Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional
John White | Nick Korte
Podcast
Episodes
Listen, download, subscribe
A Utility Player’s Advantage: The Work of Marketing in Tech with Erin O’Quinn (1/3)
Being a utility player in the sports world is one thing, but what does a utility player look like in the tech industry? Erin O’Quinn, our guest this week in episode 330, says it takes a willingness to learn, approaching what you learn as something that can help you later, and a willingness to advocate for yourself. Erin is currently a senior manager of customer advocacy at a sizable tech company. After studying communications in college, Erin’s first roles were in marketing communications, where she became well versed in the logistics of events like trade shows and developed a distinctive advantage by saying yes to new tasks / projects (even a little IT support for her employer). Throughout this first part of the story, Erin learned what she wanted most from a company’s culture, what it takes to develop a corporate brand, and how to communicate effectively with executives. As you listen to this episode, think about this – what is something you could say yes to today that could help you grow in the future? Original Recording Date: 05-14-2025 Topics – Communications and the Work of Marketing, Experience with the Cultural Elements of Tech Companies, A Return to the Tech Industry, The Strategic Side of Marketing, Communication with Executives 2:15 – Communications and the Work of Marketing Erin O’Quinn is a senior manager of customer advocacy at a sizable tech company. She has conversations with account teams and end customers to truly understand how customers use specific products, the benefits they have received from those products over time, and how success has impacted careers, teams, and the overall business. Erin tells us it’s a fun job. From where Erin began, it’s been a long, winding road to get to where she is now. Upon starting college, Erin planned to be a psychologist and counsel people in a 1-1 staetting. The school she attended (University of California San Diego) had a psychology program more focused on behavioral psychology and less on how people interact. As a result, Erin decided to pivot to studying communications. This ended up being a natural shift. The communications program focused on mass communications and communications as a social and cultural force. Human information processing concepts brought in some psychology as well. Erin refers to herself as a media junkie who wanted to understand how it influences people Some of Erin’s first roles were in MarCom positions, but not all were with technology companies. MarCom is marketing communications, but with marketing in general, the same terms can mean different things at different companies. “If you ever look at job descriptions and you see a title, you can’t just go by the name of a job. You actually have to look at what the job description is to figure out if what you think it says is what it is. But marketing communications at that point meant more of the mass communications…creating publications….” – Erin O’Quinn, on MarCom positions In college Erin became the editor of a newsletter. She learned how to do layouts and graphic design in addition to doing some writing. Her first job was with the San Jose Real Estate Board, made up of local chapters to help members become realtors. Erin would send out the newsletter, but the company also realized Erin knew how to fix computers. When people had questions and IT was not around, people would ask Erin. She became the IT department and the marketing department. The company was switching from Novell to Microsoft. They wanted Erin to help with this transition, and when she asked for formal training to fill knowledge and experience gaps, it was denied. She was worried a poor outcome could be career limiting and began looking for other jobs. The transition to Microsoft, however, did go smoothly. “But I did switch from there into tech because I realized I enjoyed the idea of being a little more hands on with technology, but I like the marketing side. So, I went to a tech company….” – Erin O’Quinn The company Erin worked for developed a back end for search engines like HotBot and Yahoo. Erin accepted a job as an executive assistant at this company but told her boss she would only take it with the understanding that she did not want to be an executive assistant in a year. “I told my boss at the time, ‘I will take this job if you promise me that I won’t be your assistant in a year. ‘I knew that I wasn’t somebody who wanted to be an administrative assistant. I wanted in at the company because it sounded fun and the people were interesting. And I loved not being the smartest person in the room. I was guaranteed to do that at this company. I knew I would be learning all the time.” – Erin O’Quinn Around 6 weeks into the job, Erin was asked to help support the company at a trade show. She expressed a willingness to learn and said yes to her first trade show. The next time she was asked to support the company at a trade show, Erin had to run the entire event in New York City to fill in for a colleague. She learned about unions, working with vendors, and how to set up the booth at the trade show. Since it was a small team, Erin needed to know how to demo the company’s products, who to ask if there were in-depth questions she could not answer, and how to talk to anyone who came by the booth whether it was a CIO or any other member of a technical team. Erin loved the events side. It allowed her to work with many different people at the company. She liked the challenge of either figuring things out or failing. Were there other reasons Erin didn’t want to be an executive assistant long-term? Being an executive assistant (or EA) was more about taking care of an individual and less about doing the work of marketing. Erin was more interested in the marketing work than being a support character. Erin had worked in her own department before and was changing jobs to become someone’s assistant. After developing skills and experience in her previous marketing role, she wanted to keep growing. Many assistants stay in those roles for a long time, and Erin didn’t want to stay in it long because the shift to something else is more difficult if you are an assistant for a long time. Erin wanted to set the agenda and intention with her boss up front, and it made things easier to shift out of the assistant role later. “I wasn’t asking for crazy money. I wasn’t asking for a lot of things, but if I was willing to fight for myself that way up front, he knew that I was going to be somebody interesting to work with. And I think that actually helped me get the job…. I love being a generalist whenever possible. It’s more fun.” – Erin O’Quinn Erin was focused on ambition and optionality. Had Erin been interested in writing up to the point of doing the newsletter to make her a well-rounded communicator going into marketing? When in college, Erin assumed communications entailed either being in front of a camera or writing, thinking she needed to build skills in both areas. Erin tells the story of working with her roommate to resurrect a specific newsletter for the university. Erin used her experience in layouts, and the roommate did the editorial part. Even after Erin and her roommate left the university, the newsletter continued to build momentum thanks to their initial commitment to get it going again. Erin also did an internship at a phone book company. The phone books were published in English, Tagalog, Chinese, and Vietnamese to serve a large Asian community in San Diego. Erin would take translated ads and do layouts as well as reach out to local politicians to get endorsement letters. “I started advocacy in college, whether I knew it or not. I just followed the transcript and did it. It kind of got me set up, I guess, to do it later in life.” – Erin O’Quinn 12:28 – Experience with the Cultural Elements of Tech Companies What did the moves look like once Erin moved on from the executive assistant role? Erin grew up in the San Francisco Bay area and has been surrounded by tech since birth. Some of her family members worked for HP for their entire career. Erin’s mother works in the biotech / pharmaceutical industry, and her dad worked as a punch card programmer before he went on to a career in sales. Tech was booming at this time. There were lots of job opportunities, and it seemed like a good industry to enter. The web was still pretty new. Erin had learned HTML in college and filled in once when a webmaster (or website administrator) left. Erin worked on promotional items and ran events. Because she was good at it, Erin was asked to run all the trade shows for the company, and it became her primary job. This involved things like handling logistics, working with product management and product marketing teams, and sometimes working with development teams. Erin had to ensure the technical specifications for what would be demonstrated in the booth were properly captured and that the booth was set up properly. Understanding servers and networking was very helpful because Erin helped set up the booth and especially in cases where they had technical issues at the booth. Erin needed to know other things like how to have people behave, how they should dress, the colors to use, and how to handle marketing for the events. Erin says she eventually became the promo queen at this company. “I was always having fun and always getting to learn. I never felt like I was being stuck in a role. If I wanted to know something different, I asked the question. That first tech company I worked at was very happy to get me involved. They had a very open culture.” – Erin O’Quinn Erin describes some of the cultural elements at this first tech company where she worked (during the .com era) – super soaker fights, barbecue competitions, etc. “…Different levels of creativity. I loved seeing that it wasn’t just the people who we
Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional RSS Feed
