Dear Future Leader: A Letter from Jon Chang, VP of Growth Marketing at MyFitnessPal

About this article:
Dear Future Leader is a letter from a senior marketing leader to the next generation coming up in the most competitive, most automated landscape in the industry's history. The human skills worth building, the practices worth starting now, and the honest advice nobody gives from a stage.

Dear Future Leader,

Learn to do someone else's job.

I know that's not the advice you expected. Everyone tells you to master your own. Pick a lane, go deep, become indispensable. Here's the problem with that plan. In the most automated era in marketing history, indispensable at one thing is a countdown clock. The people who rise fastest aren't the ones who perfect their job. They're the ones who study everyone else's.

I've been testing this for fifteen years. At theSkimm, I set out to learn how to be a CFO. Not because I wanted the job. I have zero desire to be a CFO. But once you understand how the person controlling the budget thinks, something shifts. You stop pitching campaigns and start pitching investments. At Klarna, I learned about product management and brand, and it permanently changed how I build growth teams. The goal was never to switch careers. It was to borrow a lens.

Every company you join is a free education, if you enroll. Look at what your company is uniquely great at and learn that. It's like landing at an Ivy League school with an award-winning professor down the hall. Why wouldn't you knock on their door? Most people spend years sitting next to world-class expertise and never ask a question. Don't be most people.

Then chase the trends, not the titles. Watch which skills are growing and move toward them before they're crowded. I wanted to learn everything about product marketing, so I went from digital marketing director at Kickstarter to global product marketing at IBM to growth at Klarna. Klarna grew so fast that I changed jobs every three to six months. Performance, then lifecycle, then content, then global. That rotation was luck. But luck favors the person who keeps raising their hand.

Now, about the tools. My NYU students used to ask which tools to learn so they wouldn't get left behind. Knowing the tools is critical. Loving them is dangerous. If a single platform is your identity, you're racing something that doesn't sleep and doubles in speed every year. So burn through the tools. Master them all, take what you need, and don't fall in love with any of them.

Here's the part nobody connects. If you're already learning other people's jobs and chasing rising skills, you never have to worry about being left behind, because you're the one out front.

That mentality had you vibe coding marketing automation before anyone on your team had opened the docs. Machines go deep on a single function. They can't sit at the intersection, where the marketer thinks like a CFO, the growth lead thinks like a PM, and the operator builds their own automation. Depth can be generated. Judgment can't.

A few habits worth starting now.  Write every week, and write it yourself. Adam Grant argues that outsourcing your writing to AI costs you the thinking even when the output is good. He's right. Writing isn't a deliverable. It's how you find out what you believe.

Invest in people before you need them. Every meaningful job I've gotten came through a relationship, not a resume. Grant makes a similar point about AI companions. Mattering isn't feeling valued by others. It's knowing you add value to them. Generosity compounds. Start early.

And here's the honest part nobody says onstage. None of us fully know what we're doing. The leaders you admire are pattern-matching, guessing, and occasionally panicking in private. So be careful who you model yourself after. In uncertain times, we mistake swagger for strength, which is exactly how narcissists end up in charge. Confidence is not competence.

Your career will not be linear. Mine ran through crowdfunding, enterprise tech, fintech, media, and health. Some of my best moves looked sideways or backward at the time. They weren't detours. They were tuition.

My high school cross country coach gave me the advice I've kept the longest. Don't worry about the results. Focus on the process, and the results take care of themselves. The metrics are downstream of the work. The work is downstream of who you're becoming.

The machines will keep getting better at marketing. Your job is to keep getting better at what marketing was always about. Understanding people, earning trust, and telling the truth in a way that moves someone. And learning everyone's job along the way.