204: Phyllis Fang: Trust infrastructure and freakish curiosity as career growth levers

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Phyllis Fang, Head of Marketing at Transcend.(00:00) - Intro (01:23) - In This Episode (04:13) - Uber Safety Marketing Shaped A Trust First Marketing Playbook (10:12) - How Permissioned Data Systems Power Personalization at Scale (15:22) - How Consent Infrastructure Improves Personalization Performance (19:20) - How to Audit Consent and Compliance in Marketing Data (23:24) - What Consent Management Does Across AI Data Lifecycles (28:29) - How to Build a Marketing Trust Stack (30:49) - Consent Management as a Revenue Lever (35:10) - Designing Marketing Teams for Freakish Curiosity (41:19) - Skills That Define Great Marketing Operations (45:33) - Why System Level Marketing Experience Builds Career Leverage (50:13) - System for HappinessSummary: Phyllis learned how fragile marketing becomes when systems move faster than trust while working between lifecycle execution and product marketing at Uber. Safety work around emergencies, verification, and COVID forced messages to withstand scrutiny from riders, drivers, regulators, and the public. That experience shapes how she approaches consent and personalization today. Permission signals decide what data moves and how confidently teams can act. When those signals stay connected, work holds. When they drift, confidence erodes across systems, teams, and careers.About PhyllisPhyllis Fang leads marketing at Transcend, where enterprise growth depends on clear choices about data, consent, and accountability. Her work shapes how privacy becomes part of how companies operate, communicate, and earn confidence at scale.Earlier in her career, she spent several years at Uber, working on global product marketing for safety during periods of intense public scrutiny. She helped bring new safety features to market at moments when user behavior, policy decisions, and brand credibility were tightly linked. The work required precision, restraint, and an understanding of how people respond when stakes feel personal.Across roles in e-commerce, lifecycle marketing, and platform strategy, a pattern holds. Fang gravitates toward systems that must work under pressure and messages that must hold up in practice. Her career reflects a belief that marketing earns its place when it reduces uncertainty and helps people move forward with confidence.Uber Safety Marketing Shaped A Trust First Marketing PlaybookTrust-focused marketing depends on people who can move between systems work and narrative work without losing credibility in either space. Phyllis built that fluency by operating inside lifecycle programs while also leading product marketing initiatives at Uber. One side of that work lived in tools, triggers, and delivery logic. The other side lived in rooms where progress depended on persuasion, alignment, and patience. That dual exposure trained her to see how fragile big ideas become when they cannot survive real execution.Lifecycle and marketing operations reward control and repeatability. Product marketing inside a global organization rewards influence and restraint. Phyllis describes moments where moving a single initiative forward required negotiation across regions, channels, and internal politics. Every message faced review from people who owned distribution and reputation in their markets. Messaging tightened quickly because weak logic did not survive long. Campaigns became sharper because every assumption had to hold up under pressure.“We were all in the same company, but I still had to convince people to resource things differently or prioritize a message.”Safety marketing pushed that pressure even further. The work focused on features designed for rare, high-stakes moments, including emergency assistance and large-scale verification during COVID. Measurement shifted away from habitual usage and toward confidence and credibility. The audience expanded well beyond active users. Phyllis had to speak clearly to riders, drivers, regulators, and the general public at the same time. Each group carried different fears, incentives, and consequences. Messaging succeeded only when it respected those differences without creating confusion.That mindset carries directly into her work at Transcend. Privacy and consent buyers often sit in legal or compliance roles where personal and professional risk overlap. These buyers read closely and remember details. Phyllis explains that proof needs to operate on two levels at once. It must withstand careful review, and it must connect to human motivation. Career safety, internal credibility, and long-term reputation shape decisions more than feature depth ever will.“You have to understand the human behind the role, because their motivation usually has very little to do with your product.”Many martech teams still lean on urgency and fear to move deals forward. That habit collapses quickly in trust-driven categories. Buyers trained to manage risk respond to clarity, evidence...