In this episode of Next Gen Builders, host Francois welcomes Ashley Kramer, the Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer of GitLab Inc., the DevSecOps Platform.
Ashley offers insights from her rich background in both product and marketing, sharing practical advice on how to foster successful collaboration between these two critical business functions.
Throughout her conversation with Francois, Ashley emphasizes the vital importance of customer-centric thinking, advising leaders to focus on solving genuine customer problems rather than falling in love with their own solutions. Additionally, she underscores the necessity of constant learning and cross-functional communication, suggesting that leaders must be well-versed in demonstrating their product's value across varied contexts and to different stakeholders.
Furthermore, Ashley touches on the importance of building a must-have product from day one. In her words, “When the CFO comes to whatever executive you sell to and says, ‘Hey, we need you to cut 2 million in budget.’ [Your product] has to be something that everyone's like, ‘You cannot take this from me. Efficiency will be down, we'll be unhappy, we'll leave the company.’”
Ashley also shares practical advice on balancing visionary storytelling with concrete product development milestones. By weaving customer validation into every step, Ashley illustrates how product leaders can avoid pitfalls and drive sustained innovation.
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Guest Bio
Ashley Kramer is the Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer of GitLab Inc., the DevSecOps Platform. GitLab’s single application helps organizations deliver software faster and more efficiently while strengthening their security and compliance. As CMO and CSO, Ashley leverages her leadership from roles in marketing, product and technology to message and position GitLab as the leading DevSecOps platform through the next stage of growth. She is responsible for GitLab’s product marketing, brand awareness, communications, analyst relations, community, competitive positioning, marketing ops and revenue pipeline generation including all digital and sales development efforts. Ashley also leads the strategy for product-led growth and code contribution to the GitLab platform.
Prior to joining GitLab, Ashley was CPO and CMO of Sisense and has held several post-IPO leadership roles including SVP of Product at Alteryx (NYSE) AYX) where she led the messaging, positioning and roadmap for the Alteryx Analytics Platform and Head of Cloud at Tableau where she led the effort to transform Tableau (now a Salesforce company) to a cloud-first company and ran Tableau Online, their fastest growing product. She also has held various marketing, product and engineering leadership roles at Amazon (NASDAQ) AMZN), Oracle (NYSE) ORCL) and NASA. As a former engineer, Ashley understands and can capitalize on the value of GitLab’s unique ability to solve a deep developer pain point - streamlining the development process and bringing innovative ideas to customers in a quicker and more efficient way. She approaches everything with a customer-first mindset and has a passion for solving the challenge of positioning and messaging software platforms to technical audiences.
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Guest Quote
“I love storytelling. My team is great at it. But customers need to be able to tell the same story, believe it, buy into it. So then we can go bring more prospects along.” – Ashley Kramer
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Time Stamps
*(00:00) Episode Start
*(03:44) Ashley's career journey
*(06:04) Marketing vs. Product: How to be a better leader
*(10:23) How to break new ground and innovate against the norm
*(16:21) Ashely's Oh Sh*t Moment
*(18:29) How to become a must-have product
*(21:10) Strategies for standing out
*(23:26) Company vision vs. reality
*(25:40) Ashley's advice to aspiring product leaders
*(31:01) What Ashley would tell her younger self
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Links
- Connect with Ashley Kramer on LinkedIn
- Check out GitLab
- Connect with Francois Ajenstat on LinkedIn
- Check out Amplitude
