Fung-Lin Wu, A Customer-centric, Data-driven Marketer
May 24th, 2021
Fung-Lin Wu is the Director of Retention Marketing at MongoDB. She is responsible for driving user activation and engagement throughout a customer’s lifecycle to retain customers and to reduce churn. She received her B.A. from University of Michigan and M.B.A. from Columbia Business School and has over 10 years of marketing experience in demand generation, retention, and marketing analytics. Prior to MongoDB, she worked at companies including Datadog, Managed by Q, and DigitalOcean, helping to build marketing functions from the ground up.
In this feature, Fung-Lin shares her key learnings from her first role, how she made a lateral move at her first company, why she pursued an MBA, and her day-to-day as Director of Retention Marketing. Read along to soak up her incredible career advice for ambitious women, such as yourself.
Early Career
You started your career as a Comparison Rating Analyst at Progressive Insurance. What key learnings did you take from your first role?
Progressive Insurance was my first corporate job after college and it had a huge impact in helping me to identify the type of work I was passionate about, the career path I wanted to take, and the importance of strong mentors in life.
My role as a Comparison Rating Analyst meant that I was responsible for providing market research to the company – analyzing competitor filings, measuring win rates, and sharing competitive intelligence. As a junior analyst, I enjoyed taking on challenging projects and making sure they launch without error or delay in order to feel accomplished. It was those projects that I didn’t mind going into the office on weekends to hustle it out. It also took a company-wide colloquium that I was asked by my manager to present to realize the impact my work had on the company and that motivated me to be more ambitious in my career and to aspire to be a future marketing leader. During my time at Progressive, I had the support of my manager to participate in many company wide initiatives, including the launch of Employee Resource Groups (ERG) and an Analyst Professional Group. Being a founding member of these affinity and professional groups vastly broadened my network within the company – it was through these networks that I began to develop many great mentors and sponsors who referred me to internal job postings, advised me on career development, and guided me on my business school applications.
You successfully made a lateral move after 3 years in Progressive Insurance when you transitioned from a Comparison Rating Analyst to a Digital Marketing Analyst role. How and why did you make this happen?
After three years as an analyst, I found myself less and less inspired at work. At that point in my career, I had maxed out the learnings from that role – I was responsible for training all new hires, served as a subject matter expert for our competitors, and completed an extremely sensitive and important project that had the eyes of even our legal team.
What made Progressive a great place to work was how much they valued internal mobility. I was able to have a very frank conversation with my manager that I was interested in exploring other opportunities within the company and from there, I started to keep an eye on our internal job posting site. From the networks I had met through the ERGs and the Analyst Professional Group, I spoke with many different colleagues to get a sense of different job responsibilities, team culture, and what roles I’d be a good fit for. How I actually ended up with the Digital Marketing role was indirectly through a sponsor I had at the company. After chatting with an executive in my department who had heard about my work, she recommended me to apply for a mobile analyst role because of the growing importance of mobile advertising and she saw it as an invaluable skill set I could gain for my career. She vouched for me and despite not getting the job after the final round interview, the hiring manager and this executive put in a word for me for a Digital Marketing Analyst role that had just opened up. It is to this date that I am forever grateful for both the executive and the hiring manager for being my sponsor and ultimately changing my entire career path to where it is today.
Afterwards, you pursued an MBA at Columbia Business School. Why did you decide to go back to school, and what advice do you have for those contemplating getting an MBA?
My dad had a graduate degree and so I always had an inkling that I would go back to school to pursue a Master’s degree. Early on in my career, I was lacking in broader business knowledge and leadership skills to move up in my career. And the one thing I observed was that many of the senior business leaders I looked up to all had an MBA degree from a top ranked school. When I spoke with them about their business school experience, every single one spoke highly of their degree which further confirmed my decision to apply for business school.
Going to business school was one of the best decisions I could’ve made in my professional career. It gave me the break I needed to reassess my career path, jump-started my managerial career, broadened my networks, gave me a bump in my earnings potential, and provided me with a more holistic view of the business world. To those who are also contemplating getting an MBA, I will say that everyone’s situation is different. It’s important to understand why you are applying, what you intend to get out of it, and then assess if it makes sense from a financial and opportunity cost perspective.
You’ve held several marketing roles during your time at CBS and after: Product Marketing Manager at Microsoft and Marketing Analytics & Operations Manager at Datadog. What initially drew you to this field and what about marketing excites you?
At Columbia Business School, I had the opportunity to learn about different industries through recruiting, coffee chats, courses, and my classmates. I was intrigued by the tech industry because of the fast paced environment but also the ever evolving product development and innovation. Technology has such a huge impact in the way we live our lives today that it excited me to work for one.
As for marketing, I was always somewhat drawn to marketing. Marketing plays such a huge role in everyone’s daily lives – every time you make a purchase, when you choose to buy a specific brand, or when you are researching a product online, it’s marketing at play. Marketing leverages so many different channels and campaigns to drive brand awareness, product education, and purchasing decisions. That was what initially drew me to marketing. But as I grew in my career, I became more and more obsessed with how data can help marketers optimize investment dollars and channel mix to make informed decisions and to generate a return on investment.
You’ve held roles at several different companies since your first job. When you think about the moments in your career when you made a pivot, how did you know you were ready to switch jobs and what would your recommendation be for individuals considering leaving their role / company?
There are usually one of three reasons for me to consider switching jobs: (1) the company isn’t doing well, (2) I’m no longer challenged in my current role and have hit a ceiling, or (3) the role I’m in no longer aligns with my long term career goal. For me, I like to assess my situation every six months. I evaluate whether or not I’m still enjoying my day to day, if the role was what I had expected when I interviewed, am I a good fit for the role and company, and if there are career advancement opportunities for me in the future.
For individuals considering leaving their role, my advice would be to give yourself at least six months to find a role you’ll be happy with. With that time frame in mind, you want to start looking before you’re desperate to leave the company. I’ve definitely been in situations where I was so unhappy at a company that I ended up taking the first job offer I got, and it wasn’t the right move for my career. The best time to look is when you’re still enjoying your work but you’ve reached a ceiling in what you can learn. That way, you can take your time to find the right position and be able to have leverage in whether or not the compensation package makes sense for you.
MongoDB
You’re currently the Director of Retention Marketing at MongoDB. What exactly does your role entail and what is your day-to-day? What skills and strengths did you realize were key to succeeding in this field?
As the Director of Retention Marketing, my team is responsible for driving user activation and engagement by onboarding, engaging, and retaining users. We are focused on how to leverage marketing channels to educate users so that they can successfully onboard our product and understand the value proposition of what our product can do for their application. My day-to-day mostly consists of aligning our projects across multiple stakeholders, identifying leading metrics to measure our success, refining our customer journey, brainstorming experiments to further our learnings, and working with data analytics to learn more about our customers.
The skills and strengths to succeed in this field are being customer-centric, data driven, and having an experimentation mindset. The key to activating and retaining users comes down to the ability to think from the user’s perspective and use what the data tells you about your user behavior to continually test different messaging and channels.
Outside of work, you’re a Mentor in GrowthMentor, run Marketing for SPARK by TACL - a network of leaders, founders, pioneers, creatives, and icons supporting Taiwanese American entrepreneurs and ventures, and are a part of Primary Venture Partner’s Expert Network. What fuels you to participate in these additional activities?
I was raised by my parents to value the importance of giving back to the community and to this day, it is a value I hold near and dear to my heart. In addition to the activities you listed, I also spend a lot of my time volunteering at non-profit organizations and with my alma maters. Quite honestly, in all of these experiences, I sometimes find myself learning just as much – if not more – as what I’m passing on.
After working for multiple startups in the last 5+ years, I’ve been intrigued with if there is a secret sauce to a startup’s success. I try to stay on top of startup news and love discussing with my husband on whether or not we think a startup has product-market fit, if it will have a successful exit, and whether or not it’s a startup we would invest or buy the stocks of.
In addition to having a great product and solving a real business problem, the one observation I’ve made is that a strong leadership team and a strong investment in the people can really make or break a startup. Because of this, I love spending my time in these additional activities to support and instill my learnings to other entrepreneurs and leaders. I am so grateful for the opportunity to work with GrowthMentor, SPARK Accel, and Primary Ventures – I’ve learned so much about the different challenges startups go through and when the day comes that I decide to go back to the startup world, I’ll be that much better of a leader myself!
Career Advice
What do you wish you knew when you were first starting your career?
The importance of a good manager, mentor, or sponsor! Early on in your career, being able to learn both soft and hard skills will be invaluable to the rest of your career. Especially the hard skills – if there are analytical or technical skills that will make you more valuable, having a strong leader that will invest the time to teach you or find opportunities for you to learn will set you up for long term success and make you a better candidate for roles in the future. Throughout my career, I’ve seen many people struggle in their career because they didn’t build up the right muscles and foundation so when it comes time to move up or switch roles, they either lack the minimum requirements of the role or couldn’t stand out to other candidates with more transferable skills.
Who is one woman you aspire to be like?
Wow, this is a hard question and the list can go on. At the moment, there are two that comes to mind professionally speaking:
(Note: I grew up in Taiwan so successful Taiwanese women are extremely aspiring to me.)
Lisa Su – CEO of AMD who grew the company from $2B to $100B since 2015. You can’t help but admire what she has done for the company, taking it from the verge of bankruptcy to where it is today. She’s definitely one of the most powerful women in tech at the moment and is a force to be reckoned with. I hope a book will be written about her in the near future!
Eva Chen – Head of Fashion Partnerships at Instagram, a children’s book author, and one of my favorite Instagram influencers. Not only is her career journey incredibly impressive, but I love that she uses her platform to promote and bring awareness to social issues that matter. Also, given that I’m currently pregnant as we’re speaking (as is she), I aspire for the way she integrates her work and personal life.
