158: Jeff Lee: How Calm’s Billion customer message machine unites martech and engineering

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Jeffrey Lee, Lifecycle Marketing Technical Lead at Calm.

About Jeff

• Jeff started his career as an IT specialist at IBM 
• He then joined Merchant Circle as a FE Web dev and eventually ended up managing a team of web developers 
• He later joined Flipboard – a popular social magazine app – where he spent 5 years embedded into email development and marketing operations. He built and grew their email capability to sending over 400M emails per month
• Today Jeff is Lifecycle Marketing Tech Lead at Calm where he architected their adoption of push notifications as a messaging channel; they now send over 300M push notifications and 2B emails per year

Building Engineering-Marketing Partnerships With a Technical and Emotional Blueprint

Product collaboration is the cornerstone of impactful marketing initiatives, yet many organizations struggle with this crucial partnership. Jeff's unconventional journey from engineering to marketing reveals a powerful framework for building authentic cross-team relationships that deliver both immediate results and long-term value.

The Technical Foundation

Most marketing teams fall into the trap of overwhelming engineering with urgent requests, only to face a wall of indifference. Jeff's engineering background helped him recognize that technical credibility forms the bedrock of successful collaboration. Rather than making desperate pleas for resources, he leveraged his technical expertise to create working prototypes that demonstrated clear business impact.

His subscription management project exemplifies this approach. By bootstrapping a solution achieving 90% accuracy in promotional targeting, he transformed abstract marketing concepts into concrete engineering challenges. The remaining optimization represented pure customer experience enhancement and operational efficiency – metrics that resonated deeply with the engineering mindset.

Building Emotional Capital

The impact extends beyond technical competency into the realm of emotional intelligence and operational empathy. Engineers particularly value colleagues who demonstrate respect for their workflows and time constraints. Jeff's approach of presenting production-ready queries and implementation frameworks eliminated the typical friction of translating marketing requirements into technical specifications.

This combination of technical fluency and operational understanding creates a powerful multiplier effect. When marketing teams blend technical capability with genuine empathy for engineering processes, they evolve from being perceived as an external burden to becoming a valued strategic partner. Each successful collaboration reinforces credibility and builds momentum for future innovations.

Creating Sustainable Partnerships

The formula for lasting engineering-marketing collaboration emerges from this dual focus on technical excellence and emotional intelligence:

1. Start with working prototypes that prove business value before requesting engineering resources
2. Present technically sound solutions in engineering-ready formats that respect existing workflows
3. Build credibility through consistent delivery of measurable impact
4. Demonstrate genuine understanding and respect for engineering priorities
5. Leverage initial wins to create natural advocacy for future marketing technology initiatives

The result is a partnership model that transcends traditional departmental divisions, creating sustainable value for both teams. By approaching collaboration through both technical and emotional lenses, marketing teams can transform skepticism into enthusiasm for projects that deliver meaningful impact across the organization.

This framework provides a blueprint for marketing teams looking to build authentic engineering partnerships that drive innovation and results. The key lies in demonstrating both technical competence and operational empathy – proving value through tangible outcomes while building emotional capital through genuine understanding and respect for engineering workflows.

Key takeaway: Win engineering trust by showing, not telling. Build working prototypes that demonstrate clear value, then present solutions in engineers' technical language while respecting their workflows. This combination of proven results and operational empathy transforms marketing from a burden into a valued partner, creating momentum for future collaboration.

Why it Took 3 Years to Convince the Product Team at Calm to Implement Push Notifications

Whether it’s product, martech or channels, sometimes decisions masquerade as data-driven choices but are actually running on raw emotion and bias. At Calm, adding push notifications sparked a three-year battle that exposed how deeply personal experiences shape enterprise product strategy. Through their struggle to balance user psychology with organizational resistance, we uncover essential principles for building sustainable engagement in mobile products.

The Psychology Behind Product Resistance

Product teams operate on gut reactions and personal biases more often than anyone wants to admit. At Calm, Jeff discovered this reality when a straightforward push notification feature turned into a three-year battle, exposing how deeply personal experiences shape product decisions at the highest levels.

The resistance stemmed from visceral reactions to notification overload. Product leaders, scarred by their own encounters with aggressive casino apps and notification spam, projected these experiences onto Calm's notification strategy. Their instinct to protect the product from becoming "one of those apps" created a powerful organizational inertia, even in the face of compelling engagement data.

The turning point arrived through an unexpected avenue: leadership turnover. A new Chief Product Officer, armed with positive experiences from previous roles, transformed the three-year roadmap struggle into a six-week sprint. This shift illuminates the stark reality of enterprise decision-making; technical complexity often plays second fiddle to personal conviction and past experiences.

Jeff's evolution from email skeptic to engagement advocate mirrors this journey. His own transformation from viewing email as "the scammiest thing" to recognizing its profound impact on user engagement adds a layer of irony to his push notification crusade. Small-scale pilots proved ineffective at winning support because they failed to demonstrate the compound effects that emerge over time. Like SEO, the true power of these engagement channels only becomes apparent through sustained, systematic implementation.

Industry-Standard Functionalities is More Important Than Competitive Dynamics

Competitive pressure normally drives product decisions, except when you're number one in the market. Jeff experienced this paradox at Calm, where their market leadership position actually worked against the adoption of push notifications. The common rationale? "We're number one. We don't need to do what others are doing to catch up."

This mentality exposes a fascinating blind spot in product strategy. While lagging competitors enthusiastically embrace proven engagement channels, market leaders sometimes cocoon themselves in a false sense of security. Their position at the top becomes a psychological barrier to adopting industry-standard features, creating vulnerability to more nimble competitors.

The definitive proof of push notifications' value emerged through an accidental experiment. When discussing hypothetical scenarios about turning off push n...