Ford Motor Company

Responsible for consolidating global marketing technology selection and management activities, overseeing marketing operations data capability intake, prioritization and compliance, and driving a long-term technology roadmap.

Marketing Technology and Governance Lead

Association of National Advertisers

Member, MarTech Leadership Council

Smartsheet

Led a large centralized marketing automation team providing global campaign operations, data orchestration, solution design, support and governance. Applied system architecture and technical expertise directly to projects. Mentored team members on effective practices and skill development.

Director, Marketing Automation

Poly

Plantronics + Polycom. Now together as Poly.

Leadership role expanded to manage MarTech stack of over 120 technologies and drive excellence in central webinar/virtual event operations.

Sr. Manager, Marketing Technology and Automation

Sr. Manager, Marketing Automation Operations

Manager, Marketing Automation Operations

Polycom

Promoted from individual contributor to marketing automation team manager at Polycom. After acquisition by Plantronics in July 2018, leadership role was expanded to lead the combined team and build the integrated function.

Sr. Manager, Marketing Automation

Technical and creative lead for marketing automation campaign and platform operations, mentorship of distributed producers, and development of innovations in capabilities and processes.

Senior Marketing Automation Manager

Marketing Automation Manager

Thermo Fisher Scientific

Functional lead for team of email and web editors and designers. Served as interim manager.

Senior E-mail and Web Designer/Marketing Automation Specialist, Customer Channels

Web and E-mail Designer, Enterprise e-Business

Sedlak Design Co.

Print, web, identity/brand and e-marketing design services

Independent Consultant

Universal Technologies, Inc.

Managed design and development team and external resources, delivering small and medium web projects, provided creative direction and technical guidance. Expanded services with business model and operational plan for email marketing services. Led major initiative to re-imagine flagship SaaS product, including new creative direction, technical architecture and business model.

Manager, Design and Development

McCue Design Consultants

Handled print graphic design for direct mail, advertisements, packaging and large format graphics. Led web design and development, adding database-driven technology to agency’s capabilities. Managed extensive packaging portfolio for leading refractories company through two re-brandings.

Web and Graphic Designer, Lead Developer

Thinking back, my career in marketing operations can be blamed mostly on my dad.

Before we owned a home computer, I’d accompany him when he had to go to the office on a Saturday. He wrote code for steel production systems, I played on a Mac nearby. He thought I’d enjoy the paint program since I had a lot of interest in art. I immediately used this new power to publish school news and sports in “The 6th Grade Post” newsletter for my classmates.

He spared no detail about how things worked, whether discussing a piece of machinery or a basic process of life. He always explained WHY something was. I was fascinated. He gave me old appliances and vacuums to take apart. I discovered how parts connected and worked together. The gears, belts and wheels told a story of design and engineering for a purpose.

Now with a family PC, we bonded over hardware and software. A good friend, a quintessential “computer nerd”, gave me my first glimpse into the online universe. I dialed in daily to local BBS’s and a university with real internet access, blocking the family phone line for hours.

I discovered Netscape when I got to college and I was hooked. There were no classes for web design, so I taught myself HTML the old-fashioned way—viewing web page source code and writing my own markup in Notepad. I learned the basics of JavaScript and one summer my dad taught me to program in C++. I learned how to be efficient in coding and to write for future flexibility and ease of maintenance.

Uninspired by the available courses of study, I elected to design my curriculum, borrowing classes from many disciplines. I turned web design into a career, which led to email marketing, which evolved into marketing automation and technology.

So here I am, still blending creativity and technical work. Here I am, still seeing all of the metaphorical gears behind a system. Here I am, still figuring out how to efficiently connect components to achieve a goal. Here I am, still trying to make work easier, scalable and maintainable. Here I am, taking what I’ve learned and sharing it with others through mentorship, community involvement and conference talks. Here I am, still learning.

Despite no artistic interest himself, my dad never dissuaded me from the arts. He knew computers and code and saw a chance to connect those dots. I realize now that he was very creative in how he approached coding and systems and I've found my own satisfaction in the concept.

He’s never said so, but I suspect he didn’t actually need all of those Saturdays at the office.

AJ Sedlak

Every year, this report spotlights where organizations need to improve, as well as where things are on track. If you’re a senior leader with marketing operations under you, read this and hear what your teams probably aren’t telling you—before it’s too late.

When it comes to Community and Marketing Ops, I'm your huckleberry. Community-led founder and CEO of MarketingOps.com and MO Pros® -- where 20K+ Marketing Operations Professionals engage and learn weekly.

The 2025 State of the MO Pro Report tells:

52% of organizations offer no formal training for their Marketing Ops teams.

33% see no defined career path for Ops professionals.

And yet... 92% believe AI will completely reshape how Ops gets done.

Let that sink in for a second.

We’re betting the future of GTM on AI but not investing in the people who’ll actually run it.

We’ll spend six figures on tools, then skip the five-grand budget that could teach someone how to use them strategically.

That’s how you end up with automation without adoption.

AI without accountability.

And dashboards that look impressive but don’t move the business an inch forward.

I believe somewhere along the way, we started treating “enablement” as a nice-to-have, instead of the engine that makes innovation sustainable.

We built tool stacks faster than we built talent stacks.

And in the process, we’ve created Ops teams that are over-burdened (with tech) and under-developed.

If we want real maturity, we need to shift how we invest:

→ Budget for Brains: Training isn’t an expense; it’s compounding ROI. Make it a line item, not an afterthought.
→ Shadow the Strategy Room: Let Ops sit in on OKR, budget, and GTM planning. Exposure creates fluency.
→ Narrative > Noise: Stop measuring activity and start storytelling. Translate data into decisions that matter.

Because the companies that win won’t be the ones with the most tech, they’ll be the ones with the most capable operators behind it.

A Question for you all…

If you could fund one team-wide course this year, would you pick AI automation or data storytelling?

Your answer probably says a lot about what kind of organization you’re building.

PS: You can download the full report from MarketingOps website

#MarketingOps #RevOps #Leadership #AI #ProfessionalDevelopment #StateOfTheMOPro2025

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