I Ran Marketing at Google and Instagram
15+ min read
This story appears in the
January 2020
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I didn’t know it at the time, but I was about to join my very last “performance calibration session.” This was late in 2018, when I was a managing director at Instagram, and these sessions had been a common part of my life — just like they are at many big companies. They’re a time for senior managers to discuss the performance of their individual team members, applying common organizational standards across job levels. HR specialists moderate performance discussions on a biannual, sometimes quarterly, basis. Conceptually, there’s nothing all that weird about calibration. But that’s conceptually.
I have held senior-level marketing roles at YouTube, Spotify, Google, and Instagram, so I’ve sat in on a lot of these. And the reality is this: A group of highly opinionated,