It’s been a minute. Four months, actually.

The last time I wrote here, I’d just gotten home from France and cut the grass. A lot has happened since then. This is the biggest one.

I’m going back to Parse.ly.

Madison Square Park

In April 2016, I took an interview call while walking around Madison Square Park.

I remember looking up at the Credit Suisse building. My desk was in there, on one of Yelp’s four floors. And I remember thinking: I’m going to get out of here and really grow.

A few weeks later, I officially accepted a role at Parse.ly.

Yelp was the best training I could have asked for. It taught me how to fail fast. It taught me to let what people said roll off my shoulders and just make the next dial. It also taught me about PR, what Google Alerts were, and how to use terminal to find the phone numbers of small business owners who built their own websites.

Funny enough, I’m in terminal more now than I ever was at Yelp. Except now it’s with Claude Code.

The Person on Their Phone

My first day at Parse.ly, I clicked around the dashboard and was shocked. You could learn so much about people just from them clicking around a site. And the media industry lived on those numbers.

A few years in, I was at the opening happy hour for Content Marketing World. I walked past someone looking at the Parse.ly app on their phone. At a happy hour.

I loved Parse.ly. I believed in what it could do. But seeing it in the wild, seeing people build it into their daily routines, is when I understood how necessary easy-to-access analytics were.

For just shy of four years, I grew with Parse.ly. I went from BDR, to events manager, to a one-woman marketing team.

The Long Way Around

Then I left.

For the next four years, I explored outside of Parse.ly. I led more events (during a global pandemic). I moved into full-on demand gen. I got a few more months of being a marketing team of one under my belt.

Then I got laid off.

I put the “open to work” banner on my LinkedIn photo. Then I got a message from John Levitt, Parse.ly’s GM. He asked me to apply for a job at Automattic, the company that acquired Parse.ly in 2021.

Spoiler: I did. Double spoiler: I got the job.

My first campaign at Automattic was about the Parse.ly Data Pipeline. I’d been at Parse.ly when it first launched. My roles have changed over the last few years, but my belief in Parse.ly hasn’t. I kept finding ways to talk about it (especially when I was on the media team!), and how Parse.ly and WordPress VIP together give a team the CMS and the analytics.

(This isn’t a sales pitch, I promise!)

Hey Parse.ly, I’m Back

A few weeks ago, a chance came up to focus on all of Automattic’s analytics products.

I couldn’t let it pass.

CMO of Unified Analytics. Basically a fancy way of saying: hey Parse.ly, I’m back.

It’s been over 10 years since that phone call in the park, and a lot has changed. Parse.ly is still the dashboard where analytics are easy to find. But now you can ask it questions in plain language, and you get answers from your data plus insight into what’s happening everywhere else. And with the Parse.ly MCP, you can do all of that right inside your preferred LLM.

I’ve changed too. Back then I was single in the city. Now I’m in the suburbs with my husband, three kids, two dogs, and two cats.

Who Knows

I told a friend this is the job I dreamed about when I was starting out in marketing at Parse.ly. I said there was probably a path with a lot less friction to get here.

They said: who knows if you would have gotten here at all.

They’re right. All those other paths turned me into the marketer I am today. Leaving taught me how good I have it at Automattic. It taught me what analytics look like when you don’t have Parse.ly to turn to. And I learned the kind of marketer (and leader) I want to be from people across the board.

Everything had to happen exactly the way it did.

Back to the Park

I think about that version of me, walking laps around Madison Square Park with a phone pressed to her ear. Looking up at the building. Thinking: I’m going to get out of here and really grow.

She did. She just might have taken the long way.

So I’m back, Parse.ly (and the rest of Automattic analytics!!). I cannot wait to see what we can do.