Meet a Lexi: Kristy Malik, VP, Success (Australia)

Lexi (n): an extraordinary human and Lexer team member who works hard behind the scenes to build powerful products and support customers’ success. Our “Meet a Lexi” series presents exclusive interviews with Lexis across the business to showcase the people who make Lexer great.

Kristy Malik is Lexer’s VP, Success (Australia), helping grow the lifetime value of our customers by delivering outstanding experiences.

With more than 6 years under her belt at Lexer, this is the longest role she’s held in her career, after a serendipitous pivot of industries—and her passion for data-driven creativity has made an incredible impact on our customers and our team.

We sat down with Kristy to learn more about her experience here at Lexer.

What was life like before Lexer?

I basically grew up working in advertising—more specifically, old school direct marketing.

Direct marketing is all about being data-driven and using consumer data and insight to drive segmentation, targeting, creativity, all of that good stuff. The nature of that craft meant that it created a really strong foundation for what I call direct marketing 2.0, which is basically digital marketing and customer relationship management.

I really loved working in agencies, but after a time it became really apparent that the distance between data and creativity was getting greater and greater, and I wanted to spend more time trying to be less instinctual and more data-driven to solve that.

Life before Lexer was still very focused on data, customers and creativity, and, Lexer was a natural extension of what was next for me in terms of bringing those passions to life. I’m really quite blessed that I’m still able to use that creativity in more focused and pointed ways. It was a nice serendipitous career transition moment.

How did you find Lexer?

I found Lexer through relationships, as I worked at M&C Saatchi with both Aaron Wallis, our Founder and CTO, and Dave Whittle, our CEO. Because I was looking for something that was different to traditional advertising, but still wanted to be able to be close to customer data and be creative in that sense, I decided I needed to look for something else.

I left M&C and in no less than 24 hours, Dave Whittle called me up and said, “I’ve heard you’re leaving.” And that’s how I came to work at Lexer.

Tell me about life at Lexer. Favorite part?

Life at Lexer is fast and curious!

There are lots of favorite moments in my days at Lexer, but for one, it’s uncovering some “aha” moments with customers using their data. It’s rewarding when we’re able to deliver a strategy together and very quickly see the impact of that execution. I love partnering with our customers and seeing the fruits of that labor.

Also, hands down, I have the best team. I get to work with some of the smartest and brightest people across the business—visionaries, strategists, product geniuses, customer experience specialists. Everyone brings their own unique perspective to a challenge or an opportunity and through that, we’re able to deliver really impactful ideas.

One of the most unique parts of Lexer, I think, is the care factor for you as a human. We have a number of rituals in the business that are centered on one of our six core values, and my favorite value is caring — whether that’s giving a colleague praise through our honoring ritual or taking four minutes at the start of a meeting just to breathe. That’s something I’ve never experienced at any other business before, and I highly rate it, especially through the tumultuous 18 months (and counting) that we’ve all had.

Could you describe a normal day for you at Lexer?

Day to day is a series of strategic and operational meetings, as well as some customer meetings where we talk about what we’ve delivered in partnership together, what campaigns are working, what surprising moments they’ve uncovered through their experience with seeing their customer data in our platform, what hasn’t worked and digging into understanding what we can do to try and change how they’re using their data for more meaningful customer experiences.

Our customer conversations are focused on what’s next, new initiatives and making sure that everything we’re working on together is very much centred around customers’ needs and what they want to do next.

And then I’m always having various meetings with my team, which could be a weekly one-on-one or just a random phone call to chat through a question about how we might approach a problem or an opportunity. The days are always very full, but rewarding.

How does Lexer support you to do your best work?

I think it goes back to caring, which is one of Lexer’s core values.

The way we work has changed, but even before the pandemic, we were already working more flexibly than many other businesses. If I need a few hours of uninterrupted time to develop a strategy or proposal, then I’m usually doing this from home, before heading off to a customer meeting and making phone calls en route. And if I have some errands I need to run in the afternoon, then I’m going to fit them in between some other work without feeling like I should be at my desk. Lexer really supports you to work in a way that helps you do your best work.

I think a big factor in helping me do my best work is that I know that many things we are doing and building haven't been done before. And there’s a good understanding of that. This means that I can try a new approach and test and learn as we go without fear.

What are you looking forward to most when it comes to Lexer's future?

Right now, we’re very well-positioned as a business in terms of what’s happening in the macro space around consumer data and privacy, and what some of the big businesses like Google, Apple, and Facebook are doing that mean consumers will have greater control over how their data is used.

More and more, our customers are realizing that they also need to have more control over their destiny from a data perspective, so I’m really excited about all of the products and solutions that we’re going to be developing to help them leverage their first-party data in the best way possible. And by virtue of doing that, our customers are going to be able to deliver their customers the best experiences.

So I’m excited about the future of the business because we are really at the epicenter of some major changes that are happening in the industry.

Anything else we should know?

From my experience of having pivoted careers, moving from one industry (Advertising) to this one, I think it can be a very scary prospect for some people. You sort of come to the realization that you’ve done everything that you’ve wanted to do or were passionate about doing in that industry, and you’ve hit a fork in the road.

I think it can absolutely pay off to take a left turn instead of a right. Even though there can be a lot of unknowns, if you’re really passionate and focused, then you can succeed.

From my experience, I took a bit of a chance—I didn’t know what Lexer was going to be or become, but I’m really pleased that I took that leap of faith. Every day, there’s always something that I’m curious or passionate about that I’m really excited to work on.

Looking for your next opportunity?

Lexer is hiring 🚀 with 20 roles currently open across all departments. In the US and AUS, we’re constantly adding new roles across the business.
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