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The Way of Product with Caden DamianoPodcast and opinion column exploring product design and go-to-market execution. Author: Caden Damiano
The Way of Product is your graduate school focused on developing a taste for what great products look like. Conversations are two professionals talking shop about positioning, segmentation, excellent product design, and most importantly, taste. www.wayofproduct.com Language: en Genres: Business, Entrepreneurship, Technology Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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#177 - Marlena Sarunac: The One Phrase That Ended a Startup's Six-Month Sales Plateau
Episode 177
Monday, 4 May, 2026
Marlena Sarunac is the Fractional CMO and co-founder at The Company Advice, a women-owned marketing firm serving early-stage tech startups across health tech, insurtech, and AI. Rising to prominence in the 2020s as a growth-focused operator at the intersection of complex B2B value propositions and go-to-market strategy, she became known for turning technically dense products into compelling market narratives that drive measurable revenue outcomes. She holds a Master of Engineering in Technical Entrepreneurship from Lehigh University, where she won the Joan F. & John M. Thalheimer ‘55 EUREKA! Grand Prize in 2018.Previously, as Vice President of Marketing at Particle Health, Sarunac led the company’s marketing function from Series A through Series B over 3.5 years, building a data-driven, analytics-first growth strategy centered on revenue outcomes, cross-channel experimentation, and A/B testing across market segments. Her work established Particle Health as a trusted, humanized brand within the health data interoperability space, spanning web design, conference presence, and content programs.Earlier in her career, as Director of Marketing at Ideon — formerly Vericred, an API platform simplifying health insurance and employee benefits data exchange — Sarunac ran full-spectrum marketing operations including content strategy, PR, SEO, and trade show execution. She directly attributed 40% of all inbound website traffic to marketing initiatives, with an additional 40% driven by an SEO program she built and managed over two years.At The Company Advice, she created The Healthies, the first awards program recognizing excellence in marketing, branding, and product design in digital health, expanding the firm’s footprint as a thought leadership platform for the sector.Thanks for reading this far. I mean that. There's a lot of content out there competing for your attention, and you spent some of it here. I hope it was worth it. Even better, I hope it prompted you to think about something differently enough that you'd share it with someone who'd get something out of it too.I started this podcast because tactics never stuck with me. What stuck were stories — business biographies, autobiographies, the decisions people made and why they made them. The principle only clicks once you know the story behind it.So I built the thing I wanted to read. Every week I have two conversations with people who build in technology and product. Then I write the essay I wish I could find — one that puts you inside the conversation, through my eyes. What caught me off guard. What I kept thinking about after we hung up. Where the principle actually lives once you strip away the jargon.I make this for myself first. If you read the way I do, you’ll want it too.Subscribe to The Way of ProductPS — If you want to pitch coming on the show, or you know someone I should talk to, shoot me an email at caden@hey.com with "January752" in the subject line so it gets past my filters. I'm not optimizing for famous guests. I'm optimizing for interesting conversations, even from people who aren't LinkedIn influencers. Get full access to The Way of Product w/ Caden Damiano at www.wayofproduct.com/subscribe
