Interviewing TikTok’s Global Head of Consumer Marketing (ex-Google/P&G/McKinsey, Harvard MBA)

TalentGeist Newsletter

Immediately-actionable career insights for ambitious individuals.

Read time: 10 minutes

Similar to our last interview with Brian (ex-Goldman Sachs & current Tech CEO), let’s get into it with another industry expert to give you a well-rounded perspective, and to democratize learnings from those who’ve succeeded at the highest levels.

Today’s guest —  Zuber Mohammed, Global Head of Consumer Marketing @ TikTok.

We’ll be breaking down Zuber’s career journey and insights (accumulated across 20+ years at the world’s most elite institutions — Google, P&G, McKinsey, HBS, etc.). 10 questions, in 10 minutes.

➡️ 1) What’s your elevator pitch? 😊

Hahaha – getting right to it huh?

I’m Zuber – currently the Global Head of Consumer Marketing of TikTok. I began my training in engineering, but fell in love with marketing during my first gig at P&G, where I dabbled in both marketing and product. From there, it’s been a single-track focus – I took on the marketing practice as a McKinsey consultant, led marketing teams at Google, and became the first CMO at Razer, a multi-billion dollar enterprise and the world's leading gaming lifestyle brand. 

Somewhere along the way, I got an MBA at Harvard, where I met my wife and some of my closest friends to this day.

Was that good enough? Haha. Been a while since I had to do one of these.

➡️ 2) Solid! You mentioned you started your career as an engineer and pivoted to business / marketing – how did this happen?

Great question.

I was fortunate enough to work at P&G out of undergrad at IIT – it’s a company that heavily, and equally, prioritizes product innovations and marketing. The product innovation part was probably more in-line with my ChemE degree. After getting my hands wet in both fields, however, I ultimately found marketing to be my calling. Of course, both product innovations and marketing work hand-in-hand in many instances, but I was just a lot more excited by the marketing work – sitting down with our everyday users, digging deep to uncover their pain points, mapping out their purchase and usage journey end-to-end, making strategic calls on how we can solve their pain points, etc.

But of course, it’s not like my engineering degree went to waste – if anything, my technical knowledge allowed me to become a more effective marketer. I was able to carry in-depth discussions with the product & engineering teams that earned me a lot of cross-functional respect. Can’t really complain about how things turned out!

➡️ 3) I loved the part about the strategic angle of Marketing – too many people have the misconception that marketing is ‘soft’ (and a synonym for ‘ads’). Why do you think this is?

Well – for most people, their first (and often predominant) interaction with marketing is probably flashy commercials on TV. And of course, creativity is a skill that a lot of marketers DO have – Google’s Creative Lab, for example, is a highly-respected Marketing division that handles some of the biggest priorities.

But marketing is a function that runs deep – when someone says they want to work in Marketing, it’s like saying they want to work in Tech. Okay but……what PART of marketing? Just like how in Tech there’s AI vs. SaaS, B2B vs. B2C, Product A vs. Product B, etc., in Marketing you have dozens of role & responsibility permutations.

From that angle, I would say most marketers who work in MNCs actually need to be STRATEGIC as well as creative. This is often true whether you work in P&G or TikTok or Google. Before ANY execution takes place, my marketers are in charge of things like:

• Market research – which requires analyzing tons of quantitative data

• Prioritizing user insights – you just heard a stream-of-consciousness from users totaling to 500+ behavior insights. Which ones do you prioritize for the company strategy? Ignore? Leave for later? Why?

• Building a strategic roadmap – how exactly will you go about solving key business problems or user pain points? What other teams do you pull in? How or why exactly will your strategy work? What’s the measurement process to ensure you’re using the company’s funds effectively?

The list goes on and on. This is why Google or TikTok Marketing, for example, tend to have a lot of former consultants: they’ve got the strategy part down, and this often translates to success in Marketing.

If you’re thinking about pursuing a strategic career – don’t rule out Marketing!

➡️ 4) Great insights. Zuber — what skills or traits do you think contributed the most to your own success?

Hm. I would say first and foremost – balancing the art and the science of Marketing. It’s important to have data, but at some point, you have to rely on instincts and the ‘art’ side – for example, during user interviews, sometimes microexpressions on people’s faces tell you much more than pure data, or even words.

Secondly, it’s paramount to have high EQ. Our work is highly cross-functional; we’re more-often-than-not carrying out conversations with people who have vastly different goals and working styles from you. The ability to influence them is key, especially when they’re seniors whom you have no direct authority over.

Lastly, maybe a bit cliched, but absolutely aiming for the moon in everything we do. We don’t shortchange ourselves with ‘comfortable’ KPIs. And every time we successfully launch a campaign, we do celebrate briefly, but then we’ll immediately get back to thinking about the next steps – could we have made it even better? What can we do in the future that’ll get us even higher ROI? Etc.

➡️ 5) What about when you make critical hires / build your talent pool? What traits do you look for in candidates?

Exactly the things I mentioned above! 

Also, attitude – I look for candidates who are clearly hungry to learn, have passion for impact, and possess genuine curiosity in our product. These traits come across in their depth of knowledge about my team & product, the excitement they subconsciously exhibit when talking about their experiences, and even in the types of questions they ask me at the end of interviews.

➡️ 6) Great. Now, back to your career – what’s been your most memorable experience?

You know, I’d have to bring it back to our Google days, when I led the YouTube Go team – our top-line goal was to enable accessibility for millions of users in developing nations via a lightweight version of YouTube requiring just a fraction of the data / wifi bandwidth. 

I still vividly remember going into the local markets (for example, Indonesia) and seeing the delightful looks on our users’ faces when they talk about our product – when they tell us, for example, that their most enjoyable time of the day was at the end of the day, when family members gathered around to enjoy YouTube videos together. 

We actually built YouTube Go from scratch, alongside the Product/Engineering teams — literally growing it from 0 to over 250M users. It was an incredible ride of a lifetime.

➡️ 7) What’s been your biggest challenge / setback?

I would say building our Product Marketing team at TikTok from scratch. The hiring, training, etc. was operationally-hefty, but I would say the most challenging aspect was actually looping in the Product teams. They’ve never worked with Marketing before, and we’ve had to chip away their original skepticism on the value of Marketing.

We literally started by knocking on doors, introducing the Product teams to what we do, hustling to get a seat at the table, etc. As we got more projects under our belt and consistently ‘wow’d’ these other teams with the outsized impact we drove, we eventually got to a place where the Product teams were proactively asking for support. We even had to say ‘no’ a few times because of our limited bandwidth, but this just goes to show how far we’ve come as a Marketing org. I’m honored to have played a role in establishing Marketing as a formidable and indispensable arm at a company like TikTok. Huge kudos to all my team members out there, some of whom hustled with me from the very beginning to get to where we are now.

Remember, nothing earns respect faster than consistent, unwavering impact on the organization. Always strive to add as much value as possible!

➡️ 8) If you can give advice to your younger self, what would it be?

Ah, so much. Let me list a couple.

1. Your career is a marathon, not a sprint – yes, you should work hard to drive impact and challenge yourself, but mentally you should be prepared for 20, 30, maybe even 40 years of digging deep. This of course means taking care of yourself and not burning yourself out every day. This is one of the key reasons why I’ve taken up meditation in the past few years, and make it a point to spend time with my kids everyday without any distractions from technology!

2. The people you work with (especially your managers) have an astronomical impact on your career – your development, confidence, and leadership style (which you will likely imitate after your ex-managers). Your own competence only gets you so far – always be on the lookout for great mentors, and pick managers who respect you and bring out the best in you. Invest the time to build lasting relationships with those you work with – transactional, one-off encounters won’t do much for your network in the long run.

3. Take risks and try new things – have big, hairy goals. If you fail, at least you’ll learn a ton, and improve at a pace faster than your peers. This will also build up your resilience, and help you adapt that much faster to changing circumstances in the future.

4. Don’t be afraid to change your career track! Especially in today’s workplace when there’s a lot more fluidity (for example, I changed from Engineering to Marketing). Be thoughtful on how you do so – logically weigh the pros vs. cons, and think about how your previous experiences can bolster your new intended career track even if they seem totally different on the surface (for example, Engineering gave me the ability to have technical conversations with Product teams, which definitely gave me an ‘edge’).

➡️ 9) Tell us 3 things people don’t normally know about you?

One — I’m a Pescatarian.

Two — I’ve take up meditation to achieve balance and focus in my everyday life. I aim for 20+ min every day!

Three — I dabble in DJ’ing :).

➡️ 10) Next steps — how can our readers connect with you?

Follow me on LinkedIn!

There you have it — thank you Zuber!

🙏 10-second favor from you — if this or previous issues resonated with you, could you help share the signup link with 2-3 colleagues/friends? They’ll thank YOU for sharing, and you’ll win some brownie points with them #networking 😊.

Until next time,

Vincent (LinkedIn)

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