What a Career Journey Can Look Like in a Company of Inventors

When Nicole Weingartner started at Audible as a contractor, her job was to make sure that emails and push notifications went out successfully. Five years later, she leads her own team and looks after everything to do with email and push templates at Audible—and much more. Weingartner’s curiosity and dedication to improving on the customer experience make her a great fit at Audible, where continuous learning is a driving force.

“When I first started at Audible, I was doing campaign production,” she explains. “Over time, my job changed a bit as I began investigating more ways to bring personalization and data into our emails.” That passion for tinkering and expansion came naturally. Weingartner started out at a small camera company doing “anything and everything,” but as she grew in her career she found that hierarchies and roles were much more regimented. “You had one particular thing you do, and you do it well, but you only do that.”

Audible was a breath of fresh air, encouraging people to engage with their work creatively, and innovate on behalf of our listeners. “It’s a company of inventors,” Weingartner explains. She works daily with different teams across Audible and the wider Amazon network. “Everybody is excited to come to work,” she says. “Everybody has a passion and they run with it. The company allows them to do that.”

One of our People Principles is Be Customer Obsessed, which fosters collaboration because it gives everyone, regardless of team, a shared clear stakeholder: the customer. It’s something Weingartner leverages as she often works with different teams to help create emails educating new customers on what our service offers are, and existing customers on what else they could discover within our service. The shared enthusiasm and focus means there’s a genuine commitment to doing everything possible to make customer experiences better.

When Weingartner helped launch the marketing for Audible’s all-you-can-listen membership, Audible Plus, her team worked with people across the business to create vast amounts of content to onboard new members. “It was so rewarding because I got to talk to many people in parts the company I’d never even heard of,” she says. “I was getting emails asking how we could work better as a team, move forward, and tackle the next thing together.”

Those connections have opened doors for Weingartner and her infectious energy means she’s always looking for a new challenge. “If somebody on a different team is working on something I hear about, I think ‘maybe I could help with that.’” This attitude of curiosity and eagerness to collaborate in new areas is greatly valued at Audible, where, as she puts it, “we’re an established company but we act like a start-up.”

It often leads to work Weingartner is proud of. One of her favorite projects is an initiative they developed in the wake of Hurricane Harvey. She and her team created an email offering three free months of membership to customers affected by the storm, and the response from those stuck at home were “heartwarming,” she says. “To hear directly from our customers like that, and to see my work having an impact was really special.”

Weingartner’s favorite listen

Weingartner’s current favorite is the Audible Original Maejor Frequency. “It’s my first time fully engaging with a podcast of this category, and I’m finding that each episode is better than the last,” she says. She particularly loves the discussions Maejor has with thought leaders around the world about how music is transcendent. “That’s something that speaks to all of us.”