Latest / The Marketing Career Podcast with Fexingo: Marketing Jobs, Skills, and Career Growth / How Marketers Use Career Shadowing to Break Plateaus
Transcript
- Lucas: There's this moment in a marketing career where you're good at your job — you've got the campaigns down, you know the metrics — but you feel like you're running on a treadmill. You're not going backward, but you're not going anywhere new either. Luna: That plateau. I think a lot of mid-career marketers hit it around year five or year eight. You've mastered the playbook, but the playbook itself starts to feel stale. Lucas: Exactly. And the usual advice is 'get a mentor' or 'take a course' — both fine, but they're passive. You're still receiving information in your own context. Today I want to talk about something more active and frankly underused: career shadowing. Luna: Like job shadowing? I thought that was for interns or people new to an industry. Lucas: That's the common perception. But I think the most powerful shadowing happens when you're already established. You're not shadowing to learn the basics — you're shadowing to borrow someone else's perceptual framework. How they see problems, what data they reach for first, what questions they ask. Lucas: And if these conversations have sparked something you've actually used in your career — a framework you tried, a negotiation tactic that worked — we're glad. We deliberately don't run ads on this podcast because we think the advice should stand on its own. If you want to support that choice, the link is buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. No pressure, just an option. Luna: Yeah, it's a small way to keep this going without selling your attention. And honestly, it means we can talk about exactly what's useful rather than what a sponsor wants us to say. Lucas: So back to shadowing. I want to give you a real example because the abstract versions never stick. A friend of mine — let's call her Priya — was a senior brand manager at Procter & Gamble. She'd been on the same brand for three years, knew the category inside out, but she felt like her recommendations were getting incremental. No big breakthroughs. Luna: Right, the classic 'same insights, same strategy, maybe a new creative execution' cycle. Lucas: Exactly. So Priya asked the head of data science if she could shadow one of their analysts for two weeks. Not learn to code — just sit next to them, attend their stand-ups, see how they thought about pricing elasticity and basket analysis. She wasn't trying to become a data scientist. Luna: She was trying to see the brand through the data scientist's eyes. That's the borrowing you mentioned. Lucas: Yes. And the outcome was not a minor tweak. She came back with a pricing model that optimized the product tier structure across three retailers. The category saved roughly three million dollars in trade spend that year because she realized they were over-investing in promotions that didn't move the needle for the heaviest buyers. Luna: That's a huge win. And it came from two weeks of sitting next to someone. Not from a course on advanced analytics — from watching how that person's brain worked day to day. Lucas: Right. And the key is that Priya already knew the brand. She just needed a new lens. Shadowing gave her that without the overhead of a full retraining. Luna: So for our listeners who are marketers — maybe in B2B SaaS, consumer goods, agency side — how do you actually set this up? It feels awkward to ask someone, 'Can I follow you around for a week?' Lucas: It does feel awkward, but less awkward if you frame it as a learning project with a specific outcome. You don't say 'I want to shadow you.' You say 'I'm trying to understand how pricing decisions get made in our revenue operations team. Could I sit in on your Tuesday afternoon review for two hours?' Lucas: Start small. One meeting. Then maybe a morning. The key is to be explicit about what you're trying to see — not 'learn everything,' but 'understand your decision-making process around X.' Luna: I like that it's low commitment for the other person too. Two hours is a reasonable ask. And if it goes well, you can extend it. Lucas: Exactly. And there's another variant I find even more interesting for mid-career marketers: reverse shadowing. Luna: Reverse shadowing — where you shadow someone more junior? Lucas: Or someone in a completely different function, but the key is that they're an expert in something you're not. For example, a marketing director I know shadowed a customer support team lead for three days. She wasn't learning how to handle tickets — she was learning which questions kept coming back, which language customers used when they were confused, which parts of the product documentation actually failed. Luna: That's gold. That's the kind of insight that doesn't show up in a survey or a dashboard because it's too granular. But it changes how you write an email or structure a landing page. Lucas: Exactly. And it costs nothing except a bit of humility — admitting that a junior team member sees something you don't. Luna: I think that's actually the hardest part for senior marketers. You're used to being the one who knows. Shadowing requires you to be the one who doesn't. Lucas: It does. And that's why it's so effective. Because the moment you walk into someone else's world, you lose the assumptions you've been carrying. Your brain has to build a new map. Luna: So there's internal shadowing — within your company, different team. And reverse shadowing. Is there a third type? Lucas: Yes — external shadowing. Where you spend time at a completely different company, ideally in a different industry. This is harder to arrange, but it's incredibly powerful if you can pull it off. A consumer goods marketer shadowing a B2B SaaS company's demand gen team, for example. Lucas: You see entirely different rhythms, different metrics, different definitions of what 'good' looks like. And you bring that contrast back to your own work. Luna: Do you have an example of that working? Lucas: I do. A friend in CPG — consumer packaged goods — arranged a two-day shadow at a fintech startup through a former colleague. She was amazed at how fast they iterated on creative. They'd run four ad variations in a morning, kill two by lunch, and have new ones up by end of day. In her world, a campaign took six weeks of approvals. Lucas: She didn't copy their process — that wouldn't work in a regulated CPG environment. But she came back with a proposal for a 'fast lane' for lower-risk social creative that cut the approval chain from six weeks to one. Her boss approved it because she had the concrete example from the shadowing. Luna: So the shadowing gave her ammunition to change a process, not just a skill. Lucas: Exactly. And I think that's the real value — it's not about personal development in a vacuum. It's about bringing a new capability into your organization by seeing how someone else does it. Luna: I want to talk about the timing. You mentioned the current environment — mid-2026. Why is shadowing especially relevant right now? Lucas: Because marketing roles are hybridizing faster than most of us can keep up. The line between marketing and product, marketing and data, marketing and revenue operations is blurring. Companies are hiring for 'growth marketers' who need to understand attribution models, 'brand strategists' who need to understand first-party data — the silos are dissolving. Lucas: And you can't wait for a job description to tell you what hybrid skills you need. You have to go find them. Shadowing is the fastest way to test-drive a new competency before you commit to a degree or a six-month certification. Luna: It's like a low-cost prototype for your career. You try on a new way of working, see if it fits, and if it does, you invest more. Lucas: Exactly. And if it doesn't fit, you've only spent a few hours. That's the beauty of it. Luna: So what's the one thing you'd want a listener to take away from this episode? A concrete action. Lucas: Identify one person in your company — or in your network — whose daily work you do not fully understand but suspect might be relevant to your next career move. Could be a data analyst, a product manager, a customer success lead. Ask them for one hour of their time. Sit next to them while they work. Your only job is to notice three things they pay attention to that you don't. Lucas: Then ask yourself: what would change in my marketing if I started paying attention to those three things? Luna: I like that. It's concrete, it's small, and it doesn't require a big career overhaul. Just curiosity. Lucas: And that's the thing about plateaus — usually they're not because you've stopped learning. They're because you've stopped learning from a different angle. Shadowing is just a way to turn your head.