QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS WITH TOM LEUNG

NAME:

Tom Leung

 

TITLE:

Senior Vice President, Product

 

HOMETOWN:

Mahwah, NJ

 

WHAT DOES YOUR TITLE MEAN TO YOU?

I am responsible for leading, developing, and growing our team of product and program managers. This team's mission is to do whatever it takes for Marchex to ship tons of winning products that users love and create massive shareholder value.

 

WHAT DREW YOU TO MARCHEX?

When I was with my last employer, I was selected to attend a leadership training program in Mountain View and one of the exercises was writing your ideal job description. My description talked about a senior executive job at a company headquartered in Seattle and in the online advertising industry. The job would have a lot of enterprise control and freedom to make lots of critical company-impacting decisions. Lastly, I'd be developing and mentoring a high-performing team of product people. As luck would have it, a few weeks later I ran into one of the General Managers at Marchex and about 30 emails and three or four office visits later...I was offered an opportunity pretty close to my ideal job.

 

WHAT'S YOUR TYPICAL DAY LIKE?

I average ten or more meetings a day! The good news is the meetings are all very productive and they cover very different topics. Since part of my job is to orchestrate product investments across the company, I spend a bunch of time coordinating, socializing, learning, sharing, challenging, brainstorming, and guiding activities inside the product team as well as with folks in engineering, business, marketing, sales, operation, and corporate development.

 

DESCRIBE THE MARCHEX CULTURE.

• Dynamic: Every day has twists, turns, bumps and wins that aren't expected.
• Hungry: The company is frothing at the mouth to really shake things up - eye of the tiger, yea, we got that.
• Electric: Every day things are getting more exciting and we're seeing the positive results of our efforts. You can't not feed off of that energy.

 

WHAT DO YOU DO WITH YOURSELF WHEN YOU'RE NOT WORKING?

I have a wonderful wife, two amazing sons, and also a passion for following beltway politics, playing poker, cooking, and light landscaping. I also love buying stuff - anything with great design such as strollers, mobile devices, clay ovens, cars, etc.