FourKites

Leaving my previous job after nearly 9 years was a really difficult decision but the transition was easy largely due to the incredibly supportive team members here at FourKites. I am grateful everyday to be able to work with such professionals.

I've always been in B2B tech marketing, mostly in SaaS. What started as an internship became my first role as a marketing copywriter for a mid-size ERP company. My wonderful leaders and mentors gave me opportunities to shine, including owning our customer newsletter, collaborating on our 10K and even traveling for my first international business trip to facilitate customer testimonials.

Those five years gave me the confidence to take a role in solutions marketing/demand generation by day and an executive mba program in marketing and supply chain by night. I spent the next 15 years building my GTM and leadership muscles as I grew to become team lead and eventually senior director of demand generation and account-based marketing.

I've always viewed myself and been told I'm a natural leader. As I've progressed, leadership and the people aspect of the job stood out — I learned a lot from my tremendous leaders. I always knew who and what I wanted to be and they shaped me into exactly that, a vice president of marketing at a supply chain tech company.

I love my job and feel fortunate to do what I do every day. I hope to give my team and future marketing leaders the same guidance and opportunities.

The leaders who have stood out most to me and helped shape who I am as a leader are those with whom I formed a bond. It wasn't always just business. They expected stellar results and a high degree of accountability.

And, they recognized that at the end of the day, we are all people with a common business goal, who happen to spend a lot of time together so we might as well enjoy it. The best leaders I've had had my back, were transparent, pushed me, believed in me, got to know me and helped clear the way for me to succeed.

I think it's so important not to shelter your team or your leaders. Give them visibility and opportunities to do what they do best. Let them earn the recognition for their good work.

Never take credit for what they've done. Always cheer them on and celebrate their successes, publicly. As leaders, we are here to inspire, to provide guardrails and a framework.

We have years of experience to rely on and to teach our teams what's possible when they believe in themselves and their own abilities.

Arguably, there are more women leaders in marketing than in other departments. But still less, in general, especially in tech. I encourage the women on my team to use their voices and expertise and be bold — frankly, I encourage men to do the same.

I've been fortunate to promote women to leadership roles and sometimes asking them if it's what they want is the right first step. I believe in open dialogue. I am an open book.

And I've maintained relationships with those I've helped grow, just as I remain connected to those who came before and inspired me. My leadership style is largely based on two ideas. The first is radical candor, a book and a practice that implores leaders to challenge directly and care personally.

This resonates because it's always personal, even when it's business — when people know you truly care, direct feedback can be better received. Secondly, you cannot be an expert in everything, especially as you gain more responsibility. Your own leadership team is crucial to your success and the entire function.

Rely on your leaders. Learn from them (never stop learning). Because, as they say, all boats rise and it's more rewarding for everyone this way.

From day one, I have been encouraged to explore my professional interests. I had only been an individual contributor in previous roles but was interested in people management – here, I have had the opportunity to grow into a manager role and the company has sponsored my participation in leadership programs to support my professional development.

We find that getting to know what motivates a team member allows us to give more valuable and appreciated rewards and recognition. It could be a team meeting shout out for a job well done, a gift card through our wish list program, an exciting new project that allows the employee to work with new teams or departments or even a spot bonus.

I had the privilege of being involved in the development of Appointment Manager and providing feedback when it was just a "simple" calendar designed to assist our customers in organizing appointments based on real-time ETAs. The utilization of this tool yields significant time savings, making it an undeniable favorite of mine.

We have several ways we collect customer feedback, including NPS and CSAT surveys, which measure whether users can meet business objectives, usability and loyalty. Our products and community articles let users give a 'thumbs up' or 'thumbs down' regarding whether their questions were answered.

Additionally, we host events to capture feedback — one of which is our Innovation Workshops. Hosted annually, these include up to 10 customers across industries and roles to collaborate in a design-thinking session with our UX designers and a product manager.

We host four concurrently and have covered topics like "designing the unmanned gate" or "elevating the end-customer experience." The output of these workshops accelerates our development of solutions. Another is our biweekly feedback calls.

Again, the audience is composed of customers from different enterprise companies, all leveraging FourKites to achieve their business objectives. On these calls, our product team completes discovery or validation designs before we hand them off to our development team.

These are wonderful forums to learn more and build better solutions — they also let customers collaborate with peers and influence our roadmap and product.

We have a robust online customer community where we host the FourKites Idea Exchange. Customers submit enhancement requests and upvote others' suggestions for product managers to review when grooming their backlog and building their roadmap. These inputs help prioritization, including de-prioritizing requests that don't receive wide support.

We celebrate customers who suggested and partnered with us on solutions brought to market through our Innovation Partner Program, which includes 98 partners. Cassie Garrison, supply chain manager at HNI Corporation, is one of those innovators — she suggested additional configurations to our notifications set-up, making them more dynamic.

"At HNI, we work collaboratively to make sure our customers have a best-in-class delivery experience," Cassie told us. "Working with the FourKites team to add additional configurations to the business rules ensures our end users and third-party warehouses know where their truck is at and if it'll be on time.

" Proactive communication with stakeholders is an objective for many customers — by co-innovating with FourKites, HNI boosted its productivity and helped other customers improve their operations.

While we have many ways to listen to our customers, it's important for product managers to also be in tune with the macro-environment, be aligned with business objectives and leverage a standardized framework when building a roadmap. We are set up to build customer-centric roadmaps, but prioritization is dynamic — there are times when features or functionality are "not planned" or "not planned yet" and that's important to communicate to the customer, too.

Setting expectations about how customer feedback is being prioritized is key.

We use a mix of enterprise, open-source and custom-built AI tools. This approach gives us the flexibility to meet our business needs while balancing factors such as cost and customization. In our engineering workflow, we've integrated these tools to boost quality and ease of use from the start of ticket creation.

We use an open-source plugin for Jira to ensure high-quality tickets go into the sprint. Once a developer starts working on a ticket, we use tools, such as GitHub Copilot, to help write code and unit tests. Our testers have created in-house workflows that use ticket descriptions and acceptance criteria to automatically generate test cases and code.

We use these tools in our processes as much as possible, making them easy to adopt while providing increased efficiency and enhanced capabilities. We're always looking for new ways to expand our AI capabilities, tailoring experiences for each group and addressing specific needs.

This ongoing effort not only boosts our internal productivity, but also helps our clients by automating the identification of bug root causes.

We have a thorough onboarding and training program for all engineers, regardless of their background. This ensures everyone understands the basics of our tools and development processes for building our own tools. The program includes LinkedIn courses and articles that provide a solid grasp of the tools we use.

To cap off the training, each engineer must complete a project, chosen by their team manager, that can be solved using AI. This hands-on experience helps everyone get comfortable with both basic and advanced concepts needed in our AI-driven workplace.

The rapid progress in generative AI has made creating tools more accessible than ever. Engineers can now build solutions that were once thought impossible or limited to research. Our training helps every team member understand not just the technical side of these tools, but also gives them the confidence to use them in real-world situations.

By investing in this training and mentorship, we set up our engineers to contribute to projects from day one, helping them grow personally while driving innovation for the company.

Beyond our structured training and project support, we foster a strong sense of community within our dev teams. We hold monthly group meetings and have dedicated Slack channels where team members share success stories, swap new insights and discuss the latest AI developments.

These spaces create a collaborative environment that encourages ongoing learning and helps engineers stay up to date on best practices and new trends. We put a big emphasis on mentorship and knowledge-sharing. Each business unit is encouraged to have its own data scientist in addition to our main data science team.

This helps them move quickly with AI advancements. Our senior engineers actively guide junior engineers, offering feedback and real-world advice to speed up the learning curve for those new to AI. We also support learning through access to top-notch tools, webinars, research papers and regular AI workshops from our partners at AWS, Azure, MongoDB and others.

This mix of community, mentorship and ongoing education makes our company a great place for those early in their AI careers to grow, try new things and succeed.

I love seeing how customers are using the product we've built and how it directly impacts someone's life. We wouldn't be able to delight our customers without my innovative teammates, who roll with the punches and constantly go above and beyond. I am lucky to be surrounded by such a great group of people.