Diana Pinedo Rodriguez. Marketing leader, first-gen Latina, and millennial mom building outside the corporate ladder.
I've spent 15 years leading marketing for organizations that needed someone who could think strategically and ship at the same time. Tech. Media. Education. Healthcare. Workforce development. Multicultural campaigns. Fractional CMO seats. The work is the same in every category: figure out what the audience actually cares about, build the system that reaches them, measure what matters, repeat.
DPR Media is the studio I built to do that work on my own terms, with the kind of organizations I want to be in the room with.
I am the daughter of immigrants. I am the first in my family to do most of the things on my résumé. I built my career without the playbook a lot of my peers were handed.
I started in marketing right out of Cal State Northridge in 2010, in the middle of a recession that taught me how to be useful before I felt ready. I spent the early years learning how big brands actually run, in agency seats, in media, and eventually inside global tech. I learned how to translate a complicated organization into a clear story, how to run a campaign that actually moves a number, and how to lead teams across markets and time zones.
Somewhere in those years I also became a mother. And then, twice in a row, I was laid off. Once at seven months pregnant. Once at five months postpartum. Both companies had reasons. Neither reason mattered to me at 3am holding a baby and refreshing my bank account.
That is when the consultancy started. Not as a dream. As a necessity.
A few years before that, I had quietly started a platform called Ms. Informed Latina. It was a project to give Latinas the financial, career, and life guidance I had not been given. The platform turned into a speaking practice that took me to universities, Latino professional associations, K-12 charter networks, fintech stages, and marketer development programs across the country.
It is not a separate brand anymore. It is part of the bigger story DPR Media is telling now. The audiences are the same. The mission is the same. The container is just bigger.
When I first launched the consultancy, I took on twelve clients at once at $400 to $600 a month. I thought volume would buy me security. It bought me burnout instead.
The lesson was painful and clear: scale does not come from more clients. Scale comes from better clients, better positioning, and pricing that reflects the actual value of senior strategic work. The clients who paid me well were also the clients I did the best work for. The clients who undervalued the work undervalued the outcomes too.
DPR Media is built around that lesson. Fewer clients. Bigger problems. Real strategic seats. Pricing that protects the work.
DPR Media is the studio. It houses the consulting work, the speaking, and the writing. It is a deliberate container, not a hustle stack.
I am also a co-founder of Cielito Lindo Baby Co., a baby hair and skincare brand for the next generation of multicultural families. I am bootstrapping it from $0, documenting the messy honest parts in public, and treating it as the long bet of the next decade.
Together, DPR Media and Cielito Lindo are an answer to a question I keep getting asked: what does a professional working mom actually look like outside the corporate ladder? I am still figuring out the full answer. But the early version is this: focused, paid well, present at home, and building things that matter.
I live in Austin with my husband and our daughter. I am usually somewhere between the laptop, the playground, and a coffee shop with my notebook. I read about marketing, motherhood, and Latina history. I am stubborn about quiet mornings and homemade coffee.