Spend a remote workday with Unqork Product Marketing Manager Sam Kramer to find out how he spends his time in between Zoom calls.
Have you ever wondered how exactly Unqork team members spend their days? In this new series, Unqork @ Work, one Unqork team member will walk you through an entire workday, showing you how they spend their time in a remote working environment.
Today’s featured Unqorker is Sam Kramer, a Product Marketing Manager supporting our core Marketing team. A Product Marketer articulates what’s different about Unqork’s technology and communicates that to the world, while also thinking about how the product goes to market and how to appeal to prospective clients in those spaces. Sam builds one-pagers, conducts research on our competitors, and much more—but he always makes time for a run and a dip into the blogosphere. Here’s how he spent one of his days last week, direct from Sam himself.
6:30 AM: I wake up. I’m feeling pretty energetic this morning, so I decide to jump out of bed and head out for a run. I’ve been running regularly since high school, and I continued partially because it’s the easiest form of exercise in New York City. I’ve since relocated to Florida to work remotely, but the habit stuck. Whenever I make it out for a run, I try to beat my personal record for a 2.5-mile loop. Last week I was at 19:17, but today I finish at 18:15—so I’m happy with the improvements I’ve been seeing lately!
7:30 AM: I head back in to make breakfast, which is usually a blueberry smoothie with a sprinkle of Special K Vanilla Almond Cereal. Today I also skip coffee and decide to brew a cup of tea instead. A friend just sent me a nice set of jasmine tea, so I’ve been enjoying that in the mornings. I eat while catching up on a couple of emails.
7:45 AM: After finishing breakfast, I switch gears and open up my daily Mailbrew digest, which pulls from popular blogs, newsletters, and Twitter. I’ve always loved long-form blogs, and I think it’s so cool that you can discover prolific modern philosophers and business analysts that are just sitting at home in their pajamas writing super insightful articles. A couple of years ago I interned for a blog called “Wait But Why,” and I’m still their biggest fan ever, so I love to follow their stuff. I also just recently discovered a blog called “More To That” that I’m obsessed with.
After I’ve caught up on some recent blog and newsletter content, I like to spend some time with whatever book I’m reading—right now it’s A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor by Hank Green.
8:45 AM: I crack my laptop back open and start working. Today I don’t have any meetings until 11, but then I have a few back-to-back, so I review my priorities for the day before I get started with my first task…
9:15 AM: …which is to write the script for a new demo video about group retirement producer onboarding. We do demos for each solution on the website, as well as the Unqork platform as a whole. Usually, the way this process works is that the Go-to-Market team will come to us and say, “Hey, here’s the raw footage of a demo we just used to walk someone through an application.” I ask them to describe the solution to me as if they were telling a friend about it so that I know how to describe it in simple, straightforward terms. Today I already have the demo footage to work with, so I just spend some time rewatching it before writing out the script for the final demo video.
11:00 AM: I wrap up my script and open up Zoom for a one-on-one meeting with my manager Tony. Tony’s responsible for a lot of Unqork’s content production, as well as increasing the close rate of our Sales team by making sure they have what they need to make a sale. I definitely want to sing Tony’s praises here for a second—he’s a really fantastic manager, and I think he brings a ton of calmness and maturity to the company. He’s taught me a lot about people management and operating in a larger company, which is a completely separate skill from the day-to-day work I do.
Little-known fact: Sam’s voice is the one you hear narrating all our demo videos.
We spend most of our meeting reviewing my priorities for the week—I need to write and record a couple of new demo videos, make some competitive battlecards for the Sales team, and update some of the landing pages on our website.
11:30 AM: It’s time for our weekly Marketing Team meeting. We spend some time introducing our new joiners of the week, and then we review our team objectives and key results (OKRs). At the end of the meeting, we always celebrate “wins” from the week prior. Today we’re excited about a recent advertising campaign that performed really well and helped promote one of our new webinars. Our Demand Gen team was able to drive a lot of new traffic to the website, so we take the time to highlight that work and call out key team members that helped on the project.
12:00 PM: I have a meeting with a few team members to discuss an upcoming webcast about low-code vs. no-code. A lot of potential clients don’t always see the difference between the two—and we think there’s an enormous difference—so we want to talk about the low-code pain points that no-code solves. We discuss our strategy for raising awareness and gathering attendees for the webcast, and we brainstorm what kinds of marketing materials we’ll need for the event.
1:00 PM: Time for a break! I have a big bowl of pineapple for a snack while I respond to a bunch of Slack messages and all of the funny gifs my team circulates.
1:15 PM: I get back to work editing a webinar our team produced today. Once it’s ready, I go ahead and publish it so that we have a link ready for post-event circulation tomorrow.
2:00 PM: I have a meeting with the Sales Enablement team to discuss which assets should be most important for Sales onboarding and training. We talk about existing assets that they can use and discuss if there are any upcoming demo videos that I’ll be creating that will be useful to new Sales hires to review.
2:30 PM: I meet with one of our Senior Technical Trainers, Zach Weinreb, for our virtual Donut. Donut is a product that integrates with Slack and pulls two people from different channels together and connects them to encourage a conversation. We used to do this kind of thing in person, which was much more fun, but we’ve had to make adjustments since we’re all remote because of the pandemic. Either way, it’s nice to connect. Especially with all the new hires we’ve onboarded since we’ve gone remote, there are a lot of people I haven’t gotten the chance to chat with one-on-one yet, so it’s interesting to hear about what everyone’s working on.
3:00 PM: I record and publish the group retirement producer onboarding video. I didn’t have a lot of experience with voiceover work before starting at Unqork, but it’s been really fun. I joke with my team that I have to channel my inner Tyra Banks to really talk with my eyebrows and whole face. Even though you’re just talking to a microphone, I think being as emotive as possible really helps, and hopefully, it comes through in the recording!
4:30 PM: I start gathering some details about a competitor product for our next competitive battlecard. This involves a lot of research, so I try to just get in the zone and read up on everything I can.
6:00 PM: I send my competitive analysis to our fabulous content marketer Evan and designer Erin for copyediting and styling. They’ll make sure the research I dug up looks and sounds great for our Sales team to pull from whenever they need it.
6:30 PM: I log off for the day and FaceTime my mom. She’s also in Florida, but I’m currently living at my girlfriend’s grandparents’ vacant house, so FaceTime is still the best way to keep in touch. Living in the same state definitely has its perks, though—last week I was able to join her on the two-hour drive to get her COVID vaccine!
7:00 PM: I go on a jog with my girlfriend Ariela. I’ve managed to get her into running during quarantine, and it’s really great to be able to get out of the house together.
8:15 PM: Time for dinner! Lately, we’ve been loving Kettle & Fire bone broth (the miso flavor) with Maruchan instant ramen noodles.
9:00 PM: After dinner, I end up jumping on another FaceTime, this time with the whole family.
9:30 PM: I relax at the end of the day by watching the final episode of Lupin on Netflix. It’s a fantastic show and I’ve been recommending it a lot, but the last episode ends up leaving me with more questions than answers. I’d still really recommend the show, but if anyone is watching, I’ll warn you not to go into episode five thinking it’s going to be resolved. There was so much drama that needed to be figured out in the last 45 minutes, and that’s not what happened—guess we’ll just have to wait for Part 2.
10:30 PM: Sleep!
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To hear more perspectives from other Unqorkers, check out our Creator Spotlight series.
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