North Star Leaders Podcast

Lindsay Pedersen

The world needs what only your business can bring, and as a leader it's your job to deliver. If you're wondering where purpose-driven leaders direct their time, team, budget, and energy, you'll find out here on the North Star Leaders podcast. I'm Lindsay Pedersen, brand strategist, author of Forging an Ironclad Brand, and host of this show.

Remember, purpose isn't what you hang on the wall, it's what you do when the choice is hard. Today I am so happy to be joined by Michael Atalla. Michael is CMO of UiPath, the AI automation platform.

Michael, welcome to the show.

Michael Atalla

Thank you so much, Lindsay. It's great to be with you today.

Lindsay Pedersen

Great to be with you too. To start us off, Michael, what is the most energizing part of your job that others would never guess from the outside?

Michael Atalla

So, I am actually a huge fan of being up on stage and in front of customers in a way that, like, I don't know that all marketing leaders are. I actually was born in technology. I wrote code to start my professional life.

The technology is personal to me. It matters. I joke sometimes I could never market consumer products and goods because I'm just not passionate about them, but I am passionate about technology, so when I have the opportunity to get up on stage, do presentations, sometimes on behalf of product organizations or vision and things that kind of stretch outside of the typical CMO storyline, I actually get really jazzed.

I like doing demos. I like the tech, so maybe a little more than average.

Lindsay Pedersen

I love that. So you actually just naturally, as long as it's something that you're genuinely interested in, you naturally like to be in front of people.

Michael Atalla

Yeah, I do. I love to be up on stage. I like the energy of it.

I like the challenge of lacing a story together that engages an audience. I mean, it really is that bridge between technology and storytelling that makes, I think, a good tech marketing leader. It's not even a CMO thing.

It's really just what marketing is about. It's sort of that big stage environment, or I just did a keynote at one of our customer conferences in London just a week ago, and I love the challenge of engaging the audience on a technical story.

Lindsay Pedersen

Have you always liked to be public speaking, on stage, theater, anything like that? Or is this a newly learned love?

Michael Atalla

I think I've always been a little bit of a performer. When I started my professional career, I actually got a job writing code for a defense department contractor that locked me in a top-secret skiff that had no windows, and it had everything to do with why I'm not an engineer today. I was also not a terribly good programmer, I think, compared to being a good marketer, but I knew I couldn't live in that environment.

I absolutely love being on stage, and it's not new. It's not new to me. It's something that I've been, that's been part of my life for a long time, and I've actually, you know, it's far back to high school Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet performances and such, but I also love the storytelling of it all.

Whether it's a fiction story or a true story in a business story, I just, the storytelling of it all is what makes marketing exciting and compelling.

Lindsay Pedersen

I've heard you talk about that you've described yourself first as a storyteller. Where do you think that comes from? What led to your realizing that?

And then also, how do you use that as a leadership tool?

Michael Atalla

I'll give you an example of how storytelling takes shape in a role like mine, and I'll go back a number of years in my career to a point where I was leading product marketing for a business at Microsoft, and I remember I had this very distinct memory of my boss, my leader at the time, who's quite accomplished in her own right as a marketing leader in the industry, called me into her office and said, can you read this email? It's from the lead architect of the product team we're working on. I looked at it and read it and I said, yeah.

And she said, can you tell me what the hell he's trying to say? And I said, ah, let me translate. Let me translate.

And because my background as a programmer and as a technologist and IT consultant, I sort of joke sometimes, I understand how information flows across the internet. I was born in the rise of the internet era, lived through the cloud and mobile compute era. I know how this stuff works, and that allows me to quickly internalize how new stuff works, and I think I have a talent for translating it to plain English, for lack of a better word.

And so, realizing that I'm good at that, and that people take great, sort of, I take both pride, but people also sort of recognize the value because they appreciate the fact that I can come to them with something and put something in plain English, and they go, oh, oh, is that what they were trying? Is that what they're trying? Is that what that technology does?

Is that how that helps me? It's satisfying. And so I think that early in my career, I realized that was a sweet spot for me, and I think that translates functionally as product marketing, it turns out, which also turns out is pretty fundamental to really great enterprise B2B marketing, which I've been somehow associated with for the bulk of my career.

Lindsay Pedersen

It does seem like product marketing is almost exactly the parallel to what you just described of, like, taking sort of an unformed, raw set of words and ideas, both kind of big and small, and weaving it into something the customer both relates to and cares about, or the audience, it might not even be the customer. In that case, it was your boss who needed it translated. So that's what product marketing does, is be that bridge.

Michael Atalla

Yeah, I think that's exactly right, Lindsay. I think your qualification there that it's not always the customer, it really is any audience. Sometimes it's internal, it's employees, it's my own team.

I think it's a skill set, even as a marketing leader. Marketing is an incredibly complex discipline for a, you small team, relatively speaking, with an incredible complexity of role types. We have dozens and dozens of different types of professionals in marketing.

It's not that we are all engineers and product managers, we are campaign managers and social media specialists and event managers and field marketers and data scientists and analytics folks and PR. And, and so having someone, particularly when it's the leader, having someone be responsible for that translation layer of here's what we're trying to accomplish as a business, let me put this in language that all of us can understand. And it turns out also translates very well to how we talk to partners, how we talk to customers, our employee base writ large.

I think that's a skill set that is good to have and marketing leaders should endeavor to develop. It's a role they can play inside of companies. It's a role I like to play inside of companies.

Lindsay Pedersen

To break it down even more in with the anecdote that you shared, what I heard a few things. One is simplifying or kind of distilling, separating the wheat from the chaff. So simply distilling.

So that's one. I think I also heard like synthesizing because there's otherwise kind of disjointed. And then third, and maybe this is the most subtle, but sort of almost like a sequencing of problem to solution or trouble to resolution.

So it's not just a bullet point list of distilled, nicely synthesized thing. There's sort of like a before and an after.

Michael Atalla

Yeah, that is a good way to put it. We could step even further back in distance and say it's about distilling the product and technology vision relative to a customer and business challenge relative to the tactical execution required to actually deliver that vision through a little customer lens or a partner lens. You know, if you think about the role and functions of marketing and the role that marketing plays across the relationship matrix in any one company, like the marketing to product relationship, the marketing to sales relationship, marketing to corporate strategy relationship.

And you could break it down more granularly. I think we play this role of distilling, synthesizing, translating in all of those places, which is again why I think marketing leaders should develop that skill set and celebrate when they're good at it.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah. What is in the way of all marketers having that skill set? Like, what is it that is like almost like a deprogramming or what do you have to unlearn in order to be good at storytelling in that way?

Michael Atalla

Well, I mean, you have to think audience first, which I think you made the right qualification from customer to audience. Like you have to think audience first. And I think that in most of those relationships that I just highlighted, you know, marketing to product, marketing to sales, like the opportunity for a marketer is to sit and put themselves in the audience's shoes, understand the seat that they sit in, understand the challenges they face.

And then that's where translation becomes valuable. It's very easy for marketers, particularly in some of the more prevalent marketing functions like product marketing, to be heavily influenced inside out, because that's what you live in every day, right? If you're a product marketer, you live in inside out.

You have a product manager and an engineering leader that are telling you why they are building something. And it's very easy to be enamored with why we are building something. And it turns out that's not always what customers care about deeply, why you are building something.

They care deeply about the challenges they face. And it might be that it lines up with the thing you're building, but you actually have to convince them in terms they can relate to, in terms that matter to them. And that does require us stepping back away from the why we're building something and the what we've been talking about for weeks in the office and resetting.

So what's in the way is most often that marketers forget that that's their role in it all, or are just unable to sit in the customer's seat, which I mean, connecting back to I love being up on stage in front of customers telling the story, what better test than that to prove whether or not you've done that successfully than to go try to tell the story and find out whether you were right or not.

Lindsay Pedersen

And feel the audience's energy back to you, what's working, like what an empathy building moment that is when you're on stage and you're saying, oh, some clicks happened when I uttered this, or when I paused here, and you get it in a more outside in visceral way.

Michael Atalla

Entirely. Yeah, yeah, it's very, like I said, it's very satisfying to know you're doing your job well.

Lindsay Pedersen

I've heard you talk about the difference between a brand that moves markets and one that just describes a product. Is that sort of part and parcel to what we've just been talking about? Is that related to storytelling?

Or is there more to a brand moving markets rather than merely describing a product? Is this just storytelling too? Is everything storytelling eventually?

Michael Atalla

Yeah, to some extent, everything is storytelling. I think that there's certainly eventually proof in the product. We can't look past that reality that we are as marketers only capable of delivering a promise, or we are we deliver a promise that must be kept by the product at the end of the day.

We can't keep the promise, we can only make it.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah, there's only so much there's storytelling can do a lot to sort of draw people in, but there's no amount of excellent storytelling that makes up for a product that doesn't deliver on the promise.

Michael Atalla

Exactly. I think that's exactly right. But there is sort of an aspect of marketing strategy and team that extends into how you build and design your team, how you build capacity, how you direct the team that is about running an end to end go to market motion that extends far more deeply into the customer's sort of ethos than I have a brand promise to make.

That's where that storytelling extends into, okay, well, now I have a story, I've developed the narrative, but now I have to deliver it through some very tactical channels. I have to pull levers for digital marketing, I have to pull levers for paid media, I have to have an SEO strategy, I have to think about in person events versus digital events and have an experiential strategy on top of that. What is my field strategy?

How do I reach every market that matters to me, and then all the localization, globalization that comes with that. The storytelling takes you somewhere, and then you become a marketer and you start pulling the lever and sort of a mechanic at that point of the marketing machinery.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah, it makes me think of storytelling almost as like connective tissue between all of these things. Like you can't do without the things around it. You need all of those functions, you need the various sides.

Storytelling just makes for a really lubricated system within those.

Michael Atalla

Exactly. Yeah. Well, and to some degree, there is some aspect of this that is, if you are a deeply product centric marketer, and I do think there are differences between marketing leaders and companies have needs at different times for the brand centric marketer or the comm centric marketer or the product centric marketer.

I think that companies I have gravitated towards or the moments have been product centric marketing moments that are in the midst of transformation and strategy. And when you have that sort of transformative strategy moment, you have to come up with an incredibly compelling narrative, that incredibly compelling narrative. Once believable and once you know you have the product to keep the promise, then has to be sort of run through the machine.

And yes, highly lubricated is helpful when you're running a machine. So that's a good part of the metaphor for sure.

Lindsay Pedersen

What do you think you're like as a leader? Like, how do your teammates think of you as the marketing leader, the leader of the marketing organization? What do you like?

Michael Atalla

I hope they think I stay out of their way. Mostly, I think that's part of the role of any leader is to sort of facilitate the team's operations without getting in the way of the team's operations. I also certainly believe in what I've referred to as relentless transparency.

I am convicted that the best way to manage through both challenges and opportunities is to be as relentlessly transparent as possible with your team, with your people. It's high risk. It's not always because when you are relentlessly transparent, the team notices when and if you are not.

So you actually kind of have to be all in and commit to rely with transparency, which also means when things aren't so good, you are relentlessly transparent. But I've always found that it pays off in the long run to have that kind of approach with your team. I try to create sort of an environment where curiosity is rewarded and experimentation is rewarded.

You don't always have moments where that's possible. Sometimes you just have to push the business towards a deadline or an outcome. And you kind of have to sometimes set aside experimentation for a window of time.

But I do try to come back to it. I want teams to feel like they have the freedom to experiment and try. And I think where we are right now as an industry, oh, my goodness, we best experiment and try and be curious.

Lindsay Pedersen

When you and I first met, I heard you talk about how you're coaching and supporting your team with using AI in all sorts of ways. Talk about experimentation in this moment as a marketing leader.

Michael Atalla

When we met the first time and talked about it, how much has changed since even then? It's wild, actually, how much has changed. One, I have an AI operations leader.

Like that is a role that must exist. If you are a marketing leader and you do not have a person in your organization whose job it is or heck, a team, I suppose, depending on size and scale, but at least a person that sees themselves as responsible for AI operations. That's a thing now.

I think we've got to accept it. That's a necessity in an organization. I think on top of that, we have to find ways to unblock tool level experimentation inside of marketing.

There are so many things happening right now that I really want. There's no way that I could possibly make a decision as a CMO that says, here's the tool set we are using. Go put it to work for you.

I need my team at every level to be thinking about the types of tools, the types of capabilities, the types of experiments they should be running. I need them to be talking about those things with each other. I need to provide a forum for them to do that.

Now, even in the last two or three months, we're at the level of like, let's start figuring out what the learning sort of mechanisms are for cross-team communication, cross-team learning. Let's teach each other what experiments we're running. Let's talk about successes.

Let's talk about failures. Putting an entire layer of the organization, an operational layer in place for the use of AI across functions is not just a thing that I'm doing because I think it's a good idea. I think it's essential.

Again, I don't think we're going to make it through this transformation successfully unless we are incredibly proactive at empowering our teams.

Lindsay Pedersen

Give me a mundane example or two of this with your team as of late.

Michael Atalla

I've had two or three teams come to me and say, we think we can do this thing. It's amazing and transformative. I think I need a tool that is not licensed by the IT department to do it because I've been reading this article, like here's what I see.

And my person on my team has played with the free trial. And it's just game changing for us. And over here, the thing the company has adopted and chosen, can we try this two or three times, probably in just the last couple of months that's occurred.

And it's ranged from image generation tool to a platform tool for generating and marketing campaigns to a startup that was doing something in between those two. And I'm everything I can do to get those tools into the hands of my teams, like earmark the budget, have an AI ops person whose job it is to navigate IT and licensing, legal agreements, anything we do to remove friction, so that the team can just try things like that. And so we can just learn quickly.

So we can just figure out ways to move as fast and as agile a fashion as possible. Because I mean, for years, it's been the thing that's been in the way of marketing tooling is all of those like having nothing to do with AI, right? Licensing, legal agreements, evaluation trials, the corporate tool set portfolio.

I just think we have to get all that stuff out of the way right now, things are evolving too fast for us to put a stake in the ground. And well, we can't use that tool because we're a so and so shop. Those are non-specific examples, perhaps, but that's happening every week.

Lindsay Pedersen

A couple of things like themes that I've noticed. So you said reducing friction. So when you're cultivating this mindset of experimenting and allowing for the good things to bubble up and be celebrated, removing friction is huge.

I also heard you implicitly talking about the psychological safety or giving the team to do that. And it even relates to what you were saying earlier about being relentlessly transparent as a leader. And that by making yourself kind of vulnerable in that way, it's risky.

And yet that risk is sort of the whole point that allows others to feel safe. Are those things related? Or am I overly connecting the idea of safety and transparency with cultivating experimentation and willingness to try things that might end up being dead ends or even major errors?

Michael Atalla

I think you're making a very good case for the connection between the two. They're absolutely connected, being honest about the level to which I need the team to drive this to versus being some top down thing that I issue an edict around or, or that I'm somehow the authority on what will or will not work from an AI enablement or AI augmentation or AI empowerment of the marketing function, simply because I'm the senior most person in the org. And somehow that makes me innately qualified to have become the most educated person in the last three months on all the things that have changed in three months.

It's simply not the case, right? My job is to help facilitate my team to go figure that stuff out, evaluate those tools, determine what the opportunities are, come back to me with the things that they can get done and the things they can't and things that are in their way. I hope it creates psychological safety.

I think it's a experimentation and the willingness to fail and recover from failure and learn from that failure is certainly, we preach it a lot, right, as leaders. But it is hard to make real in an organization, particularly when there's pressure on business and revenue outcomes. But I try my best, I think it is the upside to transparent approach to leadership is that you just always have that open door to just be honest with your team about things.

And I think it helps to have set that tone and maintain it. It's harder to I think leap to transparency from not so much or a very controlled narrative. Like if you're internally trying to control the narrative, and you try to leap to transparency and safety and to use your word psychological safety, I think it's hard to be believable.

I think you got to kind of take that space out from the beginning.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah, it's interesting that the idea of it, maybe this is always true in moments of massive transformation, that leadership doesn't know the answer, or isn't an expert more than the most junior person on the team. It's kind of a funny, like lag time disconnect. And I think of like, I have teenagers, I think you have kids to my oldest is actually in his 20s.

And I think he runs circles around me, of course, he does with basically everything digital. And so it would be really weird if I were the so called authority on something where obviously, he has an advantage. And yet, to take the I don't know if the parenting analogy and the boss analogy really works here.

But I am the boss. Well, I'm not with him because he's an adult. But for my teenagers, I am the boss, but they do know better.

It's like a funny disconnect. And it actually does, at least to me, it does feel kind of vulnerable to know less than they do when I'm supposedly the person who's the leader. So it, it makes me lean into vulnerability in a way that I otherwise wouldn't see value in doing or just wouldn't be motivated to do.

Michael Atalla

I think the analogy plays very well, actually. I mean, we you you do know things. And you do.

And if you take the analogy in business to be the stepping back to the 50,000 foot view and looking left to right across a very complex landscape of me just within marketing, the functions of marketing that we talked about earlier, what I bring to the table is that left to right view. And in any one moment, I am always at 50,000 feet, looking left or right across the business. And that allows me to lean into an area and pull a thread out that correlates to a thread over here and make that connection in the same way that, you know, your teenager or your now 20 year old running circles around you on TikTok might get opportunity for you to bring the thread out and be like, let's put this in context of the rest of the world and talk about how it fits into the world at large. And I think that world at large, far more serious topic with your children. And when I have children as well, teenagers still is similar to the way you draw threads out as a leader in business and try to correlate and look left or right.

So we always have that role to play as leaders. I think that's a fair, fair way to look at it.

Lindsay Pedersen

It seems like it's a productive tension, right? Like we know more about the 50,000 foot level. They know more about a specific domain, especially AI being kind of probably supercharged in this moment.

But the tension between those two things is actually where the good stuff happens. Like one without the other doesn't work.

Michael Atalla

Yeah, I love that you use the word tension. I actually use that word a lot in business. I refer to good tension in a lot of places in business.

And I think that it's an interesting, I'm sorry for changing the subject a little bit, but in key leadership, I guess you could call it skill is to be able to identify healthy tension and use it to drive hard decision making moments and to sort of create the right balance in a moment where you have to move forward with a strategic decision or really, really hard sort of pros and cons conversation. The tension, whether it's at the level of marketing versus sales tension or marketing and product tension, or it's individual team functions like communications and public relations, objective, or North Star against sort of product marketing, North Star against whatever those, what are the points of tension are, if you get really good at navigating that kind of healthy tension, you can move very, very quickly.

And if you couple that with relentless transparency, everybody's clear that's what we're doing. Like I talk about that tension openly, like this is okay. We're going to be at odds with each other.

And sometimes I walk in the room and tell people like, I'm probably going to frustrate you in this conversation, but that's okay. We're going to work through it. And we get out of this room, we're going to be on the same page.

Like that kind of approach to leadership, I think can be very, very productive.

Lindsay Pedersen

What is it about tension that's so helpful? Why? Because it sounds like it's almost like a shorthand for, or a, like a flag, like something good is happening here.

Like, why is it the tension is where the action happens?

Michael Atalla

I think it's because tension signals, passion, energy, drive, like all the things, like if you're in a room and everybody's kind of like, eh, you know, sure we could do that. I guess either one, like that, whatever, A or B or C, like that's not, like, we're not making hard decisions. That's not really hard stuff going on, right?

But if you walk in a room and you say, look, I've got a point of view on this and we're going in this direction. And your counterpart on the product team, the sales team stands up in the room and pulls out a whiteboard marker and we start like having a hard discussions. That's because we now have mission-driven people who are passionate about the thing they're doing and they believe firmly in it.

And if we can come to a conclusion, two smart people can come to a conclusion in a room with that kind of tension, then you almost certainly have tested the strategy more thoroughly than otherwise. And you probably are coming to a better outcome. Again, you've used psychological safety earlier.

You could use the word trust in this moment. It requires work to build relationships across those tension points, but it always produces a better outcome, at least in my experience.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah. When there's kind of like, eh, we could do this, we could do that. There's not that, like, dumption for a certain thing.

Then whatever the outcome of that discussion is, it might be an incremental improvement, but it's not a big idea. It's not a, like a game-changing shift for the organization. If it's not a little bit scary, if there isn't a little bit of risk there, just like risk is associated with both higher upsides and higher downsides.

So if there is no risk there, if it's like, ah, either way, there's no tension, it's not going to move the needle majorly in either direction.

Michael Atalla

Yeah. Somebody doesn't believe in it or doesn't believe in it enough to debate the issue or push a point of view or challenge your assumptions. That probably signals what they're going to do when they walk out of the room, right?

When that conversation's over, if they're not passionate about the decision you're making and they haven't challenged your assumptions and they haven't pushed your strategy, then when they walk out of the room, what are the chances that they're going to go tell their team about this important decision we've just made in this meeting, the criticality of it to the business? I mean, there are so many things that that kind of tension, that healthy tension and the decision-making, the dialogue and decision-making process that comes from it will signal about what happens next. I think that's really important as well.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah. Their conviction, whether high or low, is going to dictate how much change happens later. This has been so fun talking to you.

I have a few kind of fun rapid-fire questions for you. Are you ready?

Michael Atalla Okay.

I can handle that.

Lindsay Pedersen

All right. Okay.

One word answer, ish. Okay. What's your favorite kind of salty snack?

Michael Atalla

Potato chips.

Lindsay Pedersen

What time do you wake up?

Michael Atalla

5.30 a.m.

Lindsay Pedersen

Even on weekends?

Michael Atalla

As soon as the alarm goes off and usually a few minutes before. It drives my wife crazy, but my brain just knows what time I set the alarm for and I wake up and I am out of bed within 20 seconds.

It just kills my family that I'm a morning person.

Lindsay Pedersen

5.30 is early. Okay. Your favorite trait in a person?

Michael Atalla

Empathy.

Lindsay Pedersen

What is your favorite sport to participate in or watch?

Michael Atalla

Swimming. I'm one of those people that was a competitive swimmer, which means basically once every four years I get to watch my sport on television, thanks to the Olympics.

But otherwise, there's not a lot of it out there, but I will sit glued to it. I love watching competitive swimming and I was serious about it.

Lindsay Pedersen

When you swim, do you swim laps or open water? How do you like to swim?

Michael Atalla

I've mostly swam laps in my life, but I did briefly sort of toy with triathlon and did some open water swimming. But most of my actual competitive swimming, which we should be clear, was a number of years ago. I was in a 25-yard or 50-meter pool and I was a sprinter. I love it and I think it’s incredible.

I love watching the competition of it all. It's anything that can be decided in hundreds of a second after years of preparation is an incredibly compelling moment for me.

Lindsay Pedersen

Okay, last but not least, what is your favorite life hack?

Michael Atalla

Oh my goodness. Well, just waking up at 5:30 in the morning and getting right out of bed. Actually, getting right out of bed.

I'm going with that. There's probably better answers, but getting your day started as soon as you're awake and not doing the whole like snooze button thing. Gotta get up.

Just get up and get moving to make it happen. Cut the cord. Go.

Lindsay Pedersen

Cut the cord. We're not sleeping anymore. We're awake.

This has been so fun. Okay, where can I send people to learn more about you to learn more about UiPath?

Michael Atalla

Well, I mean, for me, Michael Atalla on LinkedIn, please. I mean, I try to stay active out there. I love the LinkedIn community, so I'm a huge fan of anybody who wants to engage with me there, chat, share stuff with me.

UiPath.com, of course, as the marketing guy, the digital front door, the best way, but we're also all over social media channels and we love to engage with folks on X on Instagram even, but it's modern marketing. We're everywhere. So find us out there on social media.

Lindsay Pedersen

Okay, and I'll put those in the show notes too. Thanks for joining me, Michael. Thank you, Lindsay.

I appreciate it.

Lindsay Pedersen

Thanks for listening to this episode of North Star Leaders. Make sure you don't miss an episode by subscribing on your favorite podcast app. If you know of a North Star Leader whose insights would be valuable for this community, please message me on ironcladbrandstrategy.com.

Also on that website are show notes, transcripts, and a way to sign up for our monthly newsletter. I hope you join us again for another episode of North Star Leaders.