We recently connected with Lauren Demarte and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Lauren, thanks for joining us today. Quality control is a challenge almost every entrepreneur has had to focus on when growing – any advice, stories or insight around how to best ensure quality is maintained as your business scales?

I’ve spent the past 10 years in tech companies of various sizes and stages; scaling up with consistency is a challenge no matter what business you’re in. Something that works when you have 20 people doesn’t (and probably shouldn’t) work when you have 200 people, or 2000. So you have to find the right balance of process and agility that’s right for your company, your customers and your people.

My first step is usually developing playbooks – living documents that are lightweight at first, and iterated on over time to reflect growth and change in the business. A good playbook details not just the steps we take to do something well, but also why those steps are important, and examples of what great and not-great outcomes look like. Context is key to helping people understand when a process needs to be followed to the letter vs when there’s some leeway to do things in different ways. If you’re hiring great people to form a diverse team, and supporting them without micromanaging them, you will find folks getting to the same outcome via different routes – this is a good thing! But you have to give them a roadmap to get to the great outcome before they start.

Playbooks are living documents, and need to be continuously updated so they don’t become another forgotten document gathering dust in the drive. I’ve found it helpful to spot someone in the team that loves a good process – there’s always at least one person – and give them ownership of keeping these documents up to date. It can be a great stretch project for someone newer on the team or in their career, as it helps them really understand operations by learning, doing and then teaching. This person shouldn’t just be a document writer; they should also have license to flag when a process is falling down, or when an outcome needs to change, and lead the team to come up with tweaks that map back to where the business is at.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m Lauren, an Australian-born marketer and customer strategist living in Los Angeles with my partner and two kittens, Rufus and Tame.

My career path definitely took some different turns to what I envisioned as a child. Back then I wanted to be an astronaut or a gas station attendant, because the lady who ran our local station always gave me a lollipop, and I figured giving people lollipops would be a pretty great career. I still do!

I grew up in Melbourne, Australia, and worked at marketing agencies and national brands until 2014, when I moved to San Francisco. I thought I’d be gone for no more than 2 years, and that’s what I told my poor parents (sorry mom and dad). But 2 years turned into 4, then 8, and here I am today, about to celebrate 10 years in the US. I’ve built a life and a community that I really love, and now California is home to me as much as Australia is.

When I arrived in San Francisco, I realized quickly that business was done very differently there compared to Melbourne – there was a certain way of communicating, of framing up information, that got the right results. Australians speak very directly and have a self-deprecating sense of humor that doesn’t really land the same way in the US. I had to modify the way I spoke, how I told a story, how I framed a request, and proactively learn a ton about this new market before I could adapt to it. But it was absolutely worth the effort – it opened the door for me to join Yelp’s national team, which was a new and growing part of the business. I was then tapped to move over to some of Yelp’s acquisition businesses to scale up their customer experience teams. Those years were a lot of fun and set me up to lead customer experience at startups like Narvar and Strivr in the years following.

In terms of career trajectory, I’ve always had an open mind; if the opportunity is interesting and challenging, and there’s good alignment between myself and the founders and team, it’s usually worth exploring – even if it doesn’t strictly fit the mold of “what I do”. Over the past 10 years I’ve worked in some pretty offbeat areas, like developing a company’s first HR function, and overseeing tax liability. Neither of these really relate to customer experience, but so many skills are transferable and expandable as long as you’re willing to keep pushing yourself to learn.

Today I’m SVP of Marketing at GoDigital Media Group, a multinational company that uses content, community, and commerce to connect with people at their passion points across music, entertainment, wellness, retail and more. Customer experience is still a big love of mine and it’s still rolled into what I do, but it’s one part of the end-to-end marketing that I oversee for a number of brands. Every day I do something new that pushes my boundaries, and I absolutely love it.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

When I first started managing people, I’d been taught the mantra, “A manager is always on stage”, and I’d translated that to mean that I needed to be invulnerable – stoic and always having the right answer. This led to me jumping in to take over from my team when they were struggling, rather than giving them space to fail fast and learn with my support. They weren’t feeling connected to the mission, they weren’t growing, and I was spending my own time in all the wrong places.

It was a hard one to unlearn. I had to take a step back and look at the growth I wanted for my team and myself, and what I needed to do differently to make that happen. It meant setting better context for my team upfront, allowing them to run more autonomously, and being okay with things getting done in ways that might not be exactly how I’d do them myself (see also: Playbooks). Truthfully, it’s still something I’m working on, but realizing my own flaws and taking steps to correct them made a difference pretty quickly.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

It’s funny to be asked this question this week because it just came up recently. In a candidate interview a few weeks ago we were talking about personal superpowers, and I said mine was that I get done whatever’s needed to solve a problem, even if it isn’t really in my wheelhouse. Like “The Cleaner” in Pulp Fiction, but I’m a slower driver.

Looking back at my career right from the beginning, I was often assigned the “troubled” projects – the ones others had worked on and hated, that didn’t have the right buy-in or budget, or that were just heading off the rails. In my early career I found this really frustrating, but over time I began to love the challenge of making hard things work. It gave me confidence to step into areas that might not be my specialty, but that would teach me something new.

Being able to bet on myself in this way led to me putting my hand up to take on business-critical pieces in areas like finance, HR and operations, which rounded out my skill set and got me some early executive visibility that paved the way for future opportunities. I’m really grateful for that!

Contact Info:

• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurendemarte/
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/user_details?userid=7CvPz3Nj9lVisDpHroik-A
• Other: BeReal with me! BeRe.al/realloz

Image Credits
Image 1: David Herschorn Image 2: my own