Building a Movement Instead of Chasing Demand with Katrina Wong, CMO at New Relic

Katrina Wong is the Chief Marketing Officer of New Relic, the intelligent observability platform, where she has led brand, demand, and communications. Before taking on the CMO role, she started her career as a consultant at PwC. She later on became Divisional CMO and VP of Marketing at Twilio Segment and held marketing and go-to-market leadership roles at Hired, Zuora, Salesforce, and SAP. 

In this episode, Katrina joins Sydney Sloan and Jon Miller to share how New Relic repositioned its category as intelligent observability and turned that into an AI story told chapter by chapter. She explains why she reports new business and post-sale pipeline separately in a consumption business, and why one marketing team owns both.

Katrina also walks through how her marketing engineering and AI team rebuilt reporting on Gemini, the 85 agents running competitive intel every morning, and what happened when an agency sent her team 200 variations to review.

Jump Into the Conversation
(00:00) Katrina’s path from consulting to marketing

(05:21) Being a strategic CMO and redefining observability for AI

(09:13) Telling the AI story like chapters of a book

(11:48) How marketing proved AI modernization to the board

(14:18) Separating new business and post-sale pipeline

(16:21) Customer hackathons and the link between engagement and revenue

(18:01) Building a trusted BI layer with vibe coding

(20:53) Humans in the loop and the problem of too much AI content

(23:18) Gemini gems for sales and 85 daily competitive agents

(25:12) The pillars of a superhuman marketing team

(27:05) Gratitude, mentors, and key takeaways

Episode Takeaways

• Take a bold stance on your category before someone else sets it for you. New Relic repositioned observability as intelligent observability, was first to claim it, and Gartner recognized the company for its AI vision the following year.
• Tell your AI story in chapters. Chapter one explained why AI matters in observability. Chapter two named the problem: code volume growing beyond human scale. That led to the brand campaign, Welcome to the Superhuman Era.
• Measure pipeline the way your business makes money. In a consumption business, new business pipeline is a leading indicator, but revenue comes from usage. New Relic tracks both, and one marketing team owns both.
• Keep humans in the loop, even when AI can produce more. When an agentic agency sent back 200 variations, Katrina's team realized more output wasn't the answer if no one could review it.
• Remove the bottlenecks between marketing and the field. Gemini gems for competitive and value selling replaced last-minute Slack asks, and 85 daily agents now draft most competitive updates before a human fact-checks them.

Standout Quote

• "Sometimes the move to be strategic is to take a bold stance and see if it pays off." – Katrina Wong

Guest Links

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katrinawong11/ 
• New Relic Website: https://newrelic.com/ 

Mentioned in this Episode

• Zuora: https://www.zuora.com/
• Gartner: https://www.gartner.com/
• Klaviyo: https://www.klaviyo.com/
• Tien Tzuo: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tientzuo/ 
• Sue Barsamian: https://www.linkedin.com/in/suebarsamian/
• Carilu Dietrich: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carilu/ 
• Tom Hartman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-hartman/
• Jennifer Covington: https://www.linkedin.com/in/covingtonjennifer/ 

More from The B2B CMO Project

• Website: https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/ 
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/b2bcmoproject/ 
• Jon Miller: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonmiller2/ 
• Sydney Sloan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sydsloan/ 
• More Episodes: https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/podcasts