Explore

Meet Viviana

Everything you need to know about working with me!

Viviana Faga

About Me

⁠

I bring over twenty years of experience designing and building brand categories for successful cloud/SaaS and enterprise social companies, helping them create scalable growth engines that drive successful exits. My particular passions are scaling and structuring go-to-market SaaS teams, messaging and positioning, category creation, freemium product strategy, and sales enablement.

Before becoming a full-time go-to-market advisor and investor, I joined the venture world as an Operating Partner and advisor to dozens of CEOs at Emergence. Prior to Emergence, I served as the VP of marketing for Yammer, where I defined the enterprise social category. After Yammer’s $1.2B acquisition by Microsoft, I became the head of marketing for enterprise social, which included Office 365, Skype, and Lync. I also spent over six years at Salesforce, where I launched several key product initiatives. Additionally, I was the VP of marketing for Platfora (now Workday) and the CMO of Zenefits.

I’m also enjoying spending time advising and investing in several notable start-ups, such as Mode Analytics, Sora, and Command E, to name a few.

Learn more about how I approach startup marketing on the Follow Your Different podcast:

⁠

Loading lochhead.com⁠

Here is a more recent interview on the CMO Conversations podcast about category creation:

⁠

My blueprint

1. Be Brief, Be Bold, Be Gone

This saying has always rung true to me. If we have too much to say, we lose sight of what we want to communicate. So when communicating a key point, consider your audience, communicate what you want to get across quickly, but do it in a way that it’s memorable. And then move on. Your audience won’t forget you or what you had to say.

2. Team over Self

It’s important to remember that your success isn’t possible without the help of your team. So while all of us have our own personal goals, and things that we want for ourselves in this world, I always ask that you think about the team before yourself, so that everyone can win together.

3. Honor your Creative Side

All of us have a creative side, whether we’d like to admit it or not. I spend a lot of my free time reading architecture/design books, and I do it because it nurtures my creative side, which feeds me professionally. So I always ask that anyone I work with find what it is that helps them think outside of their day to day such that they can bring their best self to work.

4. Just get it Done

I find that people spend too much time analyzing data (don’t get me wrong, it is incredibly important!), but at what cost? Use the data as a guide, but make a decision and act on it. You’ll learn more from doing, and making mistakes, then spending countless hours thinking about what should get done.

About this Doc

Last updated:

6/29/2022

⁠

Through my various blog posts and interviews, I hope to give people a sense of what it’s like to work with me. I’ve noted a trend towards others doing the same (e.g. Luc Levesque calls this a

“Blueprint⁠

”, First Round calls this a “

User Guide⁠

”). I hope to update this frequently to give you an idea of what I value at work.

⁠

Copy a version of this doc

⁠

About Me

My blueprint

1. Be Brief, Be Bold, Be Gone

2. Team over Self

3. Honor your Creative Side

4. Just get it Done

About this Doc

Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.

Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (

CtrlP

) instead.