Sarah Gavin

What I Do

I'm a business leader whose craft is communications and marketing. I sit at the table where the company's direction gets set, and I bring narrative, brand, product positioning, and data together into a go-to-market strategy that actually moves.

The full range: end-to-end communications and marketing strategy, AI narrative, brand, product positioning, competitive intelligence, performance marketing, GTM, crisis leadership, and culture. I bring it all together because that's what it takes to move a company.

This is the adventure of a career right now. AI has blown up the playbook. Markets are moving faster than most companies can narrate. The puzzles don't have clean answers. I've always loved that kind of problem. The messier and more complex, the more I want in.

I serve people and demand greatness from them at the same time. Those two things aren't at odds. They're the same thing.

I set an exceptionally high bar for thinking, for craft, for what great looks like. And then I create the conditions for people to actually meet it. That means genuine psychological safety, real clarity about what matters, and a culture where taking smart risks and breaking down silos is the expectation.

The teams I lead consistently deliver the strongest engagement scores in their organizations. Under my leadership, Expedia Group was voted one of the Best Places to Work in Communications. The team decided that. That's the recognition I'm most proud of.

I'm always the most positive person in the room. Not naively, but purposefully. People do their best work around that energy.

Enterprise Transformation

A consistent thread across my career has been enterprise-wide transformation. I don't just transform the function. I use communications and marketing as the mechanism to shift how entire companies operate, position themselves, and move. At Expedia Group, that meant leading the shift from holding company to technology platform, changing the narrative and the organizational identity. At Zendesk, it meant owning the AI strategy story at a moment when the whole company needed to move faster and more cohesively than it ever had. These weren't communications projects. They were business transformation efforts, and communications and marketing were the engine.

I build the bridges that make companies execute better. Between marketing and sales. Between narrative and product. Between what a company says and how it actually shows up in the market. And most importantly, between the company and its customers.

At Zendesk, I rebuilt the marketing-to-sales relationship from significant friction into one of the strongest GTM partnerships the company had seen. That meant clear positioning, shared metrics, and genuinely wanting each other to win. When marketing and sales trust each other, pipeline moves.

At Google Cloud, I built the competitive narrative and content infrastructure that gave sales teams what they actually needed to compete and close enterprise accounts. Content tailored to priority industries, buyer personas, and real deal situations. I also built a repeatable system for activating customer stories across marketing, media, events, and sales, because the most powerful narrative a company can tell is the one its customers tell for it.

At Expedia Group, I brought corporate and flagship brands under a single global umbrella after $8B in acquisitions, aligning how the company showed up. The bridge there wasn't just between teams. It was between identities. And ultimately, it was about making the experience feel coherent to the hundreds of millions of travelers who used our products.

Every bridge I build starts and ends with the customer. They're the reason the narrative matters. They're the reason alignment matters. Get the customer right and the rest follows.

Marketing AI. AI for Marketing.

AI Strategy, Narrative, and Operational Transformation

This is where the world is moving, and it's where I've been focused across every role.

At Zendesk, I built and operationalized the AI-first narrative, differentiating a legacy brand in a crowded market where every competitor was making the same claim. The challenge wasn't just messaging. It was aligning a large global organization around a story the market would believe and the product could deliver.

At Google Cloud, I drove the repositioning that shifted market perception from a distant third to a serious enterprise contender in AI. That meant unifying messaging across a complex product portfolio, building the content and competitive intelligence engine that armed sales teams, and creating a repeatable system of customer proof that worked across marketing, media, events, and sales.

I also lead with AI in my own work: embedding tools and workflows into my teams as a genuine operating model shift that enables faster, more effective work. This site was built that way.