Evan Klein is a storyteller, marketing leader, and high growth builder who prioritizes value and brings frameworks to the startup jungleland. Today he is the VP of Product Marketing at Benevity, an engagement platform turning social impact into business impact.
Growing up in the land of Bruce Springsteen (New Jersey), Evan’s father was an attorney who was very intentional in how he communicated, much like the Boss himself, and his mom was an empathetic social worker. This is important. We’ll come back to it. The English language was always important to Evan and he thought about becoming an English major to read and write professionally (I was nervous for him to review this…).
Evan crossed his t’s, dotted his i’s, and went south to Duke where he more practically studied Public Policy and Economics. As graduation neared, he began looking for a well rounded training program to join and Capital One was a perfect fit. Evan started as a Data Analyst, getting a taste for Fortune 500 consulting, technology, and banking.
In this entry level role he would come up with strategies and help inform decisions as part of an internal analysis and consulting group alongside peers from the training program. When Capital One acquired ING Direct, Evan was on the acquisition team as the company leaned into “digital”. Simpler times!
Capital One was an early adopter of modern technology practices, leveraging design thinking and hiring in-house product managers. Evan worked closely with a Product Manager and product team, even getting the opportunity to take on some of the product management himself as the team built out its first ever mobile wallet.
Hoping to pursue product management full time, Evan applied and was accepted to MIT Sloan (one of the best places in the world to pursue the field). While at Sloan, Evan was immersed in all things startup and high growth software. He interned at Eventbrite out in the Bay Area and got to see a true consumer growth stage technology platform from the inside.
As school was wrapping up, he and his roommate founded a software business called JumpYield. JumpYield built an algorithm that helped digital publishers capture more advertising dollars on their websites. It scratched his entrepreneurial itch and their product grew quickly with customers seeing 40%+ increases in revenue overnight.
JumpYield revenue grew to nearly $100k+/month within 6 months, and most of that revenue was pure profit for the business. They were on their way! Until Google sent a cease and desist for bucking the spirit of their service agreement. Their technology, it seemed, had tipped the scale too far in favor of publishers. Still, it was an awesome experience to see early product market fit like that and be part of the early digital revolution.
Evan has learned that cultivating his network is everything and one of his classmates at Sloan worked at growth stage cybersecurity company called Black Duck. He was introduced to the team with the hope of joining Black Duck as a Product Manager. But without a formal computer science degree or any direct software engineering experience, the product org wouldn’t have him. Still, the team really liked him and offered him the chance to be on the most product-adjacent function on the marketing team – Product Marketing. Marketing? He wasn’t so sure.
But when aspiring author, literature enthusiast, and emerging product leader Evan Klein laid his eyes on the product marketing landscape, everything clicked. As the most technical person on their marketing team, he led with empathy and an exacting style cross-functionally with engineering and product counterparts to tell the company’s story to the GTM organization.
While at Black Duck, Evan helped launch their container security product and went deep in software containers, cloud architecture, and Kubernetes. He really liked the B2B space, translating to technical buyers, and found his way to infrastructure monitoring and log analytics software startup Logz.io.
While at Logz.io, he moved into his first leadership role as the Director of Product Marketing. Over time he took on more responsibilities across the Marketing org including product marketing, evangelism, content, public relations, analyst relations, communications & social media marketing. He was happy at Logz.io until a friend suggested he might want to meet with a new, emerging startup looking to re-engineer engineering management called Jellyfish.
Evan sat down for coffee with co-founder Phil Braden in Downtown Crossing to hear about their mission. Evan realized that if this team could pull off what they said they could do, it would be a gamechanger for the industry. That was the kind of opportunity Evan could not pass up! After many conversations, Evan signed on the dotted line and joined the team of 15 as their first Marketing hire and one of the first on the GTM team.
Jellyfish, in short, was a wild ride. It has been the highlight of Evan’s career so far. He led Product Marketing and even the entire marketing function for a period of time while Jellyfish defined a new software category. He helped craft their initial launch, marketing plan, and supported their rapid traction as they raised capital & hired out the team. Evan took everything he had previously learned and poured it into Jellyfish.
Evan grew to lead product marketing, content, public relations & comms, analyst relations, customer marketing and customer education. He had taken on more functions as the company grew, has so much respect for the Jellyfish founders, and what they taught him while he was there. Andrew Lau is a genius (if he’s listening)! He wouldn’t trade the experience for anything and felt like he had accomplished everything he set out to do over his 4 years there.
Evan then received the unexpected opportunity to join former Logz colleague, Ali Jawin, at Outreach and build out their Product Marketing function. Allie was Evan’s demand generation counterpart at Logz, a phenomenal leader, and he was excited to learn a new SaaS category.
Outreach was a phenomenal experience working in a very competitive space (GTM SaaS) where he joined as part of a new swath of leaders to take the company through their next phase of growth selling to sales & marketing leaders.
Over his year and a half at Outreach he hired an amazing team across product & solutions marketing, customer marketing, media, public relations & comms, analyst relations, and brand. He helped reframe their narrative & messaging so that Outreach reps were value focused before selling any features. Their revamped training program helped reps get 56% closer to hitting quota and it was an extremely fun & rewarding GTM transformation.
Again, Evan was approached by a former co-worker who had joined Benevity. This late stage, private equity backed company is purpose driven and needed Product Marketing to serve as a strategic function. There’s no one better for that task than Evan!
At Benevity, Evan is responsible for leading their Product Marketing function as the VP of Product Marketing inclusive of client marketing, advocacy, market insights, and more for this mission driven company. They are helping their clients build more connected cultures, expand and communicate the social impact they are able to have, and dramatically increase employee engagement and business performance with Evan as a central part of their 2025 leadership (and beyond).
Storytelling and Value Frameworks
Evan has been toying with the idea of writing a book on product marketing leadership. It’s still a relatively new function and there are a lot of important details that get overlooked. In particular, making sure you view the company you work for and the products & services you offer in terms of “value first”.
At three different startups now, Evan has come in and built value frameworks using a similar system. Credit to where credit is due: Phil Braden and Andrew Lau set him on this path first at Jellyfish. Now, it’s become one of the hallmarks of his career. Here’s how he does it..
- He pulls in as many inputs as possible, focusing especially on conversations with customers, and boils down the company’s offerings into their jobs to be done.
- These building blocks are translated into a simple framework (people can only consume so much information) that can be leveraged by the GTM organization (and org wide) to better communicate the company’s value from an outside-in perspective.
- He creates consistency across functions by aligning messaging, web and content strategy, Sales and CS motions, and even product strategy around this framework, re-enforcing the value communicated to the market and eventually creating a self-actualizing value loop.
Evan says it’s not rocket science, but you’d be surprised by how many companies don’t do this. Leading with value over features is a revenue driver, strategic driver, and positioning advantage regardless of the software category!
3 Career Insights / Learnings
Get Close to Revenue – “At Black Duck, Lou Shipley taught me to ‘place myself as close to revenue as possible’. That doesn’t mean becoming a sales leader, but instead aligning your role as close to revenue impact as possible for the highest strategic impact and influence. Product Marketing can serve as an advisory relationship to the GTM strategy and motion if done properly”
Hard Times = Great Learnings – “You do your best learning during the times that feel the hardest. Leaving a company when things get hard might feel good in the short term but dealing with adversity can make you better for weathering it.”
Unplanned Moves – “Sometimes the best career moves are the ones you don’t plan. I never thought of myself as a marketer coming out of business school but it turned out to be the best possible fit. Be open to possibilities. You might accidentally find they make your career.”
Evan loves being a Product Marketing leader and leading teams. One day he aspires, perhaps to be a CMO or that grizzled veteran who sits on boards and shares his hard fought learnings. But right now he’s focused on what is in front of him in his new role at Benevity, learning from the best executives he can find to deepen and strengthen his product marketing knowledge.
If you want to learn more about Evan you can find him raising his young family outside of Boston, reading and writing, building the future of product marketing at Benevity, or on LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing. We’re excited to see the big impact you have on teams and product marketing in the coming years!