Northeastern grad architected her career. Now she’s a marketing VP at Oura
Lindsey Belknap didn’t envision a career in marketing when she graduated from Northeastern with an architecture degree. But perhaps, it was all by design.
The path to success is hardly direct. Just take it from Lindsey Belknap.
She studied architecture at Northeastern University, surviving “crits,” the name for daunting design presentations, and learning how to establish priorities when there was simply too much to do and little time to do it. Now, she’s the vice president of marketing for Oura, the ring that tracks the wearer’s health and fitness statistics.
Having a career in marketing, or even the health space, wasn’t on Belknap’s radar as an undergraduate student. But she took opportunities at Northeastern and in life to discover what she loved – and equally as important, what she didn’t – to shape her personal and professional journey.
“You just think it’s going to be this linear path, and then I move to the next level and I move to the next level. And it just isn’t for literally anyone,” Belknap told Northeastern Global News.
In speaking with people about their experiences, she has met people who have taken sabbaticals, taught yoga for a year and stayed home to raise their children, to name a few.
Even a slight deviation from one’s perceived career path is not something to fear, Belknap said. In fact, she encourages it.
“Each of these experiences you have, obviously are adding to a broader narrative,” are among the words of advice that Belknap offers people, even if they’re not currently in a position they want. “There has to be something about that situation that is beneficial. That is part of your story to get the next job,” she tells them.
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Belknap was unsure of the path she would take when she arrived at Northeastern, but ultimately settled on architecture because it combined creativity and structure, and “felt like a good fit,” she said.
“It teaches you how to think, how to understand space and movement and flow, and neighborhoods and the built environment in a way that you don’t really notice before,” she said.
She had two co-ops in the marketing department of an architecture firm and with a residential designer. The latter, she realized later, taught her “human-centered design” that considers people’s wants and needs within the design process, whether that’s creating spaces, products or even marketing.
Belknap was also on the executive board of her sorority, Delta Phi Epsilon, where she met her now-best friend of nearly two decades, Heather Cassar.
“I was really impressed then, and continue to be impressed now, with how she was able to balance a really rigorous educational program with being in the sorority, with maintaining really broad and deep friendships with people outside of the chapter and nurturing relationships,” Cassar said, noting that Northeastern was also where Belknap met her husband. Cassar added that the sorority role was like “trying out what it means to be a leader at a really young age.”
The two had similar experiences in their different co-ops, ones that would solidify what they wanted to do in the future, and would also go on to share career and life experiences together, from working in the tech industry in San Francisco at the same time to having their first children within one year of each other.
“She just never shied away from ‘these are things that I want in life and if it’s hard to get there, then it’s hard to get there,’ and really hasn’t ever backed down from that,” she said. “‘Tenacious’ probably is the word to sum it up.”
After graduating with a bachelor’s degree from Northeastern in 2011, and then a master’s degree from Savannah College of Art and Design, Belknap attended a career fair and met someone from an advertising agency who told her something she wasn’t expecting. She was described as being a brand strategist, or someone whose “entire focus is to deep dive into an audience and understand what matters to them” and reach them through communications, she recalled.
And so she dove into that line of work, working at MullenLowe U.S., an advertising and marketing agency based in Boston, and representing clients like beauty chain Ulta and the Royal Caribbean cruise line. She was thrilled to land at a company where she was exposed to a variety of industries and clientele. She would move to a similar role at a different agency called BBDO in San Francisco, before embarking on what she described as the “biggest moment of my career shift, in terms of what I’m doing now and what I want to be doing in the future.”
Belknap joined Nest, the company best known for its smart thermometers. She said it was an exciting time because the idea of a “smart home” was a relatively new concept that many did not understand, so a lot of her work was to help build trust and have conversations about privacy concerns. There, she served as a “critical bridge” between the product and the consumer, she said.
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“Looking back, what I was doing was really the foundations of what I consider product marketing,” she explained. “It was working on consistency and messaging and positioning and helping the advertising team develop campaigns, but it was also being used to tell really deep and meaningful narratives on our website and every other touchpoint in retail where Nest was being sold,” she added.
Belknap then made another pivot when she joined One Medical, a subscription-based primary care service. While she wasn’t working with a physical product, it was an opportunity to help people access medical care in an innovative, untraditional way.
Now, Belknap is back working with a physical product at Oura, a wearable technology company. The company’s sensor-equipped rings give health, sleep and fitness insights to its wearers. She oversees product marketing, project management, campaigns, promotions, product launches and more.
It was something that she had missed from her time at Nest, the “challenge of working on a physical object and figuring out packaging, and how you ship it, how you get people to touch and feel something versus just a digital product,” she said.
Belknap cites her Northeastern journey – where she learned “ruthless prioritization and work ethic and focus” – as integral to her success in the marketing world.
“Who I am as a marketing leader today is still very much the way I was trained to think in architecture school,” she said. “There is a rigor to the process and a commitment to figuring out how you explain (things).”
