You Are Not Your Job: A Conversation with Abby Hehemann

Abby Hehemann has a career that does not fit the usual tech playbook. She is an American from Arkansas with a journalism degree who moved to Gdansk, Poland in 2012 and started at GetResponse as a customer support specialist. Over the next decade she climbed from support to community specialist to product marketing manager to director to global marketing director, spent two years at a US higher-education startup called CourseDog where she built product marketing from scratch and created an entirely new category, then returned to GetResponse, got promoted again, and eventually walked away.

There is a story here about loyalty, positioning, and knowing when it is time to leave. Abby is one of the sharpest product marketers I have talked to, and this conversation moves between two things that turn out to be connected. One is a genuine masterclass in positioning a commodity product and proving marketing's impact. The other is an honest reckoning with what it costs to attach your identity to a company, and why she is now, by her own description, learning to be a human again.

Twelve years, two exits, one country that wasn't hers

The most pivotal moment in Abby's career was leaving GetResponse the first time, and she is candid that self-doubt drove it as much as ambition. Her entire professional identity had been built at one company in a country that was not her own. She kept asking herself whether she was actually good, or only good at GetResponse, having never tested herself anywhere else. When the founder of CourseDog reached out on LinkedIn, the timing was right. There was also a ceiling. She knew the only way up meant reporting to the C-suite, and that scared her, so leaving felt easier than facing it.

What she found on the other side surprised her. Reporting directly to a founder, building product marketing from a pile of disconnected and noisy pieces, she discovered she genuinely loved the work and was good at it. She built the baseline positioning and strategy for a mission-driven company, worked long hours because she believed in what they were doing for higher education, and created a new category called academic operations. The self-doubt that pushed her out turned into proof that her skill traveled. She was not only good at GetResponse. She was good, full stop.

The fear of the C-suite was just unfamiliarity

Abby is honest that what kept her from the top rung was a fear of talking to executives. She felt she did not have the business acumen or even the vocabulary for what they cared about, how marketing was actually landing in terms of impact. It was a fear of the unknown more than anything.

What dissolved it was exposure. Speaking with a founder day to day, she learned what made him tick about his business. Interviewing high-level university administrators, she got a feel for what drives senior people and what they actually care about. And the beast lost its power. These were just humans, and once she knew what they cared about, she could navigate the conversation. It is a small, useful reframe for anyone frozen at a level below where they could operate. The people with the intimidating titles are people, and the fear is usually a gap in exposure, not a gap in ability.

Activation versus retention is a standing negotiation

One of the sharpest parts of the conversation is Abby's description of the tension every growth marketer lives inside. She calls herself customer-first and product-obsessed, and those two things are in conflict constantly. Marketing is measured on new customer acquisition and new revenue, while a different unit owns retention, success, and expansion of existing customers. Both are fighting over the same scarce resource, which is roadmap and engineering time.

Her example is the quarterly negotiation over what gets built. She does not want the roadmap filled only with deep, late-lifecycle features for power users, because she also needs early activation improvements that help new customers get started and see value fast. If she brings in new revenue but it churns in the first 30, 60, or 90 days because those customers never activated, that failure lands on her too. So she has to show product leaders the payoff of prioritizing some early-activation work against the deep enhancements. This is the right-hand side of the bow tie that marketers are often told to ignore, and Abby's point is that the leaders in marketing, sales, product, and success have to be genuinely aligned on it. The moment everyone is just protecting their own corner, the whole thing falls apart.

Cut the pipeline into pieces

Ask Abby for a metric that changed how her executives made decisions, and she reaches for time to win at CourseDog. Selling into higher education, a public entity most of the time, is neither easy nor fast, and a six-month sales cycle is considered good. So she built heavy segmentation of the customer base and ICP prioritization tiers, looking not just for good contract sizes but for deals with energy in them, deals that actually move through the pipeline stages.

The insight is that she hates looking at the whole pipeline as one entity, because it tells her nothing. You have to cut it into pieces. Segment the deals, analyze what makes the faster, more winnable ones move, and then build the go-to-market motion around getting enough of those speedier deals into each quarter so the revenue is reliable. You cannot tell investors that your pipeline will probably close in two years and expect them to be satisfied. Segmentation is what let her promise money that would actually arrive as closed-won, and it is what turns marketing from a vague activity into something with direct, measurable impact. She extends the same lens to the two motions she has run. In product-led growth, the job is to reduce friction and let people try the product free, without roadblocks between them and the value. In enterprise, the job is to reduce risk for the internal champion who is putting their own reputation on the line by advocating for you.

Brand is back because feature parity is gone

Abby has spent over a decade in email marketing and automation, so she has watched trends die and come back. Her read on the current AI moment is that everyone is rediscovering over-automation and calling it new. Automations first arrived over a decade ago and the reflex was to automate everything, which produced slop. AI has handed marketers far more personal data points about subscribers than they used to have, which is genuinely useful, but only if you are smart about when you contextually use that data. If you are not, more data plus more automation touchpoints just means everyone floods every channel with more noise.

That is exactly where brand re-enters. Because feature parity is gone, and in a saturated market nobody remembers your features, the differentiator becomes what makes your brand memorable. What you stand for, the clarity of who you are for, the reliability and consistency you deliver. She draws a parallel to sales that lands hard. A rep who keeps talking, blabbing through a script instead of listening, is the same failure as the marketer who fires 14 emails at someone the moment they start a trial. It is all about what you are trying to extract, not about the person, and karma has a way of balancing it out. Transactional SaaS, she argues, does not have a future.

Talk to the people who pay your bills

The differentiation question gets its clearest answer when Abby talks about competing in a crowded category. There are 50-plus email marketing platforms that do essentially the same things, so why should anyone care about yours? Her answer is almost defiantly simple. Stop distilling your message down to features that will be obsolete in an instant. Go back to the customers who are still paying you and using the product successfully, and just talk to them, on a regular basis. Why are you still paying us? Why do you use this? What do you need to keep using it? Who do you tell?

Her strongest line for product marketers is that if you can be the one with the freshest and most in-depth insights about your most valuable customers, you become untouchable. Sales, product, executives, and success all want to talk to you, because you are holding the secret sauce for why the company is still in business. She is scathing about the vendors who make marketing feel more complicated than it is, the ad platforms and SEO tools that imply it is all too complex for you, so just hand over most of your budget and let them automate it. At a startup or a small company you do not need that. You need to know who you are for and where they spend time, and take control of the channels that reach them. Marketing, in her telling, is not actually that complicated. It gets made complicated so someone can sell you something.

Don't give yourself away

Underneath the marketing masterclass is a harder story. Abby left after roughly eighteen brutal months, having realized she had spent decades being loyal to companies and teams before herself. She was making short-term decisions out of exhaustion, could not see a month ahead let alone a year, and moved back to Arkansas for the security of family and a support system so she could get introspective about what she actually wants. She describes her old thinking as pure black and white, the belief that if she slowed down for even a second she would lose everything she had built, her salary, her team, her home. That worst-case spiral, she now says, is a low and fearful way to exist, and it is a lie.

The antidote she offers is practical and blunt. Build a financial cushion into how you live, so that when it is obviously time to step back, you can, and you are not forced into bad long-term decisions by the chaos of the moment. And do not give yourself away. When you shut your laptop at the end of the day you should still have the mental capacity to talk to your partner and your friends. For too long she was completely empty, with nothing left for herself or anyone else. The most striking moment comes when I share what my wife told me after a bad car crash brought on by work stress, that career suicide is fine if the alternative is suicide by career. Abby's response is that over-identifying with your job is one of the most toxic things you can do to yourself, and this season back home is about remembering she is a human, not a title. There are billions of companies. There is only one of you.

The director shift: it's not about you anymore

The last piece of hard-won advice is for anyone trying to move from individual contributor to director. The truth Abby tells them is that it stops being about how good you are. You can be the best product marketer in the world, but as a director your job is how good your team is and can be. That means getting your team the right information, protecting their time, hiring the right people, and delegating and empowering effectively while you move behind the scenes and let them deliver the work and take the visible wins.

She is honest that this was the hardest shift for her, because it demands enormous time on communication, coaching, and training on top of the marketing itself. It also means dealing with performance issues, knowing when someone needs to exit the team, and always being on the lookout for new talent, none of which came naturally to someone who describes herself as loyal to a fault. A team is not a fixed, unchanging family. It changes constantly, and leading it well means being brave enough to make tough decisions for the good of the whole. The through-line of the whole conversation is right there. Loyalty is a strength, until it becomes a way of abandoning yourself.

Key takeaways

A few things worth keeping.

Your skill travels. The self-doubt that says you are only good at your current company is usually wrong. Testing yourself somewhere else is how you find out, and Abby found out she was good, full stop.

Segment everything. The whole pipeline as one blob tells you nothing. Cut it into pieces, find the deals with energy, and build the motion around reliable, winnable revenue.

Brand is the moat now. Feature parity is gone, so what makes you memorable is what you stand for and who you are clearly for, not the next feature nobody asked for.

Talk to the customers who pay your bills. The product marketer with the freshest insights about the most valuable customers is untouchable, and that conversation is the real differentiation work.

Do not give yourself away. Build a cushion, keep something for yourself and the people who matter, and refuse to let a job become your entire identity. There are billions of companies and only one of you.

Frameworks worth stealing

Activation versus retention alignment

Treat the roadmap fight as a standing negotiation, not a one-time project. Marketing is measured on new revenue, but that revenue churns if new customers never activate, so push for early-activation work alongside the deep power-user features. Get the leaders across marketing, sales, product, and success genuinely aligned, because the moment each one only defends their own corner, it breaks.

Segment the pipeline

Never look at the pipeline as a single entity. Build ICP prioritization tiers, find the deals that actually move, and analyze what makes the faster, winnable ones progress. Then engineer enough of those speedier deals into each quarter so revenue is reliable and you can make decisions that have direct impact.

PLG reduces friction, enterprise reduces risk

Match the motion to the buyer. In product-led growth, strip out every roadblock between a new user and the value so they can try it free and easily. In enterprise, your job is to reduce the risk for the internal champion who is staking their reputation on you, because that is the person you actually need to protect.

Become the untouchable customer expert

Make it your job to hold the freshest, deepest insight into your most valuable customers. Talk to them regularly about why they pay, why they stay, and what they need. When sales, product, and executives all come to you for that truth, you have made yourself indispensable and found the real source of differentiation.

Quotes worth keeping

The lines I wrote down.

Feature parity is gone. Now it's all about brand.

If you can be the one with the freshest and most in-depth insights about our most valuable customers, you are untouchable.

PLG is about reducing friction. Enterprise is about reducing risk.

And the one that reframes the whole climb.

It's not about you and how good you are anymore. It's about how good your team is.

Rapid fire round

Same questions every guest. No prep, no warning. Here is how Abby handled it.

Best advice you've ever received? Be an owner, not a renter. From Ola, the former CMO at GetResponse. If you see a problem, do something and say something, and own the solution rather than walking past it.

Advice you ignored or wish you had listened to? The advice from her non-work people to not give herself away to the job, and to save something for herself and the people who matter. She did not listen, and wishes she had.

What would you tell your younger self? Believe in yourself, and stop requiring external validation to see that you are talented and good. It is never enough, so it has to come from within.

Ongoing challenge that keeps you up at night? How to spend her precious conscious hours on work that feels genuinely fulfilling while still being something she can monetize, and learning to think from abundance instead of the narrow, limited mindset that made her world small.

Favorite spot? Georgian food in Poznań, the last city she lived in. Cozy, warm meals that were perfect for the cold.

Tool you can't live without? Notion, and specifically Notion AI, which is good enough at transcription and documentation that she is canceling her more bespoke AI subscriptions.

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Abby Hehemann is a product marketing leader who spent over a decade building her career at GetResponse in Poland and at CourseDog in the US, where she created the academic operations category. She writes and speaks about positioning, product marketing, and building a career on your own terms. Find her on LinkedIn.