One of Notion’s core operating values is that we are owners of our mission. It’s a big mission — making software toolmaking ubiquitous. Achieving it requires strong leaders who understand how our product, our business, and our community fit together.
That’s why I’m so excited to announce our first Chief Marketing Officer, Rachel Hepworth.
Rachel was one of Notion’s early marketing hires and has been essential to the company’s growth. During the last three years, she scaled the Marketing team (now nearly 70 people!), overseeing Product Marketing, Growth Marketing, International, Content, and Demand Gen. She’ll now lead Communications, Community, and Creative teams as well.
There are few people who have Rachel’s breadth of experience when it comes to building companies through product-led growth. She was the first Marketer at The Climate Corporation, which sold to Monsanto for over $1B. She led Product Marketing teams at LinkedIn. She spent nearly four years at Slack, founding the Growth Marketing team and helping take the company public. Most recently, she was the VP of Marketing at Pilot.
Over the last decade, Rachel has built Marketing teams at companies in different stages of their growth, from Series A startups to public companies. We’re excited to have her experience, grit, and vision on our leadership bench as we continue to scale.
But, enough from me. Let’s hear from Rachel herself:
Rachel, you were one of Notion’s early marketing hires. How has the company changed since you’ve joined?
Community and user love were two of the reasons I joined Notion. I’ve worked at companies that had incredible word of mouth growth, but the personal connection people felt to Notion was at another level. Over the years, we’ve steadily developed more multi-user (and multi-product) use cases, and we’re serving larger and larger customers. So the company that started as primarily a B2C organization must become great at building and marketing to B2B customers. The challenge and opportunity at Notion is how we continue growing with our customers without losing focus on the community and product experience that earned their love in the first place.
Reflecting on your time at Notion, what’s been one of the biggest highlights?
Building this team has been a huge privilege. It’s incredible to watch people grow with the company and take on new challenges. And it feels like every quarter we open up new capabilities — like creating a Demand Gen function, building our International Marketing team, or shipping our first global brand campaign. This team is filled with people who are so talented at their craft. I learn something new every day from them.
Now let’s look forward. What are you excited to accomplish in Notion’s future?
We’re in a period of significant change due to advancements in AI. Notion is uniquely well positioned to capitalize on this shift, and I’m really proud of how we’ve been early movers in the market with our AI writer and autofill features. We are going to continue innovating and staying at the forefront of the conversation. I’m excited about some big product announcements planned for the next year — they signal an entirely new era for Notion.
I know Notion plays a key role in your work. As a marketer, what’s a Notion workflow other marketers need to know about?
I’ll give you two! The first is around user insights — it’s so important to talk to customers, but wading through pages of notes to find the “so what” can be hugely time consuming. Notion AI has made it much easier for me to understand the needs of our users at scale. I’ll use the Summarize feature to reduce the noise across my messy notes and highlight the major insights from dozens of user conversations. These summaries help drive key marketing decisions across our team.
The second is through templates. Notion has thousands of templates to help kickstart work, and you can create your own templates that are specific to your team’s needs. We have a go-to-market template I love that helps us coordinate really large and complex launches. It includes a section for user feedback, like what I mentioned above, as well as sections for each channel owner to build out their own strategy. Plus, it’s always changing based on what we learn from campaigns and launches.
