On an evening in 2008, Wendy Steinle was still at her office on the eighth floor of Novell's building in Provo after seven. The economy had buckled. She was on the phone with her boss in Boston, working through ways to find more pipeline for a $600 million portfolio, when he corrected her about the date. It was the 27th. Steinle suddenly understood that the next day had already arrived in the only way that mattered: it was her twins' third birthday, and they were asleep at home.
She drove the hour back and asked her husband why he had not called. He thought she must have had something terribly important to do. Corporate life has produced plenty of polished reflections on balance, but very few arrive with that kind of sting. Steinle later wrote that the memory still catches at her. The twins, mercifully, remember the weekend party rather than the missed date.
The episode did more than provoke guilt. It changed the design of her job. Steinle told Novell's CMO that she could not give the business what it demanded at that moment. Together they constructed an unusual answer: she moved from leading product and solution marketing and global campaigns to an individual-contributor role on a new innovation project. She would work a strict 35-hour week. One of her former direct reports took over the team, and she reported to him.
“Some may think, ‘Wait a minute - you stepped off your growth path!’ Well, that depends on the dimension you're measuring.”Wendy Steinle, reflecting on her Novell years
No one made the arrangement awkward, so it was not awkward. Steinle focused on a category-creation effort, built a partnership with the Google Wave team and worked on analyst attention and brand awareness. More important, she stopped feeling as though she was hanging from life by her fingernails. About a year and a half later, after Novell was acquired, its new leader asked her to run the group again with a wider brief that included public relations, social media and advertising. She said yes, provided the 35-hour boundary remained. It did. That year the team arrested a decline and returned the business to growth.
A career ladder is a tidy object. A career is not. Steinle's route includes a deliberate step sideways, a former subordinate turned manager and a return to leadership on revised terms.
The marketer who likes a number to earn its adjective
Steinle's career since then reads like an extended argument for range. She spent 12 years at Novell and has said she worked across nine functional areas. She moved to MRM, where as vice president and group strategy director she served the agency's largest client, Verizon. At Adobe, she crossed again between marketing, product, customer success, partnerships and site leadership. The titles changed, but the habit remained: start with a customer problem, pull the functions into the same room and attach the language to an outcome.
At Adobe, Steinle helped set the global go-to-market strategy as the Digital Experience business grew from $1.63 billion to $3.2 billion in three years. She led joint marketing for Adobe's partnership with Microsoft and set the vision for Experience League, the company's customer learning and engagement platform. In 2021, she became CMO of workplace-learning company Degreed. During her tenure, marketing-sourced pipeline rose 50 percent in difficult market conditions. Domo hired her as CMO in September 2022 to lead global marketing for its data and analytics business.
These are the figures that survive a quarterly meeting. Her more durable theme is trust. In a 2023 podcast, she put it with admirable economy: “People buy from people they trust.” Her version of full-journey marketing does not stop when a lead enters a spreadsheet. It maps different people, questions and anxieties across the entire route to a satisfied customer. Content must carry a coherent story along that route. Marketing, sales, product and customer experience may have different budgets, but the buyer encounters only one company.
A tiny shop, a complete customer journey
During a break between full-time CMO roles, Steinle ran a practical experiment from her closet. She opened a shop on Depop and sold more than 50 pre-loved items. Then, inevitably, she studied the reviews. Item quality appeared in 44 percent. Fast shipping came up in 35 percent. Communication, packaging and friendliness each registered. Of the customers who reviewed her, every one gave five stars; 57 percent expressed gratitude.
Her conclusions would fit a global software company with only minor editing. Offer something worth representing. Make the value legible. Reply quickly. Set expectations. Package with care. Ask for feedback. She used reused boxes, paper grocery-bag wrapping and handwritten notes. The scale was domestic, even charming. The operational lesson was not. Gratitude did not come from a single touchpoint. It accumulated across the experience.
This is where Steinle's fondness for words meets her appetite for evidence. Asked how to find differentiation, she does not begin with an isolated slogan. She places it inside a larger set of questions: What category are you in? Who is it for? Which job can the customer do? Why does the difference matter to that particular person? Features can help a team begin, but they must be translated into useful work and a believable benefit. A word is never merely a word when a sales team, a product roadmap and a customer expectation must all live underneath it.
A route with useful turns
The human in the technology
Steinle's interest in the human side of systems is not a late arrival. As Adobe's Utah site leader, she worked across a community of more than 1,400 employees. She was a founding member of the Adobe & Women Leadership Council. At Domo, she sponsored the company's first Women@Domo employee resource group. Women Tech Council gave her its Leadership Excellence Award, and she represented Adobe when the organization recognized the company for its inclusion work. In 2025, she joined the council's advisory board, supporting awards, panels, mentorship and programs intended to widen access to technology careers in Utah.
Her case for inclusion has always been concrete. In 2018, while discussing artificial intelligence, she observed that human values enter the technology people build. If the builders share the same backgrounds and experience, the product has little chance of reflecting the breadth of its customers. Diversity, in this view, is not decorative virtue. It is part of quality control.
She later emceed a Utah summit that gathered educators, policymakers, industry figures and student advocates around data science in K-12 education. Her message was that data literacy cannot be reserved for future data scientists. Everyone will need to become a data-driven version of whatever they choose to be. The thought sounds like a joke assembled from a corporate blank: data-driven [fill in the blank]. It is also a concise account of modern work.
“With marketing, I enjoy the spark that happens for the whole team when we anchor on the idea of ‘for real people, by real people.’”Wendy Steinle at Vertafore
At Vertafore, where she is now chief marketing officer, those ideas meet a new industry. Steinle has described herself as new to InsurTech, though the technologies she has marketed have long served customers across insurance and other sectors. She is interested in going deep rather than skimming the category's surface. Insurance gives her favorite questions higher stakes: How does software remove routine work without erasing judgment? How does AI expand capacity while the relationship between agent and client remains recognizably human? How does a company earn trust while asking customers to change familiar workflows?
Her answer is less a grand theory than a method. Connect the journey. Ask what the work enables. Use data, but do not confuse the dashboard with the person. Vertafore's current product direction puts AI into the daily mechanics of insurance distribution, from submissions and quoting to servicing and reconciliation. Steinle's role is to make that change legible to agencies, carriers and managing general agents, people who know both the value of automation and the price of misplaced confidence.
Retiring the cape
Years after the forgotten birthday, Steinle bought a Wonder Woman sweatshirt. It was part joke, part consolation: proof, she hoped, that she really could do everything. By her first CMO job, the outfit had grown into a pleather jacket, metal cuffs and a lasso. When an executive discussion turned to Halloween costumes, a colleague asked why on earth a leader would want to wear it. The costume suggested an impossible standard to everyone watching.
Steinle took the point. She now prefers “intentional humans” to do-it-all superheroes. Priorities shift across seasons. A colleague, spouse or child may quietly lend patience, but patience is not an infinite corporate resource. Boundaries work only when they are voiced, negotiated and honored by performance on both sides.
Away from the meeting room, Steinle's preferred Utah weekend is happily specific: mountain biking or skiing, a solo hike or an outdoor adventure with family and friends, New York Times games, neighbors passing a porch, perhaps a small live-music venue. She rides a red Trek bicycle. There is a pleasing consistency here. Community, motion, attention and the occasional puzzle are present in both the biography and the job description.
The easiest profile of a CMO is a procession of companies and percentages. Steinle has plenty of both. Yet the better measure of her career may be the decision made after that late night in Provo: acknowledge the cost, redesign the work, deliver against the new terms. The promotion arrived later. The useful growth had already happened.
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