A Day In The Life Of A Senior Manager SMB Growth At TikTok
A day for a growth strategist at TikTok involves a significant amount of cross-continental collaboration, starting with responding to messages from colleagues in China and Singapore, followed by either solo strategic planning ("analyzing back-end data and identifying holes in the user funnel") or cross-functional teamwork for execution. The novelty of working at a rapidly growing company like TikTok means much of the work involves creating processes ("figuring out how to do it before we can actually do it"), with late-afternoon/evening meetings with the Asia teams completing the cycle.
Data Analysis, Cross-functional Teamwork, Strategic Planning, International Collaboration, Problem-Solving
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Kelly Mellenthin
Senior Manager, SMB Growth
TikTok
University of Southern California (USC), 2013
UCLA Anderson School of Management, Master of Business Administration (MBA)
Marketing
Technology
Sales and Client Management
Scholarship Recipient, Took Out Loans, Worked 20+ Hours in School, Greek Life Member
Video Highlights
1. The role involves a significant amount of cross-functional collaboration, working with colleagues across different time zones and departments to execute strategies.
2. A large part of the job is data analysis, identifying areas for improvement in user funnels and developing strategies to address them.
3. Because TikTok is a relatively young company, much of the work involves figuring out how to do things for the first time, requiring creativity and problem-solving skills.
Transcript
What does the day in the life of a growth strategist look like?
I'm sure everyone tells you every day is not the same, and I don't think in any career any day is the same. For me, that actually rings true as well.
If I were to distill it down, I work with China and Singapore a lot. We have big offices in both those places, and with the time zone difference, they're usually awake when I'm asleep and vice versa. So I'll wake up and have hundreds of messages from my colleagues over there to answer. I usually spend about an hour every morning doing that.
Once that's all done, depending on where we are in the strategic planning cycle, it really depends on what my days look like. If we're in deep planning mode, it's pretty solo work, like analyzing our backend data and thinking about where the biggest holes are in our user funnel. This is to identify areas for improvement and then write strategy documents for ideas and how to improve them.
If we're in the part of the cycle where the strategy has been approved, then it's usually working with cross-functional teammates to determine how to implement it. The beauty of working at a company like TikTok is that most things haven't been done yet because it's only a couple of years old. It's incredible to think how big they are now. So, a lot of what we do, we have to figure out how to do it before we can actually do it. That definitely takes up some time.
But if we've already finished that, then execution is the other side. So then I'll work on execution for that if we're in that period of the strategic planning cycle. That takes up the bulk of my day, like post-replying to Singapore and China. Then towards the end of the day, Singapore and China wake up, and that's when we usually have our meetings.
I have meetings usually between 4 and 10 p.m. Not every night, because I like to have a life too, but I try to block them. Then it's rinse and repeat. That would be a typical day, depending on what period I'm in in the strategic planning cycle.