business message should feel less like a form letter and more like an occasion.
Linda Hazzan Makes a Public Library Legible in Public
For roughly two decades, Toronto Public Library’s communications chief has worked on a deceptively hard problem: showing a whole city that its library is not merely a place to borrow books, but public infrastructure for learning, connection and civic life.
Xavier Leport Is Turning the Pizza Order Into a Growth System
At Pizza Salvatoré and Groupe Abbatiello, Xavier Leport has treated the online order as more than a transaction. It is the feedback loop behind a fast-growing restaurant operation.
Dave Snow Is Teaching Debt Collection to Read the Room
At Remitter, the old collections script is becoming a responsive conversation. Dave Snow's route from clean energy to receivables technology explains why he treats timing, tone and customer choice as infrastructure.
Gene Hall Runs Marketing Where the Math Never Sleeps
Inside Capital One, one of America's most data-obsessed banks, a divisional CMO answers a harder question than most marketers ever face: can you prove it worked?
Lindsay Hanson Is Teaching a 160-Year-Old Brand to Show Up Every Day
After nearly two decades at John Hancock, Lindsay Hanson has made a quiet operating idea into a brand strategy: earn attention between the big life moments, one useful interaction at a time.
Jennifer Weissman Bets on the Thrill, Not the Jackpot
The CMO of PENN Entertainment has spent a career learning what actually pulls people back to the casino floor - and the app - and it is not what most people assume.
Leland Kass
Leland Kass is a New York based marketing executive and the Chief Marketing Officer of Lafayette 148 New York, the Brooklyn Navy Yard luxury womenswear house led by Deirdre Quinn. Kass built a career at the intersection of luxury retail and storytelling, with senior roles at Maria Tash, rag & bone, Saks Fifth Avenue and Conde Nast, plus an independent consulting practice, LKK Advisory. The through line is brand narrative, digital and e-commerce growth, and customer engagement for premium consumer brands.
Michael Grimes
Michael Grimes is Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer for JD North America, the parent of JD Finish Line, one of the largest specialty athletic footwear and apparel retailers in the United States. Based in Indianapolis, he leads brand strategy, omni-channel marketing and consumer experience for a chain that generates around $2.1 billion in annual revenue and employs roughly 16,000 people. A Butler University graduate who started in the agency world at Willow Marketing, Grimes has spent his Finish Line career stitching together the store and online worlds, steering high-profile sneaker launches and culture-forward collaborations, while also serving on the Finish Line Youth Foundation board.
Nick Wilkoff
Nick Wilkoff is the Chief Marketing Officer of L.L.Bean, the 111-year-old Maine outdoor brand known for its lifetime guarantee, Bean Boots, and Outdoor Discovery programs. A Middlebury environmental policy graduate who started his career as a Forrester Research analyst, Wilkoff leads brand, marketing, and customer engagement for a company doing roughly $1.7 billion in annual revenue. He champions an outdoors-for-everyone philosophy, pairing L.L.Bean's heritage of quality and durability with a modern, inclusive, community-first approach to keeping a legacy brand relevant.
Tammy Redpath
Tammy Redpath is the Chief Marketing Officer of EVEREVE, the Edina, Minnesota-based women's fashion retailer, a role she stepped into in April 2026. She brings more than three decades of retail and brand leadership, most of it at Target Corp., where she rose from store management to senior vice president of marketing and served as president of Target's India operations. Before EVEREVE she was CEO of Inside Edge Commercial Interior Services, chief engagement officer at Lakeshore Learning Materials, and an independent leadership and brand consultant. At EVEREVE she leads global marketing strategy, brand positioning, and customer engagement across the retailer's stores and digital channels.
Ty Haney
Ty Haney is a consumer-brand founder who built Outdoor Voices into a category-defining activewear label starting in 2013, was pushed out in 2020, and rebuilt from scratch. She now runs Try Your Best (TYB), a community and loyalty platform used by more than 200 consumer brands, and in 2025 returned as CEO of Outdoor Voices after its acquisition by Consortium Brand Partners. She also co-founded the plant-based energy brand Joggy.
Joe Welu
Joe Welu is the founder and CEO of Total Expert, a Minnesota-based fintech company that built the first customer engagement platform purpose-built for banks, credit unions, and mortgage lenders. He started the company in 2012 from the basement of a real estate office, hiring his first programmers off Craigslist, after a decade running one of the top-selling real estate teams in the U.S. Today Total Expert serves more than 200 financial institutions, including 15 of the top 25 U.S. banks and lenders, and its software touches roughly a quarter of U.S. mortgage production.
Matt Smolin
Matt Smolin is co-founder and CEO of Hang, a New York-based customer engagement and loyalty platform now positioning itself as an AI marketing system for restaurants, beauty and apparel brands. Hang originally launched in 2021 as an NFT-powered membership platform and raised a $16M Series A led by Paradigm in 2022, with backing from Tiger Global, Kevin Durant's Thirty Five Ventures and MrBeast's Night Ventures. Under Smolin, the company has moved past its web3 branding into AI-driven segmentation, campaign automation and loyalty for brands like Just Salad, Jeni's, Boba Guys and Taziki's.
Diya Mathew
Diya Mathew is a Senior Manager for Customer Engagement Strategy in the Office of the President & COO at ServiceNow, the enterprise cloud platform company valued at over $100 billion. A graduate of Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and NIT Tiruchirappalli, she brings a rare blend of technical depth and strategic acumen forged across Cisco, Deloitte Consulting, Meta, and now ServiceNow. Based in San Francisco, she works at the intersection of executive strategy, customer engagement, and enterprise operations.
Samantha Mah
Samantha Mah is VP of Strategic Partnerships and Growth at ServiceNow, the $13B+ enterprise cloud platform company headquartered in Santa Clara. Based in Toronto, she leads the charge on unlocking organizational potential by eliminating manual, repetitive work through intelligent digital workflows. With a Six Sigma Master Black Belt background and a career that spans Xerox and ServiceNow, she brings process-excellence discipline to the art of enterprise partnerships. She also serves in the Office of the CDIO as Senior Director, Customer Advocate - bridging the gap between technology capability and human impact.
Eitan Winer
Eitan Winer is the co-founder and CEO of Maverick, a San Francisco startup that uses generative AI to send personalized videos and AI-optimized email at scale for ecommerce brands. Raised in La Paz, Bolivia and trained in Management Science & Engineering at Stanford, he spent eight years building products at mobile gaming company Pocket Gems and ran an alpaca-apparel store on Shopify before teaming up with engineer Debarshi Chaudhuri in 2021. Maverick records a merchant once, then uses lip-sync and face-sync models to generate thousands of customer-specific videos, aiming to make online shopping feel as personal as walking into a store.
Jack Sardinia
Jack Sardinia is the co-founder and CEO of FavorDrop, a Buffalo-based platform for sending time-bound digital gifts and promotions. He launched it in 2021 with his father, longtime Buffalo restaurateur Tim Sardinia, around a simple idea: buy a friend a drink at their favorite bar even when you cannot be there. What began as a consumer app for sending restaurant gift cards grew into a B2B customer-engagement tool used by car dealerships, marketing agencies, and home-services companies, with more than a million FavorDrops sent and a patent on the 'bounce back' that returns unredeemed gifts to the sender.