Career Day: Shane Murphy // Intercom

Quotes

• “I think like a lot of decisions in life, you look back on it and at the time it may not have been a very deliberate decision but you are kind of looking at your options and one way where you look back you realize there was probably motivations behind yourdecisions that you didn’t quite realize. In college, I studied business and law but creativity has been a big part of my life.” -Shane “It was about trying to make sure that I understood areas adjacent to my actual role. What I mean by that is if I am working with somebody in finance, I always really try to understand how do they understand the world.” -Shane“In university one of the great benefits I had was learning a wide range of different businesses from strategy to finance. One of the main things I learned that helped me through to today was, on the law side, the structured thinking. Law is all about taking all these random information, figure out what is going on, and pick the problem apart. It’s a though process I use to this day. -Shane“I joined the two-year Orange graduate program where you would rotate across various disciplines of marketing. It was an incredible grinding and understanding the disciplines of marketing but more importantly, how they all work together. Having the opportunity to join the graduate program was huge for me anf foundational experience to this day.” -Shane“In my career marketing has become exceptionally more diverse in the different disciplines that are within marketing. Now you have all the gamut from a designer in the team to a technologist.” -Shane“I was struggling at the consulting phase because I didn’t have a team and you are a hired gun essentially. You’re dropped into these new areas and you are expected to have a lot of experience in them and you don’t and frankly there were a lot of smokes and mirrors, pretending to know what you’re doing and copying somebody’s deck and try to package it as your own work. I was really uncomfortable and had a massive imposter syndrome.” -Shane“The first step I did in Dublin was obviously to reach out to some recruiters to figure out what was the landscape for potential roles. I had simultaneously made the decision that I wanted to move into digital marketing. It was a gap in my experience and it was exploding as a discipline and I felt that if I didn’t get on it now, where it was still nascent enough and I could get early enough to learn it, that I might missed that boat.” -Shane“I essentially tried to find what were all of the ways that I could put things on my resume that made it look like, and also learn, of course I wasn’t just fluffing it completely but I did it so at least they would see that I have a bit of experience.” -Shane“I joined AdRoll in Dublin as I got the digital marketing experience I decided that I want to get back to a role where I could now use all of the experiences starting with my early experience in branding part and I coupled that with demand-gen experience particularly digitally at Paddy Power. I was ready to have a more broad marketing management role.” -Shane“I had the benefit of coming in with a pretty broad range of experience so I was one of his few direct reports that could talk to him about marketing across the board whereas all the other direct reports were all pretty functional leaders.” -Shane“I got the opportunity to run the North America sales which is 60% of our revenue at the time. Where he felt comfortable in giving me that experience is that a lot of the work that I have done on the marketing side was bringing marketing closer to sales so I got really close to the sales operations.” -Shane“I actually think that the marketing discipline in itself is diversifying. You have the brand and product marketing side which is very focused on the message and the skillsets there are very much story telling with a lot of creativity. On the other side, you have demand-gen which is highly technical.” -Shane“Marketers today need to understand art, they need to understand science, they need to understand math, they need to understand language. You can’t just be a specialist at one thing anymore. It used to be that marketers were creative now you have to be a data scientist, understand technology and the legal side as well.” -Ben“In the past we were a very product-led company which means that a lot of our marketing was more into messaging hierarchy, lower-level like the product feature messaging and we were trying to elevate it a bit up to the overarching value proposition like they should care about Intercom over all.” -Shane“I think career is all about momentum and you can get momentum either through your personal momentum within a company or through thecompany’s momentum. When I joined Intercom I recognized that a lot more of my career trajectory will come through the company momentum. For me to grow at Intercom, I need to make sure that Intercom grows.” -Shane“I would say that given the focus on diversity and inclusion in the world at large right now, I take some pride in the fact that our CEO is a woman.” -Shane“My biggest advice would be, as I said marketing is becoming so diverse and there are different skill sets that you need to have. It’s all about learning more about those areas and that might mean you move a little slowly up the ladder but that also means you won’t hit a ceiling.” -Shane