Room to Grow and Innovate: Marketing Careers at Appian

Career growth in tech marketing is one of the main drivers behind why people join the Appian Marketing team. And it’s also a main reason people stay for the long haul.

To get a first-hand look at what career growth for marketers at Appian looks like, we talked to James Lee and April DelFavero, two leaders in very different roles to hear their stories. 

My background is in mechanical engineering, and I initially joined Appian as an Associate Solution Engineer, working on customer tech support cases. When I wanted to improve efficiencies, and make our team’s lives easier, I’d hop behind the scenes and start building with our product on the back-end.

I was fascinated by our product and got real impact use cases through experimenting on my own. I learned about features that saved developers time, and was curious to better understand how it works. Through documentation and learning software skills from others on the team, I essentially taught myself to be an Appian developer!

Later, I was invited to help launch the new Appian Community Edition, the free version of our product, as a developer on the Marketing team. This role allowed me to be in the technical space but with more responsibility, more involvement in the product strategy, and on a new team where I could see the impact of my work.

We’re developing a product-led marketing strategy, building experiences into Appian Community Edition, and guiding users with video tutorials. We need developers to build those experiences from the technical side, and it’s really exciting to grow the developer team within Marketing. 

At Appian, I’ve found there are many ways to find mentorship and growth opportunities. I can closely collaborate with people who don’t even sit in my department, and I think that’s because of the culture we have as a company that celebrates cross departmental community.

By building out your internal network, it can help make the transition between departments (like I did) more natural. When I was first working in technical support and experimenting with work outside of my role, my colleagues and manager encouraged me and were curious to hear what I’d learned. In my two and half years here, I’ve been able to grow into four different roles. That’s because of the environment and people who recognize your strengths and are constantly supporting your career development. 

We’re growing the developer team within Marketing, and we’re looking for people who are not only technically minded, but are also passionate about telling stories, selling an idea, and are extremely curious. 

It’s an incredible opportunity to be working in a technical role within Product Marketing, because you’re involved in more product strategy discussions than other developer roles, as well as getting to touch a lot of different aspects of technology.

Our vision is to use low-code to build applications faster, and be more attainable and accessible for our customers, and that’s an exciting mission to be part of. We’re looking to hire people who are comfortable working with the unknown, exploring paths that haven’t been walked before, and get excited about driving this vision forward.

I’ve been in the tech space for most of my career and was drawn to Appian seven years ago when it was starting to be in hyper-growth mode. I saw it as a huge opportunity for my professional growth, and to be part of an inspiring product that had great potential for customers.

At the time, I was looking for a new role where I could grow as a leader and learn about many different aspects of marketing, from events to global partner and customer campaigns. That’s what I’ve been able to explore at Appian, and I really enjoy the variety of work and being part of so much growth — both personally in my career and building out the Marketing team. 

There have been  a lot of opportunities on the Marketing team to innovate, and take our programs that were working “just fine,” to  make  them great. I’ve had some off-the-wall ideas since I got here and have been trusted to try new things. I often repeat my mantra that “if we’re going to fail, let’s fail fast, learn from it, and then move forward and try something different.” 

For example, we had our Appian World user conference scheduled for mid-March 2020, the start of the pandemic. We had a lot of debate within the whole Marketing team about what to do. Do we rebook the conference for fall 2020, or are people too overwhelmed with the unprecedented times and should we fully cancel?

We did neither, and decided to take on the challenge and do it virtually.

Within six weeks, we pulled together an extremely successful event. Our ecosystem of customers and partners showed up, gave us great feedback, our attendance was higher than ever before, and it was the first virtual conference of its size in our industry.

There were many bumps along the way, and figuring things out as we went, but it’s a testament to the people at Appian who are willing to experiment and step up to take on new challenges. This meant doing work outside of peoples’ job descriptions, and rallying together to make this successful; because as a team we agreed it was the best move to support the Sales dept, our customers and for the growth of Appian.

We all left that event with so much pride, and it was a really important milestone in peoples’ professional lives.

Across the organization and the world, everything became different with the pandemic and the way people were buying software, working, and consuming content changed. This was the first of many projects that required innovative thinking, and our team was supported and set up for success the entire way. 

The thing about growth opportunities is they can be very different and your interests change over time. On the Marketing team, it’s not uncommon to transfer between functions, to other departments, or transfer to work in other countries if that’s the kind of growth you’re looking for.

Having a support system and advocates at your company is important, and something you’ll find here. At Appian, I was impressed from the start on how accessible all the executives are, regardless of their position. It’s not common at companies to be able to book a meeting with one of your founders! 

Since I joined, I’ve participated in our new leader development program that we call the Appian MBA, which is designed for managers to grow and develop their teams. That experience has been invaluable to me. I’ve also gotten involved in our AppianWomen affinity group, which is an amazing community that offers mentorship, learning from execs, and meeting other women across the company.  

There’s a lot of opportunity here, and on the Marketing team. We’re always looking for new and creative ideas for how we can make our programs the best they can be. 

You’ll find that no day is boring, and no day is the same. You’ll never shut your computer at the end of the day without learning something new, meeting someone new, or making a difference. All of the work we’re contributing is having real impact across the organization, and with our customers and partners. That’s what it means to be on the Marketing team. 

I came to Appian for growth opportunities—both for myself professionally, and for the growth potential I saw in the company. Seven years later, those are still the reasons I'm here. Our team has grown tremendously and we’re not slowing down anytime soon! This is your chance to be part of it. 

See our open career opportunities here.