Trend Round 2 — English Monologue

Hi, I'm Johanna. I just graduated from Gonzaga with a triple major in Economics, Math, and Data Science.

The work I love is actually simple to describe. What clients say is usually scattered — a complaint here, a screenshot there, a two-line email. Data is scattered too — a number moves, and nobody can say why. I love standing in the middle of all that and turning it into something people can actually act on — and then using the result to make the next round better. And I always start from the person — first catch how the client feels, then catch the need.

Let me start with the experience that shows this best.

I was a Customer Success intern at Double Service, a B2B SaaS company. Their platform was shared by twelve municipal government clients, and I sat right between the clients and the engineers. I quickly noticed something that was funny and painful at the same time: the tickets engineers received often just said, "the button is broken." So they had to rebuild the whole story before they could even start. Exhausting for everyone.

So I went to the engineers and asked: before I hand something off, what should I check first to help you most? Then I turned every issue into a card — who owns it, what's the status, how urgent it is, what the client impact is, and what happens next. Before anything went to engineering, I added the reproduction steps and the evidence. My job was not to forward the message. It was to make the handoff useful, so the next person could act without rebuilding the story.

The tools — I knew none of them at the start. I'm not from an engineering background. But I didn't wait until I'd learned everything. I picked one real pain point, spent about two to three weeks on each tool — just enough to build a first version — and shared it with the team. I watched where people got stuck, which fields they missed, and fixed it from their feedback. My teammates tested it, the engineers did the fixing, and I made the path between them smooth.

The results were concrete: traceability went to about ninety percent, daily throughput went from thirteen to twenty issues, and average resolution time dropped from about fifty minutes to thirty. And I kept one habit from that internship: by the third time I do something by hand, I want to leave behind a rule someone else can pick up.

But no process can save you when the results just stall. Let me share a time that happened.

A friend and I ran a group-buying community — basically, people in one chat group ordering together. We found good products, negotiated the price, opened the deal, and everyone bought as a group. We started with about thirty members. Our first playbook was scheduled flash discounts. It brought people in, but it didn't keep them — people who came for the discount stopped buying when there was no discount.

The easy move was to push harder — more deals, deeper discounts. But I stopped and made the failure specific: the problem wasn't that we weren't loud enough. It was that what we pushed had nothing to do with what people wanted. So I changed the method, not the effort. I read through more than a thousand member messages and turned them into buying signals — who was asking about what, who responded to what — and started recommending the right products to the right people.

Repeat purchases picked up, word of mouth picked up, and the community grew to about six hundred members. No fancy tools — just reading the signals right. And what I took from it is exactly the daily reality of campaign work: when something underperforms, make the failure specific, change the method, and keep going.

These days I have a helper for reading signals and catching details: AI. But for me, the value of AI starts with how the customer feels.

The best example is my daily life right now. In my job search, I have a lot of applications and real conversations moving at the same time. I've taught AI my own logic, so it watches things for me — who replied, who's waiting on me, which signal matters, who needs a follow-up. AI helps me miss less. But every real reply, every follow-up — I write those myself. At Trend, I'd take care of clients the same way. AI doesn't make communication colder. It's the opposite: it lets me cover more details, so every customer feels remembered, understood, and looked after.

It also makes me faster. I used to want everything figured out before I proposed anything. Now the first version is cheap: I quickly put together something we can discuss, check it with a colleague or the client, and fix it with real feedback. I'm faster — and I find out earlier if I got something wrong.

As for how I keep AI accurate — it's like onboarding a new coworker on their first day. You can't just say "do this." You explain the background first: what a correct result looks like, which signals matter, what to do with exceptions. Once that's clear, it gets stable: it handles the repetition, and I handle the exceptions and the checking.

And of course, before anything reaches a client, I check the facts myself: every number traces back to the source, it's really this client's data, and the wording is backed by the data. If I can't verify it, it doesn't go out — I fix it first, or I bring it to my manager. In one sentence: AI is for speed — I'm responsible for the truth.

Next, the project that means the most to me — because it answers why I want to do marketing.

When I decided to seriously go after marketing, I did one thing: I turned my own job search into a real, running marketing project — with its own audience, its own message, its own data. Because my job search is the only market I own end to end — real buyers, real rejections, real feedback, every single day. A side project can't give you real market feedback. Here, every signal is real.

I'm early in my career — I'm not a finished product yet. And marketing is exactly how an early product gets better: put it in the real market, read the response, and use every response to improve the next round. What I'm optimizing was never the number of applications. It's where my next hour should go.

The feedback only comes back two ways: it either says "you're targeting the wrong people," or it says "you need to get better." I've had both. One category of roles just wasn't converting, so I retired it completely — and the better-fit direction started showing early signals. Honestly, this conversation is one of them. Another time, someone I met through networking reminded me that readers are drowning in AI content now, and people only trust what feels human. That time, the fix was me: the messages that matter, I went back to writing by hand.

So what this project taught me is simple: no rejection is wasted. It either tells me where to go, or it makes me better.

Finally — why Trend?

The reason is direct: Trend is a company where marketing is the business. That means two things to me. First, marketing is the core here — what I'd do every day is the heart of it: understand what the client wants, read the performance signals, organize the next step. Second, the clients come from all kinds of industries. The core questions stay the same — who are we trying to reach, what are the signals telling us, what should we do next — but every new client is a whole new domain, a new audience, a new definition of success.

Honestly, for a lot of people that amount of information is a burden. For me it's the fun part — and it's where I'm different. Entering unfamiliar territory fast is what I've been doing all along. At seventeen, I moved from Taiwan to New York for my last year of high school — new language, new culture, new everything — and I found my footing. Three majors trained one way of thinking: break the mess apart, find the structure. And in my internship, I picked up each new tool in two to three weeks and turned it into something the team could follow. So the first time I read this job description, I was happy. It's challenging and fun — and the challenge happens to sit right on my strengths.

Of course I know what I'll need to learn: the lead generation terminology, how a lead moves through Trend's process, what the key metrics mean. I even reached out to a few people with Trend experience, and one of them told me the biggest part of ramping up is learning the industry and its terms. Honestly? That made me want this more.

One more thing matters to me: this is an in-person job, and that's exactly what I want. At this stage, I want to sit next to experienced people, ask fast, and learn fast. Tatyana described the team like a sports team — pulling toward shared goals while everyone builds their own career. When I heard that, I knew this was a place I wanted to join.

My goal is simple: learn this industry fast, and become someone the team and the clients can count on.

At the end, when she asks if I have questions, I'll ask just one:

"If I were to join, what's the one tool or skill you'd want me to start learning on my own before day one, so I can ramp up faster? I'd rather use the waiting time to get a head start."

After she answers, if there's time, I'll take twenty seconds to share how I usually learn something new fast — find a real use case, learn enough to build a first version, start using it, and make it solid with feedback.

And if the conversation feels good, I'll add one more line before we wrap up: "Based on our conversation today, is there anything you'd want me to clarify or expand on?" — so any concern she hasn't said out loud gets a chance to be answered in the room. Then thank her for her time.