How do you cut through the AI noise, build trust in uncertain markets, and lead your marketing organization through constant reinvention? Diego Lomanto, CMO at WRITER, shares his blueprint for enterprise storytelling, customer-centered go-to-market, and scaling AI with impact.
How do you cut through the AI noise, build trust in uncertain markets, and lead your marketing organization through constant reinvention? Diego Lomanto, CMO at WRITER, shares his blueprint for enterprise storytelling, customer-centered go-to-market, and scaling AI with impact.
Host Francois Ajenstat opens up the conversation by asking how Diego’s unique journey has led him to where he is today. Making the jump from automation to AI, Diego shares how his time at UiPath shaped his approach to building with speed and rigor.
You’ll hear how WRITER’s marketing team stays agile in a fast-evolving category, why human-led engagement still wins in an AI-first world, and how to empower customers to evangelize change from within.
Diego also shares lessons on hiring for adaptability, partnering deeply with your product teams, and making storytelling a competitive advantage. Whether you’re leading go-to-market for a scaling SaaS company or navigating the enterprise AI wave, this episode delivers practical strategies for marketing leadership in motion.
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Guest Bio
Diego Lomanto is a B2B product and marketing expert with 20 years of experience in global enterprise software. He is currently the CMO at WRITER, where he has been since 2024.
He is adept at building and leading product and marketing organizations and is a graduate of the NYU Stern School of Business with an MBA and a specialization in strategy and marketing. His specialties include B2B and SaaS, strategy and competitive analysis, product innovation and development, go-to-market strategy, brand vision and positioning, and digital marketing.
He is skilled in demand generation and funnel optimization, product marketing, and sales enablement. He also acts as Startup Advisor/Investor.
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Guest Quote
“What I love about what AI has done is, it helps people and companies get started and it helps them scale, and that middle part is where the magic happens. You're giving the humans much more time, bandwidth, and opportunity to focus on the magical part of marketing. The creativity, the story you want to tell, the people-oriented parts of the job. And you're able to do that because AI is giving you the tools to generate a lot of ideas. When you're ready to take something to market, scaling it is so much easier and faster than before.” – Diego Lomanto
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Time Stamps
00:00 Episode Start
01:50 How WRITER is transforming the world
03:50 Diego's journey from automation to AI
06:30 Marketing AI with human success stories
11:45 A commitment to reinvention
14:35 Culture is critical at fast-pace organizations
19:00 Maintaining core principles amidst product evolution
20:40 How WRITER delivers above and beyond
23:30 Merging best in class technology with a forward looking culture
25:30 Real opportunities for AI in marketing
31:30 Product marketing alignment
35:00 Diego's journey to the CMO seat
38:45 Diego's "Oh Sh*t" Moment
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Links
0:00:00.2 Francois Ajenstat: We're all deeply invested in our customer deals. We're watching them, we're shepherding them, we're coming to the kickoff meetings, the QBRs. We're doing things like having kickoff meetings with their executives, helping them understand what role they play and how AI is different and how you as an executive, you didn't just sponsor buying this technology, you gotta be out there on the front line. So we're gonna help teach you how to talk to the rest of your organization, how to tweet about it, how to write about it on LinkedIn. We do those things to really make sure that the customer gets visible what they're doing inside their company and that they're getting to success as fast as possible.
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0:00:41.7 Francois Ajenstat: This is Next Gen Builders, the show for the growth and product leaders of tomorrow. These days, everyone's selling AI. Your competitor, your cousin, maybe even your coffee machine? So how do you stand out when the whole market sounds like a pitch deck written by ChatGPT? Well, today, we're going behind the scenes at Writer to see how they approach marketing with a focus on what matters. Getting closer to their customers, understanding their needs, and building trust in a world that's changing by the hour. We'll talk about why the best marketing doesn't necessarily start with AI, and how to reinvent your playbook when the rules keep shifting. Joining us today is Diego Lomanto, Chief Marketing Officer at Writer. Welcome to the podcast, Diego.
0:01:36.5 Diego Lomanto: Thank you, Francois. It's good to be here. I appreciate you having me on and looking forward to our conversation.
0:01:41.6 Francois Ajenstat: Well, I'm really excited for you to be on, and maybe let's just go right in. Maybe for the audience, can you explain what is Writer? What do you guys do, and how is it transforming the world?
0:01:54.3 Diego Lomanto: Yeah, it is an agentic AI platform. What we do is we help companies build, activate, and supervise AI agents at scale in their enterprise. We have everything you need to bring an AI agent to life inside your business, and we're hyper-focused on the biggest companies in the world, most complex use cases. Most of our customers are in the Fortune 500, Global 2000. We know how complex it is to bring AI into a large business, what production workflows look like, how many people are involved in a different type of workflow, and how many different systems, how hard it is to implement and integrate. So we've built an agentic AI platform that's designed to work for those enterprises, and it's going really well so far.
0:02:42.9 Francois Ajenstat: That's awesome. And it can work on just about any kind of use case in the enterprise, right?
0:02:47.3 Diego Lomanto: Yeah, it's very adaptive, wide-ranging. We go across front office, back office, middle office. I think a lot of our successes in the early days was more in the front office in marketing. That's kind of where we got our start. But we've really expanded now within our customers to not just marketing, but sales, customer support, HR, legal, and even backgrounding like logistics and the supply chain, really across the workflows. We don't think so much about departments as we do mission criticality, like what workflows are really important to driving and running your business. We want to help you bring AI into those workflows and help you build agents to help you manage those.
0:03:35.1 Francois Ajenstat: That's cool. And you say the word workflow, I think about automation. And you worked at UiPath at the height of the automation boom. Now you're working at Writer doing the height of the AI boom. How do you compare those two moments for you? What's similar? What's different?
0:03:53.3 Francois Ajenstat: Yeah, it's funny. I actually try to not say workflow so often. It's a good word to describe a lot of process inside a business, right? But yeah, I was at UiPath from 2018. I started in 2018. I was there for about four and a half, five years through the real growth of RPA and automation. It was quite an incredible and interesting time as workflows, sorry for using it again, became as automated as possible. But that market grew so fast. We expanded so quickly. We went from 5 million in ARR to over a billion in like five years, right? So it was a real, real fast growth. And what we found was there was a lot of pent up demand for like, if this thing happens in my business all the time, the same way, how can I just make that streamlined? How do I automate that process? Because it's not really benefiting from humans' ability to think abstractly or creatively or make decisions. There's no variance in how that workflow and that process was accomplished. So RPA and automation came along and it was like, yeah, I do A, B, C always and just automate that.
0:05:10.8 Diego Lomanto: And that's why that market grew really fast. I think the big difference now with AI is that you're able to address the type of work that is not so linear and predictable and low variance in how it gets accomplished. And so I see the aperture for that much wider than what we saw for automation. It's more complicated. AI that reasons and makes decisions, it's more squishy, right? And it requires a lot more to get into production, but it has a much wider impact, I think. And that's what we're seeing. That's why I'm so excited to have gone from automation to AI with this move.
0:05:56.8 Francois Ajenstat: Yeah, I mean, I totally agree with you. The potential is infinite, what's possible there. But how do you think through, like, you use the word squishy, which is kind of an interesting one, because you see the potential, but being able to describe exactly what it does can be hard. And you think about the potential of AI as well, it's infinite. But how do you think about marketing AI, when it's really, in many cases, a dream? It's many cases, this vision, and how do you connect it to the reality of what's on the ground today?
0:06:30.3 Diego Lomanto: Yeah, I think, ultimately, long term, you're going to see a wholesale change of how work is done thanks to AI, right? I'm not saying anything that others haven't said already, but probably better ways and much more vocally. But this technology has the ability to fundamentally change how work gets accomplished. And I think we're a bit away from that. We're still learning how to use it for the work we do today, right? The work that we know already. There's a ton, like, even if we didn't have the ability to do new types of work or rethink work from first principles from the ground up with AI, just making what we do today faster, better, better for customers, better for the people doing the work, that itself is a huge marketing opportunity. But when you layer in on top, as we learn and get to use it and see what it can do and become comfortable with it and trust it more and think about designing work after we have more experience working with AI, like that becomes like a limitless opportunity for what AI can do to work. But I think right now, there's a lot of like, this is what we do.
0:07:44.5 Diego Lomanto: How can we do that better? And there's a huge opportunity around that. And I think the way you market that and the way you you really talk to the world about it is through real stories. You know, talk about real ROI. Where's the real change happening? Because that's what people are craving right now. It's been, what, two and a half years, coming up on three years since the ChatGPT moment. And what we saw in 2023 was a lot of experimentation and a lot like, boards saying, here's millions of dollars. We need AI strategy. Go do stuff. So buying a lot of things and testing them out and trying things. I think 2024, you saw, okay, like, now let's start, like, what did we learn? Let's start getting to some real actual tangible benefits. And I think this year you're actually starting to see some real successes. And so what we do, what I like to do is focus on the human side of it. What kind of value are we getting? What are the successes? And show a real deep customer story as opposed to just talking about the technology and amplifying those stories.
0:08:50.9 Diego Lomanto: So that's what people are craving, the successes. What are people doing? How did they get success? How can I replicate that? That's what people are looking for.
0:08:58.6 Francois Ajenstat: Is that your approach to breaking through the noise? I mean, we're at the peak hype of the hype of the curve of the hype cycle. And like, is that, that strategy to really land it?
0:09:10.9 Diego Lomanto: Yeah, it is. Focusing on the stories, focusing on the people. Ultimately, the people who are making these decisions are people. They are human beings and they're facing uncertainty. They're trying to figure out what to do. So from a marketing perspective, our company and this is before I even joined our CEO, May Habib, is really put a big emphasis on getting in the room, talking to people, helping them understand how this stuff works, hearing what their challenges are, spending time. So it's amazing for a company we have we have our own models. We've built a whole this whole platform. It's very technically oriented. We have a very human centered marketing strategy. And I think that touch that we call it surround bound. We surround our ICP with writer, both at the top of the funnel, but then deep into conversations. We do, we host a lot of dinners, a lot of events. We spend time with people facilitating conversations and getting deep into the power of what it can do. And that's worked for us.
0:10:17.8 Francois Ajenstat: I love that. I mean, we think a lot about agents in terms of removing humans, in many cases, or augmenting the human. But you guys have a very human-led engagement model.
0:10:28.9 Diego Lomanto: Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, I may be a techno-optimist. I mean, I know I'm not maybe, I am. And you may say I have rose-colored glasses, but I've studied, I know everyone says this time is different. It's always, this time is always different. I mean, if you study the technological history, society reshapes around the technology, and we find ways in which to work that are supported by the technology that we can't even think of today, right? Who would have thought of a gasoline station in 1640? You know what I mean? Like, who would have thought of SEO in 1955, right? It's just, the society changes. And so our focus is, well, what is that society going to look like? What is the business going to look like? What is jobs going to look like as this technology becomes more mature and starts to become adopted? There's a permanence to it or pervasive inside society. So focusing on the people is absolutely we feel like actually something we do better than a lot of others out there.
0:11:34.9 Francois Ajenstat: That's great. When you look at this space, right, the pace of innovation is unlike anything I've ever seen. It's moving really fast. As a marketer, how does that change how you approach marketing, whether it's the tactics that you use, the message that you deliver, or even like the innovation that you're able to deliver to the market? It's just, it seems crazy right now. It's amazing.
0:12:03.2 Diego Lomanto: Yeah, this market's evolving faster and more often than any market I've ever been in. And like I said, UiPath, we went from five to a billion in just a couple of years. And this feels five times faster. Like it's so much, like the whole world is tuned into this. So much investment is happening here. So many people are engaged in what's happening with AI that it's just moving so fast. And so I think quite honestly, there's a discipline that you have to have to act with speed, urgency, and think about reinvention consistently. Like there's no, you can't hold your priors too long. You have to continually be looking at like, what's really happening in the market? And I think at Rider, we're proud to say like we reinvented ourselves every six months. Like since I've been here, we've reinvented ourselves twice. The company itself we started as a Grammarly competitor. Our co-founders had an AI translation company that was NLP oriented in the mid 2010s. And when they saw the transformer white paper and they saw how so May and Wasim are our co-founders, when they saw how impactful that took, like they knew it right away. They read it, they're experts at AI.
0:13:18.6 Diego Lomanto: They saw, okay, this stuff is actually, this potential is massive. This will change everything. They had a lot of experience with enterprise. This is why Writer is so enterprise focused and why we've been enterprise focused from day one is are their backgrounds, but they reinvented that company and pivoted to Writer, even though it was a good successful company. And we've continually done that for the time I've been here. And I look my time before then, the company is constantly reinvented relentlessly. And that just it requires a stamina and like it really does and a fortitude. It actually, you have to hire the right people. You have to hire people that are comfortable with that. You have to, you have to be comfortable with it. You have to constantly be asking yourself is this still the right way to do this thing? And that could be, that can get tiring. But when you know that you're doing it because when you set a plan to do it, you can do it. So you have to like go into it with open eyes on reinvention is the norm, not the extreme.
0:14:24.0 Francois Ajenstat: Can you make that concrete? Like, how does that look like in practice? You know, if you're always reinventing everything every six months, what does that mean for the team, for the work that you do?
0:14:35.5 Diego Lomanto: Yeah, it means a lot of communication, a lot of alignment conversations. And I think fortunately, it's not like the leadership team goes in a room and comes out spends a weekend, comes out and says, guys, everything's changed. We're doing this thing. It's not like that. We have a really transparent culture here. We have a very customer focused culture here. And so the teams are continually seeing what's happening. Like we're sharing constantly. We're seeing customer results. We're seeing what's working, what's not working. So the whole company is in the conversation and moving along with us. And so it requires a lot of coordination, but it is not top down amplification of that coordination. It is more like orchestrating is what I would say, as opposed to directing the change, orchestrating the change. And honestly, I think you have to have people who are good at that. Find people who enjoy love living in that. I think we have a culture here. We've hired people who've been through these crazy growth spurts. And for some crazy reason, come back to it. Everyone on the leadership team has had a success and an exit and we came back and we're doing the build again. But we're all that personality where like this is, I would, I'd be bored if I didn't wake up every day thinking about being able to think about the changing world and how do we need to adapt. That's kind of like we crave that. So I think it's a culture thing. That's a big part of why we're able to do it.
0:16:16.5 Francois Ajenstat: That's really cool. Are there competencies that you look for when you're hiring somebody who can manage this pace and manage a transformation?
0:16:25.5 Diego Lomanto: I always look at how they approach the interview process. We do a presentation and I've had candidates that I was sure were going to be great. And when they come into-and we're not asking people to do work, right? I don't want people doing work before they get here, but I want to see how they think. And you could really tell how they approach the presentation. Are they proactive? Are they calling me, asking me questions? Are they doing are they looking? You know, once again, it's not to do work, it's to see how they think. And you can kind of tell, like, all right, this person is a driver, not a passenger, just by the way they approach the interview process. My shorthand is, like, does this person always look how to move the ball forward? Because that's the persona that does really well. It's like, what can I be doing right now to move things forward as opposed to just waiting for the instruction? So I like the Frank Sluppen book, Amp It Up, if you haven't read that, right?
0:17:29.5 Francois Ajenstat: Great reference.
0:17:30.8 Diego Lomanto: Great. Like, that's, like, read that, look for people who fit that profile. That's what you need to win in an environment like this.
0:17:39.2 Francois Ajenstat: I love that you brought out that book because one of my favorite questions to ask the team is, what's the most important thing that you're doing right now?
0:17:46.7 Diego Lomanto: Yes.
0:17:47.1 Francois Ajenstat: The one thing. We always try to spread ourselves super thin, do everything, but in reality, like, if you're not focused, if you're not driving, you're not going to go anywhere.
0:17:57.5 Diego Lomanto: And that's particularly hard for a marketing team because you don't have one thing that everyone's doing, right? Like, we're not all doing the same thing. We're like 12 little teams doing 12 different things in service of the bigger strategy. And so orchestrating and prioritizing to make sure that the teams are not doing different things and are focused around the bigger strategy is important. So prioritizing and getting the team aligned on the most important thing or two things or three things, but no more than that are really key. I agree with you.
0:18:36.6 Francois Ajenstat: Now, we've talked about how speed, like this industry is moving at a speed we haven't seen before. The companies constantly changing and evolving. Now, how do you plan, build, create your bets knowing that you don't know what's ahead of you? You can't even plan for what's ahead of you because everything's changing every moment. How do you approach that? It seems really crazy hard.
0:19:03.9 Diego Lomanto: No, I mean, like, I think we know our long-term vision here is that we want to transform enterprise work with AI to center, right? We have good foundational direction that we're going in. It's how is the market changing, adapting, evolving is how do we execute? But we are focused on the enterprise. We know we're going after the most complex use cases and workflows inside a business. We know that. We know that we're selling to CIOs, lines of businesses, and the builders themselves. We have these general business principles well laid out, like in our goal and where we're going. It's how do you execute that change along? What's happening inside the market? That changes a lot, but we don't waver from our long-term mission.
0:19:51.6 Francois Ajenstat: Are there signals that you look for to say that you're heading in the right direction or that you need to change course?
0:19:58.6 Diego Lomanto: Yeah, adoption the standard sort of like product signals, but then also market signals as well. Like, how are we getting pick up? Are people amplifying what we're saying? Are we getting invited to stuff? How are we doing with the analyst reports? There's a lot of still like basic blocking and tackling that you do with the traditional marketing functions.
0:20:25.5 Francois Ajenstat: Right, so some of the traditional things still matter, but you guys approach things very differently. I know when we were talking earlier, you told me about the human-led process, but also like the sales process that you guys do is different, I think, than most other technology companies. What does that look like in practice?
0:20:46.3 Diego Lomanto: Yeah, so we invest a lot in customer success and adoption. And like, I mean, maybe that doesn't sound like something that is different. It's hard because like it is one of our differentiators, but everyone says they love their customers, right? Everyone says that we ensure our customer success. Like, so you can't really advertise that, but you feel it. You definitely feel it. And myself, May, CRO, like we're all deeply invested in our customer deals. Like we're watching them, we're shepherding them, we're coming to the kickoff meetings, the QBRs. We have a lot of executive presence in our customer, like not just closing the deal, I'm talking post-sales and getting them launched. We have this idea of sort of the crawl, walk, run where we want to make sure that they're successful. So we really nurture that early adoption while we get them to their own building over time. We're doing things like having kickoff meetings with their executives, helping them understand how they, like what role they play and how AI is different and how you as an executive, not just, you didn't just sponsor buying this technology, you got to be out there on the front line. So we're going to help you and we're going to teach you how to talk to the rest of your organization, how to tweet about it, how to write about it on LinkedIn. Like we do those things to really make sure that the customer is visible, what they're doing inside their company and that they're getting to success as fast as possible.
0:22:16.1 Francois Ajenstat: Oh, that's cool. So you're teaching them how to talk AI, how to evangelize AI.
0:22:23.2 Diego Lomanto: Exactly.
0:22:23.7 Francois Ajenstat: That's really cool.
0:22:24.5 Diego Lomanto: Exactly. Like that's, companies need to see their leaders talking about it. Otherwise they're not going to change themselves. Like don't get me wrong, 10% of your workforce is like tinkering and thinking and they trying to constantly grow. But the majority is they just want to do their jobs and they're they're looking to get the day done and they're going to do what they're signaled to do. They're going to focus where they get their signals. And so we work with our customers to help them set the signal for their company, which is another reason why companies really like working with us is because we're a partner in that journey for them. I mean, I don't know, like when you go, we have countless pictures of us at the whiteboard with the senior leadership of CPG, big CPG company or retailer, like mapping out the workflows with them and then getting them engaged in the process. It's our DNA and the way we've always been. So it really helps us with drive that option.
0:23:28.5 Francois Ajenstat:That's amazing. How much does culture play a role in a successful deployment with a customer? We know that a great product is required, but is culture like the necessary ingredient to drive success here?
0:23:42.4 Diego Lomanto: Yeah, you need both. Both are requirements to a successful AI adoption. So on one hand, you need the technology has to be near perfect, can't hallucinate. You can't get into production at a Vanguard or Prudential like you can't get into production workflows with it being like 95%, right? It has to be like four nines and it has to be tight, right? So it has, like the technology is absolutely vital, but unless there's a culture of progress and reinvention, as we were just talking about one workflow, two workflows, five workflows, 10 workflows, like it just will stop there. It has to be where we are helping the organization think about not just this particular agent, but what are the next 10 agents? What are the next 100 agents? And so that culture, you need both. Otherwise you're a point solution and you're a one-off. So it's really important for that, for both sides of the equation, the technology and the cultural permanence is really huge.
0:24:57.8 Francois Ajenstat: Yeah, I mean, that makes total sense because you do need the whole organization to embrace this change and make it become the norm of how we work.
0:25:06.1 Diego Lomanto: Yeah, that's right.
0:25:08.1 Francois Ajenstat: Now, let's switch gears and talk about you and your team and the impact that AI has had on the marketing function. It seems that marketing is one of the early adopters of AI. What does that look like on how you do your job today compared to maybe 5-10 years ago?
0:25:27.6 Diego Lomanto: Yeah, I think what I love about what AI has done, both for my team and the high-performing teams that I've gotten to work with as customers, is it helps people and companies get started and it helps them scale. And that middle part where the magic happens, you're giving the humans much more time, bandwidth, and opportunity to focus on the magical part of marketing. The creativity, the story that you want to tell, the people-oriented parts of the job. And you're able to do that because AI is giving you the tools to generate a lot of ideas and then when you find what needs to be done and you are ready to take something to market, scaling it is so much easier and faster than before. I could create when we have a great piece of content, when we have a great campaign or we have a great asset, we're able to take that so much wider and to more markets. And that's just on my team of marketers at a Series C company. When you look at some of the biggest retails in the world that we work with they'll take a product to market and what would have taken them millions and millions of dollars and weeks of time to take one product and take it to 200 countries and thousands of retailers.
0:26:56.4 Diego Lomanto: You know, the classic example is the product detail page. You know, that's the manufacturer's way of doing business. I write the primary product detail page and then I need thousands of iterations for all the different retailers I work with, right? So being able to scale that super fast, nearly instantaneously, is giving them much more time to focus on the product, the first one, right? The main one. The one that sets the context for all of the iterations to come. I love that we're getting more time on that because that's where the differentiation comes and that's where the heart of the product and the heart of the function really lies. So I love that part of it. It's giving us much more ability to take the scaling and make the scaling faster and easier.
0:27:44.5 Francois Ajenstat: Yeah, that makes total sense. Have you seen different parts of marketing having either higher impact or higher value than maybe in other places?
0:27:54.2 Diego Lomanto: Well, I mean, I think it's clear in content creation. That's the initial part. I can create so much more content so much faster. So that's like the easiest and the fastest place to start. I love the edge cases. When you give people inside the company the ability to build their own agents is when you really start to see the interesting use cases come out and the magic happens. I have an awesome use case with my head of demand gen, actually. So VP level person, responsible for pipeline, demand generation, saw a way to do pipeline generation better and built his own agent to do it specifically. Yeah, so specifically, I'll give him a shout out, Andrew Racine. He's awesome. What we were talking to our sales team on improving our outbound pipeline generation, right? Eternal struggle between sales and marketing. How do I enable sales to do their own outbound? You know, it's an important part of the equation. We have a great relationship with our sales organization. And so we sat down and they said, well, look, you guys create great content and great assets, but there's so much of it and we don't know how to actually take what you've done and outbound with it.
0:29:20.2 Diego Lomanto: So we do these pipeline generation kits we're really good at that. But Andrew said, you know what, I'm going to create an agent that allows the rep to upload an asset that we created, give a little bit of description of what he's trying to do, he or she is trying to do, and we'll create a custom pipeline generation kit around that particular asset and topic for them. And so they're able to do their own output. And even if they know they're going to talk to a specific customer or a specific person, they can customize how they're going to do outbound conversations based on that asset. It's all customized. There's an agent that does it for you so that we have all of our reps now are unable to do that. And we don't have to do a, we do three kits a month, right? Like there's just so much bandwidth that we can direct them. But all those long tail opportunities, we're equipping and enabling them to have those conversations through the agent that we created. And that was Andrew not a technical person, technical enough, not a technical person, knew, like knows the problem to solve better than anyone in the company and was able to build his own agent and give that off to sales to do it. So I forgot the question, but that's an example of how we're using AI to really like just do marketing differently here.
0:30:43.4 Francois Ajenstat: No, I love it. And it also shows like the hyper personalization that you can get through because now you have an end up one, right? Any opportunity, any account, you can make it feel so tailored to them without missing, requiring an army of people.
0:30:59.2 Diego Lomanto: That's right. Rice email all the stuff that you want to start that connection. It even gives them a script that they when they get on the phone, they they want to have that in front of them all around the asset that they want to talk about and the topic and the theme of the conversation and the person itself.
0:31:13.6 Francois Ajenstat: That's great. Now that's a good example of marketing, working with sales and like driving productivity and ultimately driving the outcomes we all want, which is more pipeline, more successes. What about working with product? How does marketing and product work together? You know, what are some things that you've seen work really well or really poorly?
0:31:35.3 Diego Lomanto: Yeah. So I have a product marketing background. I grew up in product marketing. So this is near and dear to my heart. I love product. Yep, exactly. There you go. I love product. I love, I love, I love product managers. I love engineer. I love that whole side of the house, right? We work with the product and engineering teams to help them take the raw innovation that they're building very customer centric. We're building with customer needs in mind, but there's like some really raw innovation there. We are now we're an LLM provider, right? And so we, and I can get into the whole reason why I think that's important, but we have our own core foundational technology and then we package it up and we have the product and the features and stuff that people use every day. I am a huge proponent of product and marketing need to work together to figure out how to tell the story of why this product is going to change or enhance the way companies are working and take the steady stream of innovation and turn it into a meaningful series of moments for the market.
0:32:57.0 Diego Lomanto: So we work with them to understand what's coming, what the roadmap look like, how is it organized and what are the themes there that you're developing to like, what are the three themes that support the broader vision that we're developing this technology to? Because if you don't do that, then you're just releasing feature after feature after feature. And so we've built a very close relationship with the product organization to sit down, understand the roadmap, and then create themes around the different innovations and then work towards a moment where we bring it all together in a big launch, so to speak. It's not always a launch, but I'm a big believer in like launches. I think launches are just, unless they bring the company together, like they're good in so many ways, they get the attention, they force the company to work much more closely, and nothing makes shit happen. Sorry for my language. Nothing makes stuff happen.
0:33:55.3 Francois Ajenstat: We'll bring up some oh shit moments in a moment.
0:33:57.3 Diego Lomanto: There you go. Nothing makes shit happen more than a date on the calendar that everyone is working. Like, it's just amazing. I remember getting here and I'm like, all right, we are going to do a launch early April. Let's let's see what's coming, sitting with product. You have all this amazing stuff coming. Let's bundle that up and let's let's tell a story around it. And we have a make now. So now we do that. We have a release cadence. We have major moments. So I work, my teams work very, very closely with product to help tell the story of what they're building much more crisply, I think.
0:34:28.2 Francois Ajenstat: That's great. And I totally agree. Launches are these beautiful galvanizing moments for the company where everybody knows exactly what they need to do and it accelerates pace, right? Because you have this hard milestone.
0:34:43.1 Diego Lomanto: Yeah, it's great.
0:34:44.3 Francois Ajenstat: Now, let me, let's ask a question about you. You know, you're, you said you came up through the marketing ranks from the product marketing lens. And now you're a CMO and you've been a multi-time CMO. Tell me about that journey. How did that progress? And is it typical to go from product marketing to CMO?
0:35:05.3 Diego Lomanto: I think it's more and more common these days. You have different eras in tech. I mean, I'm going to speak specifically for the tech marketer. And when, if I look at like the early days, demand gen tends to have a whole... And some companies, it is a demand gen oriented world. And that's fine and right for a lot of companies. But what I've found recently is that because the market is so competitive and product differentiation is getting harder and harder to achieve, product marketing orientation in the leadership role has become more important because storytelling and positioning is a bigger facet of how the marketing organization helps the company win. And so I have found through my last roles that I was brought in because of that bent. And that's the pain that the company had was we have a great product, we have a machine and an engine. And Andrew, the person I just referred to, he built the machine before I got here. Our demand gen organization is as good as I've seen, right? But what we need is to figure out how do we tell the story in a different way, who we are, how we do what we do, why we're different.
0:36:35.6 Diego Lomanto: So I've seen the product marketing CMO rise because of that, for sure.
0:36:43.3 Francois Ajenstat: I love that. And what makes a good story? If that's that key thing, right, as a storyteller in chief, what is a great story?
0:36:53.0 Diego Lomanto: Yeah, so I think a great story, the overriding principle is simplicity. I always go back to trying to think about the human brain. Okay, we can pontificate here, human brain evolution. Our brains have not evolved from the primal days, right? So we're still trying to simplify everything as much as possible and burn as little calories as we can inside our brain, right? The base level human position is if it's too complicated, I'm going to move on. So what I am always seeking is how do we simplify what we say? Early on, you asked what Rider does, and I said, we help companies build, activate, and supervise AI agents at scale, right? Build, activate, supervise, that folds up so much more stuff than that we do, but it's like three words, simple, build, activate, supervise. It's for my builders, it's for the adoption across the business, the end users working with it, and then it's for IT being able to really understand and look at what's happening. I can go deeper in each one of those pillars, right? But what we crave is just that one-liner, simple way of understanding what you do. So from a storytelling perspective, it starts with the simple, like what is the one line that you can say about what your company does? And that's where we spend weeks or months trying to figure out what that is, but that's the most important part of storytelling.
0:38:24.7 Francois Ajenstat: And there's some repeatability, some consistency and scale, quite frankly, which is great.
0:38:29.6 Diego Lomanto: Yep, that's right.
0:38:32.4 Francois Ajenstat: So looking back on your career, you've had a lot of successes, a lot of learning through that journey. Can you share one of your favorite oh shit moments?
0:38:44.1 Diego Lomanto: I think the biggest one was COVID when lockdowns started. And I know this was like an oh shit moment for the whole world. And then in tech, everything, like everyone was like work stopped for a week, two weeks, like just what are we doing? What's happening? And then I remember very distinctly, that quarter was not great, right? Because people stopped buying, they didn't know what to do. And we weren't alone. I was at UiPath at the time. And what I think came out of that was a recognition that this is actually a transformative moment for the world that is actually a tailwind for us to sort of like fuel for our growth that I don't know if you remember that meme of like, who was responsible for our digital transformation strategy. And it was like CIO, CTO, COVID, right? And it was like, COVID really kicked digital transformation to super high gear. And we quickly regrouped. And we're able to say, okay, like, if we're removed to digital transformation, digital transformation is now in aperture. What does that mean for us? And so we took a step back from like, this could be catastrophic for our business to this is actually something that will, and I don't want to come across too much like opportunistic on COVID because it's like a horrible tough time. But from a business perspective, it was like a real opportunity for our business. And we were able to figure out how to turn that into momentum for us.
0:40:30.6 Francois Ajenstat: Yeah, I mean, for sure, that was a hard moment, but also created a forced moment for people to change, to see the world differently. And there's been great things that's come out of it. There's been other things that's come out of it. But I think change and opportunity is to me the biggest learning.
0:40:49.6 Diego Lomanto: Right. And I think the other thing that I took away from it, and I a lesson I think that I try to share with my teams is there's always an adaptation to what becomes present or challenges or roadblocks or the evolution of things. Like now with AI, it's changed a lot. And we just talked about that earlier. Society will progress, jobs will progress, people will progress, like take a long term view, not in the moment, try to like lift up 50,000 feet and say, what does this look like for like in the past? Like, let's find comparable moments. Let's see how society adopted, like get above the fray and just think. And I think that's what like the smartest and best people do. And so I'm trying to always think of let's divorce ourselves from the emotion of what's happening and think about historically, how does this usually play out? Or what can we learn from history? And this might be different, but there will probably get clues from history. And so I think that was another thing that like the oh shit! COVID moment was like, all right, well, okay, there was the pandemic in 1918.
0:42:04.6 Diego Lomanto: We had how does society like, wait a minute, we we're 100 years later and like everything so I don't want to minimize the short term, but like society gets through things and it just evolves and adapts and be ready for that. Like that becomes opportunity for you, that evolution, adaptation, if you could put yourself in a good place for that. Like for all these financial crisis in 2008, right. You know, great companies were born out of that. And if if you're, if the dessert the death of, right. It's painful, but, but like, look at some of the great companies and the that came out of that, like it was a whole new era, what web 2.0 came out of that and a whole new era of the startup world grew out of that so much, so much grew from that. And then like the death of zero interest rates and the whole 2021 meltdown just got to like, it's painful in the moment, but divorce yourselves from it and look at how society typically adapts and adjusts. And that's where you can look for opportunities to lead as well.
0:43:08.2 Francois Ajenstat: I mean, that's great advice. And we're now leading into an amazing opportunity with AI agents, right. Enabling every company to succeed and do more. And I think that's a really unique time and you're in a very unique company driving a lot of change. So Diego, thank you so much for joining the podcast. It was great to learn from you. Thank you all for listening to Next Gen Builders and look out for our next episode wherever you get your podcasts. And please don't forget to subscribe.
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