Tania Francis
“Your customers don’t care about your company’s growth or unit economics. They care about what problem you’re solving for them and how you’re solving it.”
Leading one major growth initiative or turnaround for a Fortune 500 company would be a career achievement for most professionals. Trove partner Tania has led two -- Expedia’s entry into Latin America and the turnaround of Amazon’s Kindle business worldwide-- and she’s just getting started. The daughter of a Mexican diplomat, Tania is a proud immigrant who assumed she’d follow her mother’s footsteps. She started down that path, but it wasn’t long before she came across a Brand Manager opportunity that changed everything. The opportunity to perfect and bring to market consumer products brought Tania a passion and joy that she had not experienced before. When she found herself obsessing over perfecting a popcorn bag for a movie theater chain, she knew that product and brand management were her calling.
After spending the first part of her career working with consumer products, Tania became the Head of Marketing for the Mexican Stock Exchange, which was undergoing a significant transformation, from a physical stock exchange to a digital-only market. Spearheading the creation of a net new, business critical digital experience represented another pivotal moment for Tania: the moment she became hooked on tech. After earning her MBA at Darden School of Business, University of Virginia, Tania picked up where she left off, accepting a brand management role at Microsoft overseeing the iconic Office brand and launching the Dynamics brand portfolio. Over the next three years, she became adept at building and bringing to market new tech products globally. She worked closely with product teams and loved it so much that she transitioned into a Product Marketing role where she worked closely with research and international teams to develop multi-audience marketing strategies that would later catapult the Dynamic brand into a billion dollar business within two years.
Armed with this experience, Tania accepted a role at Expedia, which had no localized presence for customers in Latin America and Emerging Markets. She immediately recognized an opportunity to create a more relevant experience for that large and growing market. While CEO Dara Khosrowshahi was on-board conceptually, he admitted that the company lacked much expertise to make it happen. Tania suddenly found herself leading cross-functional teams across Expedia and managing a startup within a massive organization. Unfazed, her team began to sort through the questions at hand, from should we start in Mexico, Brazil, or somewhere else, to how quickly do we scale, to which channels should we leverage, to how do we ensure this is profitable? Countless hours of hard work to scale this business line proved Tania’s instincts spot-on: within four years, Expedia’s Latin America business was driving over $1 billion annually. Additionally, the GTM playbook she built became a formula for growth, with Expedia leveraging it to enter numerous other markets.
Ready for a new challenge, Tania joined Amazon as its Global Head of Marketing for Kindle Devices. Compared to entering a new market, this role had a very different remit. While Kindle was the strongest brand in Amazon’s portfolio outside of the Amazon brand itself, the devices were losing their luster. Tania was tasked with rekindling (pun intended!) customers’ love for Kindle. After painstaking research and analysis, Tania and her team determined that the way to do this was not through advertising or traditional marketing alone, but rather by reinventing Kindle as a product that delivered an innovative experience across devices, establishing its unique position and one that could compete with tablets and smartphones. They doubled down on their customer focus, streamlining the Kindle product portfolio, and delivering on relevant innovations to meet the needs of different audiences and reading habits. Turning around a significant brand, including witnessing it become a big, mature, growing business again, was very rewarding.
After Amazon, Tania dipped her toes in the startup world, most notably for a digital, mission-driven bank. There she led efforts to consolidate the bank’s product marketing portfolio and streamline messaging so that new and existing products better resonated with customers and were widely adopted and used. However, for the first time in her career, Tania saw first-hand the ramifications of launching products that were not developed with the user at the center. Despite her best efforts, the bank began to lose traction with its customers. This got Tania thinking about the mistakes that startups make early in their growth stage and how to avoid them. Most notably, she reflected on how important it is to build a foundation for growth and scalability, as well as how startup leaders in particular must develop a culture of focus and customer obsession. Caring about short term investor needs and competitor dynamics is important, long term success ultimately comes from delivering on consumer needs.
Most recently, Tania launched a consulting business to help early stage startup founders develop their full-stack marketing and product teams and strategies, tapping into her superpower of mining business insights to identify and solve real customer problems through innovation. Building world-class products takes a village and starts with strong foundations. Her support has helped founders differentiate their customer story from their investor story, build scalable foundations for growth, solidify their unit economics, and secure funding, and it’s given her the opportunity to do what she loves most: identifying and unpacking real customer problems, contributing to user-centric solutions, and delivering those solutions to the people who will most benefit from them.
Contact Tania
LinkedIn Email: tania (at) francis.com
Email hello@trovecommunity.com or contact us for an introduction.
