Carnegie Mellon University - Tepper School of Business

Duke University

Chief Marketing Manager: Cross Carline at Nissan Motor Corporation

Asurion

Director of Strategic Pricing

My team worked on a variety of challenges for Nissans Marketing and Sales organization, as an internal strategy/consulting group who tackled dynamic projects that help the organization get smarter.  We study portfolio pricing strategies to change how Nissan positions our product vs competitors, evaluate future feature business cases for executives, build impact scenarios for production decisions, and manage the internal fleet of vehicles used for marketing and promotion campaigns.

Nissan Motor Corporation

Chief Marketing Manager: Cross Carline

I worked on planning upstream products, including the 2022 Frontier and other vehicles.  I really enjoyed doing a deep dive on customer data and vehicle benchmarking, and using that data to build focus group questions and topics to identify product priorities and key features.  Working with engineering and marketing functions to build a lifecycle plan for a vehicle that works within profit, cost, and volume constraints was a challenge for each program that required analytical expertise and problem solving while working with other groups that have different priorities.  This role blended numbers and analytics with emotional storytelling to help drive investment decision on products that will inspire and excite the customer of tomorrow.

Product Planning

In this role I acted as a brand manager, where I was responsible for Kicks/Versa nameplates.  I am most proud of the work I did planning and executing the Kicks launch, a brand new nameplate at the time which has consistently delivered results above our plan.  I helped build the marketing material and took journalists through the inspiration and purpose of the Kicks at our media event.  Understanding the customer and their priorities and purchase reasons were critical in building a successful product and campaign. I also built expertise in pricing, incentives, sales analysis, and operations in helping to ensure the regions and dealers had the information needed to help bring the Kicks to market. I enjoyed experiencing how important collaboration is in bringing a product to market in automotive, and how a success story depends on a tremendous number of people over years and years of planning and effort.

Chief Marketing Manager: Small Cars and CUVs

In my first full time role at Nissan in Finance, I was a controller in the manufacturing side focused on parts and materials.  I lead the month close process for team of 6 analysts managing multi-billion dollar spend in annual costs, coordinating efforts between finance, accounting, IS, and purchasing.  My background in IS and data systems allowed me to make improvements to data quality and reporting processes while mentoring and training new employees.  These efforts resulted in a performance recognition by leadership.

Senior Financial Analyst

I wanted to scratch an itch I'd long had in working in the automotive field as I've always loved mobility and transportation, which led to this internship during my MBA program.  I built an NPV forecasting model used for evaluating company investment decisions that helped save time and energy for my team.   I really enjoyed the pressure of presenting to executive teams at the end of the summer, and mentoring undergraduate interns.  It led to a full-time offer and I still work at Nissan so it worked out well!

Finance Intern

In this role I combined my technical background with a true leadership role and led cross-functional teams comprised of industry experts, internal stakeholders, technical developers and clients. I delivered a complex system of technology, processes, and people that managed billions of dollars and hundreds of construction projects across the client portfolio.  I managed the client relationship, built the proposal that secured a $500k project, while helping develop the customer perspective with the developers and build a product that met their needs using an agile methodology.

Senior Associate

I continued to build expertise in software and data systems by leading requirements, design, development, and implementation on a complex financial data system for foreign capital projects. Resulted in successful system implementation, a streamlined data process, improved data quality, and quarterly financial reports delivered to Congress.  I learned how an understanding of the customer is the critical first step in building anything, and how important it is to build trust with your customer.

Booz Allen Hamilton

Senior Consultant

I built business intelligence tools and reports and trained clients on how to use them.  Today, I still use those experiences in advanced business intelligence software and SQL in my job.

James Marschner