Genentech performance marketing engagement lead Tiffany William is a self-proclaimed “newbie” in pharma marketing.
It was only late last year that the UC San Diego alum pivoted from a six-year career in mobile gaming marketing to the pharma realm. After leaving leading game developer Kabam as a senior growth marketing manager in November 2025, it wasn’t game over for William’s career in marketing. Instead, she landed on a whole new map.
Eager for the opportunity to apply marketing that could impact “even more people,” she took on a position at Genentech as performance marketing engagement lead, a role she’s held for ten months now. Since then, she’s been downloading her gaming marketing chops to apply to the pharma marketing sphere.
“Obviously, the context of the marketing itself is very different, and responsibilities far greater in pharma, but being able to kind of transfer what I learned from gaming into pharma has been really good as well,” she said of her career pivot.
In a Q&A for Fierce Pharma Marketing’s “Rising Stars” series, William discusses the transition and delves into how she’s bringing a “fail fast, learn fast” mentality to Genentech among efforts to help build out a strong “culture of experimentation” within the company’s marketing department.
Responses have been edited for length and clarity
FPMK: What inspired you to pursue a career in pharma marketing, and what keeps you motivated in your current role?
It was thoroughly a big change, but it gave me the chance to kind of bring a fresh perspective and some of what I learned in gaming into a much more complex and deeply meaningful industry like pharma. And a big part of what drew me to Genentech and pharma marketing was again the opportunity to use marketing in a way that can touch a lot of people's lives and make a difference in their health. That brought a deeper sense of the purpose of the work itself, and that was definitely something that I didn't get to experience when I was still in gaming.
What keeps me motivated in my role today at Genentech is the opportunity to scale that thinking of performance marketing. How can we use what we're learning from people's behavior to create more relevant and helpful experiences? So, as performance marketing engagement lead at Genentech, I get to work across the portfolio, connect learnings between brands, and help marketers feel more confident using performance data and applying an experiment and optimization mindset in in their work. So, you'll hear me mentioning the words "optimization" and "experiment" a lot, but I especially enjoy making performance marketing feel less daunting and more fun, approachable, and more creative.
FPMK: What has been the most rewarding or challenging project that you've worked on so far?
I think one of the most rewarding challenges has been helping build a stronger culture of experimentation and optimization across Genentech. It is not a single campaign or a single moment. It has really been about helping marketers feel more confident once again using data, triangulating between data sources, asking questions, testing new ideas, and learning from the results. One mindset that I brought with me from gaming is fail fast, learn fast.
To me, that does not mean being careless or treating every unexpected result as a failure, but rather it means testing with a clear purpose, understanding what the data are telling us, and applying that learning to our decision making instead of waiting for everything to be perfect. I've brought that mindset to life in a few different ways at Genentech. I host office hours five times a week where marketers can bring real business challenges and have an open, practical conversations about it. I've also developed and led incubators and workshops designed to upscale and inspire over 200 marketers at Genentech. And one of the things that I enjoy the most, I must say, is the breadth of the work. One day, I might be helping an SS marketer think about experiments designed to reach population-based decision makers more effectively. On another, I might work with a patient marketer on identifying opportunities to increase patient engagement.
So, not one day is the same, and I think that's what keeps my job really exciting. And again, because I work at the portfolio level, I have a bird's eye view of what different brands are testing, what they're learning, and that allows me to spot patterns, connect teams with useful insights, and capture these learnings in case studies that can be shared across the board. And we can share these case studies widely through forums like our town halls or marketing newsletters, so that the learnings don't stay just within one brand or one team.
At the end of the day, I love being able to recognize and celebrate our marketers on the great work that they're doing. When someone who initially found performance marketing really intimidating because it may work with a lot of different data becomes more excited about the test that they're doing, or they start sharing these learnings with another team—that’s one of the clear signs that our change management is working. The behaviors that we've been encouraging our marketers to do are finally being put in practice, and the impact is finally getting bigger than just one workshop or one initiative.
FPMK: What advice would you give to people who worked in pharma marketing for decades?
Before going into the advice itself, I must say, being someone who's only been in pharma less than a year, I still have so much to learn from our veterans, people who have spent decades in pharma marketing. Their understanding of patients, HCPs, brands, and the complexity of our industry is something that is deeply, deeply valuable.
I learn something new every day from our veterans. But if there is one piece of advice that I could give, it is to keep being curious, even when our experiences have given us strong instincts. Customer behaviors, market dynamics, marketing channels, technology are always changing. Staying curious gives us this chance to question our assumptions, but also to look at similar problems with a fresh lens.
I also think that there is a lot that we can learn from other industries. Pharma, of course, has its own limitations and guardrails that other industries may not have. I mean, I come from gaming, so I'm learning about these intricacies also. But that doesn't mean that we cannot be creative or operate at the cutting edge level. We can look outside pharma for inspiration, and then we'll then adapt these ideas into with the needs to fit these ideas to fit the needs and responsibilities of our industry.
I would also encourage our experienced marketers and senior marketers to not only share their successes but also what did not work and what they learned from it. I feel like when leaders do that, it kind of sets the tone and also shows the next generation of marketers that experimentation is not about having the perfect idea or having the perfect results. It's about being thoughtful, learning from the data, and continuing to improve. So to me, the most powerful combination is that deep industry knowledge and wisdom paired with a beginner's mindset, where you are confident in what you know, but also remaining curious and open-minded about what the next signal might teach us.
FPMK: What do you like to do when you're not working?
When I'm not working or when I do have free time, I love spending quality time with my husband as well as our three-year-old mini bernedoodle Kuma. I also enjoy going to concerts and planning our next vacation, whether it's a local getaway or international adventure. Honestly, sometimes planning the trip is almost as fun as taking it for me, and those are the things that I like to do that help me recharge and come back to work more energized.