Resume

Gavin Johnson

Marketing leader with a technical background in software development and systems administration. Experience leading launches, positioning, campaigns, and sales enablement for developer tools, databases, cloud infrastructure, and AI products.

• Deep technical background (former dev/sysadmin)
• Product launches, GTM, positioning, and messaging
• Developer tools, databases, cloud infra, and AI
• Technical content: blogs, decks, web, enablement
• Analytics, experimentation, and BI
• Trusted lead for cross-functional execution

Experience

Pinecone

Los Angeles, CA (Remote)

Technical Product Marketing Manager

2025–Present

Lead product marketing for Pinecone, driving GTM across positioning, launches, campaigns, competitive strategy, Sales enablement, and technical content. Managed and mentored a junior Product Marketing Manager.

• Led Pinecone’s largest launches, including Dedicated Read Nodes, BYOC, and Full-text Search. Owned launch strategy, positioning and messaging, blogs, web updates, emails, social, Sales enablement, and sustained post-launch promotion.
• Established and ran Pinecone’s launch motion. Managed the launch calendar and coordinated Product, Engineering, DevRel, Sales, and Marketing.
• Reworked Pinecone’s core product story and Sales narrative around use cases, creating positioning and messaging for semantic search, recommendations, and RAG/agents.
• Built Pinecone’s competitive content and sales enablement, producing benchmark-based one-sheets for Turbopuffer, Weaviate, Qdrant, AWS S3 Vectors, and OpenSearch/Elastic. Organized competitive resources and developed training for GTM onboarding and recurring Sales enablement.
• Developed growth campaigns for OpenSearch competitive takeout, Dedicated Read Nodes, and BYOC, including campaign strategy, paid media messaging, Sales/BDR messaging, webinars, and supporting technical content.
• Launched Pinecone’s Los Angeles developer community from scratch, creating a monthly agentic AI meetup series that draws 40–80 attendees per event with approximately $150 in total company spend across all events.
• Wrote and edited technical GTM content across launch and technical blogs, product pages, pitch decks, FAQs, newsletters, release notes, customer stories, and event collateral.

Pulumi

Los Angeles, CA (Remote)

Director of Technical Product Marketing

2024–2025

Led product marketing, driving strategy across messaging, launches, content, and enablement. Delivered numerous product launches, revamped sales and analyst materials, and played a key role in defining Pulumi’s platform engineering positioning.

• Led launch strategy and GTM execution for Pulumi IDP, positioning it as a modular internal developer platform with built-in guardrails and self-service workflows.
• Led the launch of Pulumi ESC, a secrets and configuration management system, including messaging, positioning, and content development across web, slides, and enablement.
• Developed messaging for security-focused features like ESC (secrets management), RBAC enhancements, and audit capabilities.
• Worked with Product and Engineering on user activation, onboarding, and nurture flows.
• Created booth messaging, demo flows, and technical content for events including KubeCon, Google Cloud Next, and AWS re:Invent.
• Created analyst briefing materials, newsletters, sales decks, web pages, tearsheets, and other GTM content.

Earthly

Los Angeles, CA (Remote)

Director of Product & Marketing

2022–2024

Led Earthly’s go-to-market efforts as their sole marketing employee. Helped grow ARR from $0 to $250,000+ and active, paying users from 0 to 100+. Rewrote all positioning and messaging. Fully redesigned company website. Data analytics lead.

• Interviewed more than 75 users of OSS Earthly or customers of Earthly Cloud. Collected product feedback and used it to influence the product roadmap and develop product positioning and messaging. Earthly’s first paying customer (and several others) came from these interviews.
• Planned and executed more than 10 product launches. Wrote and edited multiple launch blog posts, press releases, social media posts, and internal launch communications. TechCrunch covered one of the launches.
• Rewrote all of Earthly’s positioning and messaging. Introduced positioning and messaging framework documents as well as per-product positioning and messaging. Tested messaging using Google Ads and on-website A/B testing.
• Planned and executed a complete website redesign (development done by contractors). Wrote every page on the website except the FAQ as of May 2024. Old vs. New.
• Led data analytics efforts. Planned and implemented a MarTech stack to provide advanced BI. Led the transition of CDPs from RudderStack to Segment. Implemented and/or integrated Salesforce, Segment, Snowflake, dbt, Hex, and GrowthBook (A/B testing). Got us off Google Analytics.
• Secured, with a PR contractor, appearances for the CEO on six tech and developer podcasts, including Coffee and Open Source, The Jeff Bullas Show, The Tech and Main Podcast, The Effective Developer Podcast, The Business of Open Source Podcast, and devtools.FM.
• Introduced standardized documentation of marketing assets: positioning and messaging frameworks, customer quote inventory, “wall of love” inventory, and media kit.
• Wrote user/customer emails and configured email automation. All new community member emails and new Earthly Cloud user emails come from my email address (via email automation) and respond to me.

Twilio Segment

Los Angeles, CA (Remote)

Senior Product Marketing Manager

2021–2022

Led go-to-market messaging, campaign planning, and launches for Segment’s core features and its data infrastructure innovation initiative. Collaborated with Product Management on product strategy, roadmap, and product design docs.

• Collaborated with Product Management on product strategy, roadmap, and product design docs. Their reverse ETL functionality and change to a data warehouse-first approach was influenced by this article I wrote while at RudderStack.
• Came up with and co-wrote the first two blog posts about the modern data stack in a thought leadership series (first post, second post). Collaborated with PM to build a strategy around the content and distribute writing across our team of subject matter experts in R&D.
• Led go-to-market for Regional Segment—Segment deployed on EU infrastructure—a major GDPR-focused feature. Wrote the launch blog post. It was Segment’s most significant product launch in Q1 2022.
• Launched several other features of varying scale—14 launches in H1 2022. Wrote and edited multiple launch blog posts and communications, enabling the Sales team on important new features.

Yugabyte

Los Angeles, CA (Remote)

Senior Product Marketing Manager, Yugabyte Cloud

2021

Led go-to-market strategy and execution for Yugabyte Cloud—Yugabyte’s fully-managed distributed SQL database. Wrote content and delivered webinars.

• Launched Yugabyte Cloud. Wrote positioning and messaging and web page copy. Edited the press release and launch blog. Coordinated the launch campaign.
• Wrote technical blog posts and customer case studies.
• Initiated and managed sponsorships and promotions with Scott Hanselman and Corey Quinn (developer “influencers”) and a few tech publications.

RudderStack

Los Angeles, CA (Remote)

Product Marketing Lead

2020–2021

First US-based Marketing hire, and first Marketing lead. Introduced a product launch process and cadence, executed launches, wrote brand and launch messaging, built a content narrative and strategy, wrote thought leadership, edited all significant content, presented at conferences, initiated sponsorships and promotions, and generally led Marketing, excluding Demand Generation.

• Introduced launch tiers and a launch cadence, and formalized the launch process. Built a standard, tiered template for launch activities that made it easy to appropriately size launch efforts based on importance while ensuring all appropriate tactics were executed. Launches were scheduled monthly, and feature roundups were scheduled bi-weekly.
• Executed several launches. Managed the launch process. Wrote launch messaging to guide content creation. Wrote launch blog posts and edited ancillary launch posts. Wrote and released press releases.
• Wrote and coordinated social posts and community posts. Built audiences and promoted posts on LinkedIn and Twitter when paid promotion was appropriate.
• Wrote brand messaging and product/feature messaging. Created the overall brand messaging guide and individual messaging for each major feature/SKU. Wrote all of the copy for their April/May/June 2021 website refresh.
• Acted as Editor for all of RudderStack’s content. Built a content narrative and strategy for their 3-person, India-based Content team and the leadership team to execute on. Edited all non-templated content. Wrote CDP-focused thought leadership.
• Initiated and managed sponsorships and promotions with The New Stack (content affiliate), dev.to (multiple podcasts), The Data Engineering Podcast, changelog (podcast and newsletter), and more.
• Pitched RudderStack at SXSW Pitch 2021 (pitch video). RudderStack was selected as 1 of 40 finalists for SXSW’s annual startup accelerator. I wrote and recorded the pitch video and answered for a live Q&A broadcast at SXSW 2021.

New Relic

Los Angeles, CA (Remote)

Principal Product Marketing Manager, Open Source

2020–2020

Led go-to-market strategy and execution for New Relic Open Source and New Relic’s open source instrumentation. Collaborated closely with product management, engineering, and sales engineering to identify open source projects and contributions worth investing in and promoting.

Principal Solutions Marketing Manager, Product Marketing Management

2018–2020

Built and executed the strategy for New Relic’s Digital Customer (DCX) solution. Led the creation of DCX Marketing and Sales content. Integrated DCX into New Relic’s campaigns and tactics. Represented New Relic as an external speaker.

• Built New Relic’s DCX solution strategy. Analyzed internal and external content developed for and tactics previously used by other New Relic solutions. Performed competitive analysis. Developed a DCX content and tactics roadmap and calendar.
• Wrote New Relic’s DCX solution positioning and messaging. Described how we wanted the DCX solution to be perceived by the market, who our targeted personas were, and wrote taglines, copy blocks, and email templates for use by Marketing and Sales.
• Created DCX solution content for Sales. Collaborated with the solution consulting group from Sales to build industry-specific DCX content (e.g., pitch decks, solution guide decks, industry primers, discovery questions, objection handling, etc.). Targeted four industries: Media, Retail, FinServ, and Travel.
• Integrated DCX solution into Marketing campaigns and tactics. Worked cross-functionally with demand generation, content and creative, digital marketing, and field marketing. Led creation of and co-wrote content (e.g., articles, solution sheets, white papers, etc.) and landing pages. Developed an event response campaign and cadence.
• Represented New Relic as an external speaker. Presented on the importance of DCX for modern, digital businesses and connecting technical application performance to business outcomes. Presented at New Relic’s FutureStack Los Angeles 2019, WP Engine Summit 2019, and Gartner IT Symposium Xpo 2019.

AT&T Mobility & Entertainment

El Segundo, CA

Lead Product Marketing Manager, Video Lifecycle Strategy

2017–2018

Built analytical models and business cases for strategic project analysis. Managed enablement projects for product go-to-market, ensuring ancillary systems and processes worked correctly for customers.

• Built the analytical model and business case that got Netflix on DIRECTV Stream’s streaming box. Built an analytical scenario model comparing multiple levels of integration with Netflix. Collaborated across Marketing, Finance, and AT&T Corporate Strategy teams to align on assumptions and key takeaways and build the executive presentation deck.
• Developed product sunsetting strategy for AT&T’s IPTV service. Built a yearly profitability model for the IPTV service. Used existing subscriber and revenue as well as churn and churn acceleration projections to project revenue 5 years forward. Collaborated with engineering to build a 5-year IPTV cost projection model.
• Managed product enablement projects. Ensured customer-impacting issues did not occur because of internal, cross-team coordination issues (e.g., got a customer authentication feature for AT&T TV’s upcoming streaming box in the product backlog, engaged a third party to provide at-home delivery for AT&T TV’s upcoming streaming box, etc.).
• Built profitability models, business cases, and recommendations for VP and SVP-initiated innovation proposals (e.g., TV service for Cricket Mobile customers, a hyperlocal video service, etc.).

Deloitte Digital / Deloitte Consulting

Los Angeles, CA

Served as a trusted client partner, consulting at Fox for ~2 years. Led teams to create, expand, and maintain custom-built business applications for diverse companies, from startups (Human Longevity Inc.) to Fortune 10 (AT&T).

• Led expansion and maintenance of Fox Theatrical’s global release planning application. Managed two teams of onshore and offshore consultants and developers through two major expansion projects and the implementation of supporting systems (version control, CI/CD, ETL, etc.). Led cross-functional teams of marketing users, IT leadership, and our consultants through the entire SDLC for each project.
• Served as a trusted client partner. Traveled with my primary client at Fox to Europe and Asia to introduce Global Marketing to major global release planning application updates and promote application use in non-domestic regions. Also used these trips to gather first-hand feedback on the application that informed future features and fixes.
• Managed tech consulting projects for a variety of companies. Led teams of business analysts, consultants, and developers through project design and delivery (e.g., led a team through the development of a digital marketing transformation roadmap for a major grocery wholesaler, led a team through the deployment of a tailored Salesforce CRM application for a biotech startup, etc.).
• As an MBA intern, I defined program management processes and a quality management plan for a multi-project customer service enhancement program at T-Mobile. Established PMO reporting templates and cadence.
• Recognized with the “Extraordinary Moments” award from company leadership for being a company-wide top performer at my level for multiple years consecutively.

Manager (Consulting)

2016–2017

Senior Consultant

2014–2016

Summer Associate

2013

National Technical Systems

Calabasas, CA

Microsoft Dynamics ERP Administrator

2009–2012

Led a cross-company ERP implementation serving 600+ business users at 20+ facilities. Managed 2 internal developers and 7 consultants through the design, development, and delivery of system customizations.

• Led cross-functional team of business users from finance, sales, marketing, operations, and IT; developers; and consultants to consolidate fragmented CRM, sales, and financial systems into a single ERP system.
• Owned yearly project CapEx budget for the ERP system. Worked with CIO to build yearly CapEx requests. Managed hardware purchases, software licensing, third-party add-on licensing, and consulting costs.
• DBA for the SQL Server database. Built and maintained off-site redundancy and failover mechanisms for the database. Managed all ERP report development.

Timber Products Company

Springfield, OR

Computer Programmer / Analyst

2007–2009

Built enhancements and reports for the company’s Microsoft Dynamics ERP system. Partnered with logistics, inventory, and finance teams to optimize workflows.

• Designed, developed, and deployed ERP features and reports.
• Led reporting infrastructure planning and development.

ViewPlus Technologies

Corvallis, OR

Product Development Assistant

November 2004–June 2007

Developed testing protocols for and tested Braille printer drivers and firmware for release. Developed a text-to-Braille application for release.

Education

University of Southern California

MBA, Master of Business Administration (3.78 GPA)

May 2014

• Beta Gamma Sigma, Business Honor Society.
• Data Analysis Lead for Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), Business Advisory Council Research Project. Foreign Direct Investment across APEC: Impediments and Opportunities for Improvement.
  • A large, 12-person MBA research project sponsored by and presented to APEC.
• Program Lead, Marshall Case Competition Program.
• Director of Technology Consulting, Marshall Consulting & Strategy Club.
• Business of Entertainment Graduate Certificate from the USC School of Cinematic Arts, May 2014.

Oregon State University

BS, Computer Science (3.61 GPA)

June 2007

• Cum Laude.
• Upsilon Pi Epsilon, Computer Science Honor Society.

Other

• Software: ChatGPT/Codex and Claude/Claude Code, Google Workspace, Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, Figma, and too many more to list.
• Programming: SQL, Java, Golang, Python, JavaScript, HTML, CSS.
• Interests: Brazilian Jiu Jitsu black belt, photographer, and former marathoner.