The Marketing Engineer

I agents are bringing a new level of automation to ad operations. Aaron Lu, AI Product Lead at Notion, shares how his team is using AI across growth marketing, building agents that automate workflows, monitor spend in real time, and enable capabilities that advertising platforms don't support natively. Aaron explains how he decides what should become an AI agent versus a simple automation, how he builds feedback loops that improve agents over time, and what it takes to orchestrate multiple agents. He also breaks down the competitor-monitoring system that won Profound's Marketing Engineering Hackathon and how building with parallel agents changed his workflow. We discuss: How a marketer's job shifted from doing the work to designing AI systems Why a good cost-per-lead number can still hide wasted ad spend The swarm of AI agents running Notion's ad operations How he built an AI agent for LinkedIn dayparting, a feature the platform doesn't natively support The creative duplication agent that saves a day of work every week What he would do differently on his hackathon-winning project How to decide what to automate first Connect with Aaron: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaron-lu/ Notion: https://www.notion.com/ Connect with Profound: Website: https://tryprofound.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tryprofound/ X: https://x.com/tryprofound Read the Marketing Engineer Manifesto: https://www.tryprofound.com/marketing-engineer Profound University: https://university.tryprofound.com/ The Marketing Engineer is a show for practitioners figuring out in real time what it means to market at the frontier. New episodes every two weeks.

Austin Lau was a non-technical marketer when he started experimenting with Claude to write custom Google Ads scripts, pasting in code, running it, and iterating through errors until it worked. At the time, he had joined Anthropic as its first growth marketer. His experimentation reshaped how he thought about his own role and the future of marketing. He went from doing everything manually to building budget dashboards, daily briefings, and campaign automations, while developing a framework for what to automate and what to leave alone. Austin explains why AI is turning marketers into builders, giving them the technical leverage to become Marketing Engineers, when to use Cowork versus Claude Code, and the “blast radius” test he runs before letting agents touch any live campaigns. We discuss: Why marketers are positioned to become Marketing Engineers The shift from managing campaigns to managing a fleet of agents The “blast radius” test he runs before automating anything Why you don’t need 50+ AI skills When a skill is actually worth building, and when it just adds noise Building a live budget dashboard inside Claude Cowork The Google Ads script that turned him from a marketer into a builder How to know when to reach for Claude Code versus Claude Cowork Connect with Austin: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/austinlau1/ Connect with Profound: Website: https://tryprofound.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tryprofound/ X: https://x.com/tryprofound Read the Marketing Engineer Manifesto: https://www.tryprofound.com/marketing-engineer Profound University: https://university.tryprofound.com/ Resources Mentioned: Austin’s Claude Cowork Guide: https://claude.com/blog/best-practices-for-getting-started-with-claude-cowork The Marketing Engineer is a show for practitioners figuring out in real time what it means to market at the frontier. New episodes every two weeks.

Andy McCutcheon is the GTM AI Lead at Block, and spends much of his time convincing colleagues who have never opened a terminal that they can build their own tools. At a company of six thousand people, that means weekly office hours, casual working sessions where he shares his screen live and lets people watch him think, and a running answer for anyone who says they don't know where to start: you have to be bad at something before you can be good at it. Block’s internal skills marketplace now holds three thousand tools, many of them built by people who found their way in through office hours just like Andy's. We discuss: Getting non-technical teams comfortable building with AI What it takes to contribute to an internal marketplace of three thousand skills and tools Why Andy tells people they have to be bad at something before they can be good at it What goes into building an MCP server that people can actually talk to conversationally Two slash commands that give his AI agent memory between sessions The personal newsletter that runs AI research every night while he sleeps Connect with Andy: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andysmccutcheon/ Block: https://block.xyz/ Connect with Profound: Website: https://tryprofound.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tryprofound/ X: https://x.com/tryprofound Read the Marketing Engineer Manifesto: https://www.tryprofound.com/marketing-engineer Profound University: https://university.tryprofound.com/ Resources Mentioned: Andy's Skills Library: https://github.com/andymccutcheon/skills The Marketing Engineer is a show for practitioners figuring out in real time what it means to market at the frontier. New episodes every two weeks.

Most marketing teams are still working across disconnected systems, scattered context, and workflows that break down as they grow. Lucy Hoyle, Senior Content Engineer at Carta, set out to solve that problem. At Profound's Marketing Engineering Hackathon, she built a prototype she calls the “marketing brain.” A shared context layer that transforms siloed workflows into systems that enable collaboration, while giving teams a common source of truth that continuously evolves. That prototype became the seed of a full operating system now rolling out across Carta's entire marketing team. In this episode, Lucy explains how she built the prototype, the challenges she faced along the way, and concepts like context rot and token discipline that are shaping where marketing teams are headed over the next few years. We discuss: What context rot actually is and why too much information can make AI worse BM25: The keyword-based search library Lucy used to filter the information Claude ingests How a hackathon prototype evolved into a company-wide Marketing OS The pitch strategy Lucy recommends to get buy-in from executives Why “Have you asked Claude” became Carta’s unofficial rule Connect with Lucy: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucy-hoyle-883381138/ Carta: https://carta.com Connect with Profound: Website: https://tryprofound.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tryprofound/ X: https://x.com/tryprofound Read the Marketing Engineer Manifesto: https://www.tryprofound.com/marketing-engineer Profound University: https://university.tryprofound.com/ Resources Mentioned: Profound’s Agent Marketplace: https://www.tryprofound.com/agent-templates The Profound brand kit & product messaging agent Lucy built at the Profound Marketing Engineering Hackathon: https://hub.tryprofound.com/hubfs/Lucy%20-%20Marketing%20Engineer%20Hackathon%20Files.zip Rank-BM25, the open source Python library Lucy used to filter context for Claude: https://pypi.org/project/rank-bm25/ and https://github.com/dorianbrown/rank_bm25 Lucy’s Marketing Brain Hackathon Presentation: https://shorturl.at/AvKDU The Marketing Engineer is a show for practitioners figuring out in real time what it means to market at the frontier. New episodes every two weeks.

Samsara is one of the most advanced examples of AI adoption inside the marketing team of a large public company. Holly Chen, VP of Growth Marketing, shares the marketing team’s approach. A big part of their success came from a deliberate three-phase rollout that moved the marketing organization from a leadership mandate to company-wide enablement and, ultimately, sustained momentum. The whole approach runs on a bottoms-up philosophy: the people closest to the pain points are the ones building the solutions, rather than AI development being centralized within a small team. Holly also shares how AI has changed the way her team hires, why she looks for a specific kind of AI fluency in candidates, and why she believes every marketer needs to become a Marketing Engineer. We discuss: The three-stage rollout: mandate, enablement, and sustained momentum Why bottoms-up AI adoption outlasts top-down mandates How a 230-person team built 90 AI agents (and how they keep them running) Samsara’s AI governing body The hackathons and monthly AI Power Hour that keep teams building Why Holly values judgment over taste in the age of AI The biggest hiring mistake marketers make in the AI era Connect with Holly LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/holly Samsara: https://www.samsara.com Connect with Profound Website: https://tryprofound.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tryprofound/ X: https://x.com/tryprofound Read the Marketing Engineer Manifesto: https://www.tryprofound.com/marketing-engineer Profound University: https://university.tryprofound.com/ Resources Mentioned Gong: https://www.gong.io Playwright: https://playwright.dev Gumloop: https://www.gumloop.com/ Holly’s Substack: https://hollychen.substack.com The Marketing Engineer is a show for practitioners figuring out in real time what it means to market at the frontier. New episodes every two weeks.

Figma is shipping products at a pace most marketing teams can barely track. Reema Batta, VP of Growth Marketing, is the person responsible for making sure they can actually keep up. Part of how they do it: a context layer. Every product Figma launches now comes with structured positioning, messaging, and value props that channel teams can reference directly, without a meeting or Slack chain. The coordination tax, as she calls it, is something she has systematically engineered out of the workflow. Reema also explains why Figma's AI-generated content is outperforming human-written pages, why the bottleneck in marketing is moving upstream to judgment, and how she thinks about prioritization when the product roadmap never slows down. We discuss: How the marketing funnel is being compressed inside AI conversations The context layer that keeps channel teams current without another meeting Why AI-generated content is outperforming human-written pages Tokenmaxxing as a phase-one metric, and what comes after it How Reema interviews for systems-thinking skills Why strong judgment is quickly becoming a marketer’s most important attribute Connect with Reema: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reema-batta/ Figma: https://www.figma.com Connect with Profound: Website: https://tryprofound.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tryprofound/ X: https://x.com/tryprofound Read the Marketing Engineer Manifesto: https://www.tryprofound.com/marketing-engineer Profound University: https://university.tryprofound.com/ Resources Mentioned: Figma Config: https://config.figma.com Figma: https://www.figma.com Profound’s Zero Click Event: https://www.tryprofound.com/zeroclick Marketing Engineer Job Board: https://www.marketingengineer.jobs/ The Marketing Engineer is a show for practitioners figuring out in real time what it means to market at the frontier. New episodes every two weeks.

Until recently, Matt was the only person running all of Wispr Flow’s marketing execution solo. Meta and Google Ads, newsletter sponsorships, landing pages… it was all on him, and the company was growing fast. Handling everything manually became impossible. But instead of hiring, Matt decided to build. The result? An agent-powered marketing OS that now runs across a team of nearly 20. It handles 100 newsletter sponsorships a month, automates the admin that was eating 10–20% of everyone's week, and made several planned hires unnecessary. We discuss: How marketing and growth teams are evolving in real time Why the marketers of the future will be “systems thinkers” The reason most marketers don’t utilize AI tools to their full potential How he scaled a personal OS into something his whole team runs on The newsletter sponsorship system that runs itself Matt’s session start and end workflows that keep Claude Code sessions from spiraling into chaos ***Connect with Matt*** LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mswulinski/ Wispr Flow: https://wisprflow.ai/ ***Connect with Profound*** Website: https://tryprofound.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tryprofound/ X: https://x.com/tryprofound Read the Marketing Engineer Manifesto: https://www.tryprofound.com/marketing-engineer Profound University: https://university.tryprofound.com/ ***Resources Mentioned*** Matt’s Claude Skills Explainer document: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UuQoeQSzXoc6hH055lbz0h9P6QLYciUT/view?usp=sharing Matt’s Claude Skills Files: Session Start, Session End, and the Sponsorship Copy Waterfall (Drop them into Claude Code to try them): https://hub.tryprofound.com/hubfs/wispr-flow-claude-skills.zip Dub.co for affiliate and tracking link management: https://dub.co/ Claude Code: what Matt used to build his marketing OS: https://claude.ai/code Wispr Flow: Matt's company; voice-to-text tool he uses to dictate prompts across all his sessions https://wisprflow.ai/ VS Code, where Matt runs his Claude Code sessions: https://code.visualstudio.com/ Linear, the project management tool integrated into Matt's OS for task assignment: https://linear.app/ Hex: Matt's BI tool, referenced when pulling live data into reports https://hex.tech/ GitHub: used to version control and share the Wispr Flow Marketing OS across the team https://github.com/ Logitech MX Master 4 Mouse, the hardware Matt uses to navigate between sessions hands-free with Wispr Flow: https://shorturl.at/FlKsu The Marketing Engineer is a show for practitioners figuring out in real time what it means to market at the frontier. New episodes every two weeks.

Meet the marketer who builds. Marketing Engineers pair creativity with systems thinking, combining a marketer's instincts with technical ability to bring ideas to life. They're architects, agentic operators, and craftspeople with high taste. In the episodes ahead, you'll hear directly from practitioners and leaders who've reorganized how their teams operate, built marketing workflows for scale and quality, and invented capabilities that didn't exist before. This is The Marketing Engineer, from Profound. New episodes every two weeks. Connect with Profound: Website: https://tryprofound.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tryprofound/ X: https://x.com/tryprofound Read the Marketing Engineer Manifesto: https://www.tryprofound.com/marketing-engineer Profound University: https://www.tryprofound.com/