Marie Moxnes Harfjeld is a fractional Chief Marketing Officer who works with early-stage B2B SaaS companies. With over ten years of strategic marketing experience across fintech, fashion, banking, and startups, she helps founders build positioning, go-to-market strategies, and marketing infrastructure - often as the first senior marketing hire a company brings on.
When she starts working with a new client, one of her first priorities is understanding the customer. Who are they? What language do they use? What problems brought them to the product? That understanding shapes everything - from messaging and positioning to campaign strategy and content. This is where Pilea comes into the picture.
"With my clients that use Pilea, I easily get the customer understanding I need to build a marketing strategy on day one," Harfjeld explains.
In previous engagements, building that customer understanding meant conducting multiple qualitative interviews. She would schedule calls with a client's users, ask open-ended questions, record the conversations, and then manually synthesize what she heard into patterns she could build the marketing strategy on.
"You're looking at 20 to 30 hours just for the research phase," she explains. "Scheduling, interviewing, transcribing, organizing, pulling out the themes. And that's before you've even started building the strategy."
The process was valuable but came with inherent limitations. Interview samples are small. Finding the right time to meet someone for an interview often takes weeks. And the insights, while rich, are difficult to trace back to specific customer moments once they've been summarized and condensed.
"There was always a degree of doubt. Are these patterns truly representative, or am I hearing what a handful of people happen to say?"
Because Pilea collects, categorizes, and clusters feedback from across a company's tool stack - Slack, HubSpot, Intercom, support tickets - the customer insight she needs is already structured and waiting for her.
Instead of spending weeks on interviews, she opens Pilea and asks it to surface the highlights that are relevant for marketing: the pain points that come up repeatedly, the language customers actually use, the moments where the product resonated.
"It draws from hundreds to thousands of real data points - not just five to ten interviews. The breadth is something you simply can't replicate manually."
What used to take 20 to 30 hours now takes roughly one.
For Marie, the most important shift is traceability. Every insight she pulls from Pilea links back to a specific piece of customer feedback. When she presents a positioning recommendation or a messaging angle to a client's leadership team, she can point to exactly where and how many users it came from.
"It makes the conversation completely fact-based. I'm not presenting my interpretation of a handful of conversations. I'm showing patterns from real customer signals, and anyone can click through and verify them."
That transparency changes the dynamic in stakeholder conversations. There is less debate about opinions, less pushback on strategy, and faster alignment - because the evidence is accessible to everyone in the room.
Marie's use of Pilea is different from a typical product team setup. She isn't using it to prioritize what to build next. She is using it to understand how customers think, feel, and talk about the product - and then translating those patterns into marketing strategy.
"The insights in Pilea are pure gold for marketing. The language customers use, the pain points that keep coming up, the way they describe the value they get - that's exactly what you need to build positioning, write copy, plan campaigns."
As a fractional CMO working across multiple clients, she doesn't have the luxury of spending weeks embedded in one company's Slack channels or reading through support tickets. Pilea replaces the manual work she would otherwise have to do to piece that picture together.
"If Pilea disappeared tomorrow, I'd have to go back to scheduling interviews and spending days synthesizing what I found. You just can't replicate that breadth manually - not at the same scale, and definitely not in the same time frame."
Pilea has enabled Marie to:
- Reduce customer research from 20–30 hours to approximately one hour per client
- Access structured, source-referenced customer insights from day one of an engagement
- Present fact-based marketing recommendations backed by traceable customer data
- Work more efficiently across multiple concurrent client engagements
For Marie, the result is not just efficiency. It's confidence.
"I show up to new engagements with a deeper understanding of the customer on day one than I used to have after weeks of research. That changes the quality of everything I build."
Marie Moxnes Harfjeld
Pilea helps Marie cut 20–30 hours of customer interviews with one hour of structured, source-referenced insight.
We keep things light when it comes to sorting your feedback. When it comes to protecting your data? That's where we get serious.
Pilea is built in Norway 🇳🇴, hosted in the EU 🇪🇺 and scalable to product teams globally 🌍.
