Digital transformation in product marketing | Kirsten Jepson, Director of Product Marketing at TELUS International

What It Covers

Kirsten Jepson, Director of Product Marketing at TELUS International, covers how digital transformation reshapes product marketing strategy, including cross-functional collaboration frameworks, AI adoption, stakeholder buy-in, and tool selection. She draws on five years building TELUS International's product marketing practice from the ground up through its IPO.

Key Questions Answered

• •Cross-functional content production: Structure content creation as a multi-team workflow rather than a solo effort. For case studies, assemble product marketing, account management, marketing, and external writers on a single call, build a repeatable framework, and assign each team a defined role — product marketing extracts insight, marketing handles visual consistency, account managers supply client data.
• •Buyer journey mapping: Treat the modern B2B buyer journey as a non-linear "starburst" rather than a funnel. Buyers conduct extensive self-serve research before engaging sales, so product marketers must integrate website, email, and social interaction data simultaneously to understand where and how prospects engage — not assume a sequential path through channels.
• •Digital tool evaluation: Audit the full suite of available sales and marketing tools before committing budget. Video demo tools, for example, allow teams to track individual prospect engagement — including who viewed content, for how long, and within which company — providing granular data that informs follow-up strategy and pipeline prioritization far beyond standard email open rates.
• •Stakeholder buy-in for transformation: Build a formal business case before requesting budget for any digital transformation initiative. If the proposal fails in the current budget cycle, preserve and resubmit it when timing and budget conditions align. Jepson notes that multiple previously rejected initiatives at TELUS International were later approved once organizational readiness caught up with the proposal.
• •Build vs. buy decision: Large B2B organizations should default to evaluating partners before committing engineering resources to building proprietary solutions. As digital transformation accelerates, the partner ecosystem expands faster than internal teams can build, making a structured buy-versus-build assessment a foundational step in any product development or digital capability roadmap.