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

★ Human-Centered Operations Leader, Instructional Design, Instructor, Author, Speaker, Education and Lifelong Learning Advocate. Dedicated to Advancing Women in Leadership ★

Short summary:
My work involves creating and delivering educational experiences to help people grow their careers and businesses using the lessons I learned from building an agency from the ground up as employee #1. I also create plans, processes, and programs such as a knowledge management program, an award-winning comprehensive employee onboarding program, and an award-winning referral partner program that generated 45% of company revenue. I am currently creating courses for Maven, Teachable, and HubSpot Academy. I am also writing a book on RevOps to combine a love of research, writing, and lifelong learning.


More context:
I spent several years learning executive leadership skills in my operations career at Remotish, a RevOps agency serving B2B SaaS companies using HubSpot, which also aligned with my purpose of advancing women in leadership (Remotish is women-owned-and-led).

I have very diverse career experience, which helps me see the big picture, quickly thinking many steps and scenarios ahead, while being detail-oriented. Creative problem-solving and clarity are my superpowers – I can generate surprising ideas with an unconventional perspective, and clearly explain the steps to make those ideas into reality. 

Career Journey: 
1. Graphic designer / art director, mostly magazines, with an art & journalism degree 
2. Photography piqued my interest while directing photoshoots, which led back to school 
3. Career 2 was a photographer and entrepreneur  
4. My favorite part of running the business was marketing, inspiring a career change
5. MBA in digital marketing to help my career move further and faster
6. Starting at Chief Martech Officer (Remotish) in a client-facing role that led to the fast track to management
7. Discovering part of what I was doing my whole career was Operations 
8. Creating educational content to help others learn these operations & career lessons faster than I did (internal training programs, on-demand and live cohort courses, templates, workbooks, and more)


Resources for finding your superpowers and purpose: 
1. howtofascinate.com (My advantages: prestige, innovation, and passion) 
2. 16personalities.com has an eerily accurate personality test (INTJ Architect) 
3. startwithwhy.com first helped me find “what” I enjoy: creating, improving, or discovering/exploring

Jen Bergren, MBA

This week's newsletter of learning resources is ready for you! 📨

Featuring content from:
Fiona Simpson
Samantha McKenna
Christopher Morris
Remy W.
Elena Dailly
Jane Serra
Inken Kuhlmann-Rhinow
Tina Lei
Mike Rizzo
Darrell Alfonso
Erica Lamberg
Jeff Ignacio
Colette Molteni
Jonathan Mendez
Richard Britton
Andrew Birmingham 🕵️‍♂️
Lauren Aquilino 💕 and Sydney Mulligan ☕️
Dan Tyre, Trygve Olsen, and Dave Meyer
Liz J. Simpson
Sari Hegewald and Michael Hartmann
and more!

Read and subscribe here: https://lnkd.in/g99x-kKv

#operations #ops #learning #learninganddevelopment #revops #strategy #communication #leadership #insights #crossfunctional #generalist

Open article: Weekly newsletter #147 by jenbergren.substack.com

At #MOpsApalooza, Marketing Ops Community leaders Mike Rizzo and Audrey Harze ✨ gave the opening remarks with a theme of MOps (marketing operations) Reloaded like the Matrix Reloaded movie.

We’re at a turning point.
AI is not an experiment, it’s an expectation.
But how SHOULD we use it responsibly?

Act 1: Welcome to the system
Slow down to see the system, code, & how to make it work.
AI without MOps is chaos.
AI with MOps can scale.
We're being asked to implement AI with no direction from execs.
Hype is everywhere, but adoption is messy.
More than seeing tools, we need to see the entire system.

Companies are reacting, not leading.
Without leadership, AI takes over like Agent Smith.
Without governance, the systems start to run the company instead of the company running the systems.
But AI isn’t the villain; the lack of leadership is.

Act 2: Seeing the System
Zooming out to influence strategy.
Zooming in to make it scale.

AI tools are coming down from the peak hype cycle of inflated expectations to the trough of disillusionment.
Zoom out by remembering the tech adoption chasm, the journey from hype to habit.
How do we get there?
Mapping it.
In every new tech wave there is a gap/chasm between innovators and others.
Marketing ops bridges that gap.
Turning potential into process.
Turning hype into habit where measurable value lives.

Act 3: The weight of connection
Every bridge has 2 connections, to balance, distribute the pressure, and hold the weight.
MOps is that bridge, connecting the vision of the business with the capabilities of technology.
We’re carrying and distributing the weight of people, systems, and processes that keeps the company flowing.
MOps makes what leadership imagines possible, so you can cross the chasm and reach the next stage or new lands.
You’re designing how it all works.

Success isn’t measured by pipeline anymore, its measured by progress.
We’re not support.
We’re architects of scale.
We’re not a revenue team.
We’re an infrastructure team that enables revenue at scale.
We’re not GTM engineers.
We’re GTM architects.
Every engineer needs an architect.

Act 4: You are the one(s)
We’ve seen this martech movie before, this is the sequel.
Companies buy first and plan later.
It’s what gave birth to MOps.
We’re at the same crossroads.
We can design what comes next.
Executives need people who understand systems end to end.
People who have seen martech explode over years.
You are the best person to prove the tech stack can achieve ROI.
Run the stack like a product.
MOps is the leadership companies need to write that next chapter.

Act 4.4: The human experience
AI can’t see around corners.
Only people can.
AI trains on public info.
It sees success stories.
It doesn’t see what didn’t work, the trial and error.
Only humans can apply it with integrity, nuance, and purpose.
AI doesn't change the game.
MOps does.
We don't adopt the future.
We design it.
By building the bridge that every business needs.

#MOPZA #MOPZA25

Jen Bergren, MBA, M.Ed.

Cory Huff spoke at #MOpsApalooza about ‘Build Your First AI Agent (without bugging an engineer).’

This was the one AI session I attended, to support #sandiego chapter leaders! 🙂

What is an AI agent?
A tool that acts autonomously once you set it up.
It needs a specific task and outcome.

Example: An agent to search 100s of daily Instagram DMs for testimonials. 
The agent logs into Instagram & finds phrases like ‘I love,’ ‘product name,’ or ‘thank you.’ Then it pastes those into a Google sheet with the account handle. 
This used to take a human 1 hour a day.
It took 2 hours to set up the agent.

More agent examples:
• Data Analyst that helps you write Python 
• Email Builder that integrates with automation platform, adds copy & images.
• Data cleaning agent that normalizes customer data
• Agent connected to Sharepoint – “go find all docs about X and summarize them”

Agent building tools:
-Chat GPT or Agent Mode
-User facing chatbots
-Back end agents with complex integrations

Another example: Coaching/therapy prep agent
Four agents doing discrete tasks used together instead of one agent doing 4 things.
1-Understands the question to direct to the right next agent
2-Self-rescue system: Agent walks through 4-step conversation to prep for a difficult conversation
3-What am I feeling? A mini agent trained to help users understand how they’re feeling
4-When the workflow ends, subscribe the user to an email list integrated with marketing automation platform

Agent Stages
Goal: Build the next mini-agent
Steps:
1 Define what the overall agent or agent cluster will do.
2 Communicate this test with marketing / IT/ in-house legal team
3 Build the MVP for the first mini-agent
4 Validate the outputs
5 Refine prompts, integrations, and access

Tell the agent to leave a part blank if there is no answer so it doesn’t invent information. Never ask an agent to make up what the answer should be. Give it a picklist to choose from.

Audience idea: Agent for quality checking (QA) emails

1. Design prompt
Ask AI to ‘help me design a prompt for an AI agent that performs email QA, I’m uploading a knowledge document that will define all the things that need to be checked.’

2. Copy the output (prompt template) into a Word doc and edit to improve it.

3. Put that prompt into a workflow creator that creates chatbots that integrate with LLMs, which processes info back and forth to LLMs to write the answers.

4. Add human check-in steps to make sure the agent can proceed to the next step without inventing information or confusion.

After you’re confident in the workflow, the human check in can be removed, maybe after 100 times running the workflow and iterating to fix issues during that time.

Chat GPT agent mode records videos of what the agent did so you can see where mistakes were made and where to tweak it.

To decide on a good first agent to build, look at what you are doing in your job that is repetitive and boring. How can you automate that? 

Thank you, Cory!
#MOPZA

Thank you to Patti M. Wilson (Myers) for this wonderful testimonial for my #documentation courses! ☺️ ❤️  It was a pleasure to chat with you in class!

Maven is running a sale this week on all my live classes - 25% off!

If you want to start 2026 with a system and support to prioritize, write, maintain, and adopt your process documentation, or simply improve your existing writing and other documentation skills, enroll today and save!

Find the full course and both workshops here: https://lnkd.in/g4d44D4b

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