Katrina Wong is the Chief Marketing Officer of New Relic, a $1 billion revenue observability platform that went private in a $6 billion deal in late 2023. She joined in May 2024 as the company’s first CMO, responsible for brand evolution, demand generation, and market expansion. She previously held marketing leadership roles at Segment and Salesforce and has been part of seven successful company exits across her career. She studied environmental toxicology before moving into tech, and applies a scientific approach to hypothesis testing and measurement in marketing.

We discuss:

* Why stretch goals, not achievable targets, create the conditions to overachieve pipeline

* How New Relic moved from 3x to 5x pipeline goals with the same budget and eventually eliminated the lower goal

* How sprint-based demand gen works: setting numeric goals Monday, checking trajectory Wednesday, hitting targets by Friday

* Why the sprint facilitator’s role is to probe the how, not just receive status updates

* When database growth plateaus, how distribution through partnerships, communities, and influencers unlocks pipeline within weeks

* How defining ICP through compelling events in top deals, not firmographic patterns, enables targeted lookalike motions

* How Katrina uses customer advisory boards and co-innovation sessions to identify emerging problems before they surface broadly

* How New Relic moved from claiming “intelligent observability” to naming a specific pain point: engineers troubleshooting AI-generated code at 3AM, at a scale that can’t be solved by humans alone

* Why AI reduces the manual work of marketing and restores space for creativity, storytelling, and brand building

* How Katrina rolled out AI adoption bottoms-up through a monthly marketing showcase, then layered in top-down governance

* Why the CMO role means wearing the company hat, not just the marketing hat

Where to find Katrina Wong:

* LinkedIn

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