Jennifer Maybin

I'm gonna say my relationships again. I really think it's the strongest focusing that we have in any industry - the trusts and relationships you build with people along the way. I think transparency and relationship building, it doesn't matter what aspect of the industry that I've been in. I feel like your relationships are gonna determine your success, and when I've been laid off or I've had to restart in other industries, it's always those relationships that I go back to that are kind of supporting me and holding me up.

The best career advice I ever received is to not rush things. I think when I was younger in my career, I would kind of have an idea or something I wanted to roll with and just, before having it thought out or processed or presented, just kind of blurted out. And I had a really great manager at Wolverine who just kind of taught me the value of sitting on something and really coming out with it for the first time when it's presented and clear, rather than subjecting myself to a bunch of questions and pressure just from kind of blurting something out off the cuff in a meeting, just because it came to top of mind.

Know your value, which I know is very hard to say without giving tangibles, but I think knowing your value - and I've been lucky enough to have other women along the way kind of help me when you're blind. Again, that transparency of being upfront with what you're making, asking the right questions, and don't kind of sell yourself short. I feel like sometimes I get in my own head about opportunities, and I feel like I'm underqualified, and I don't feel like men really go through life feeling those same doubts.

I think the biggest challenges is just noise in general. There's a lot of people in the AI space - it's super noisy. There's a lot of different products that are going to be fair weather, moving in and out of the space quickly, they're not going to stick around, so there's a lot of distractions. But there's also a lot of really, really good tools and softwares and utilizations of AI being used right now. I think a lot of people kind of get a little afraid of it, where they maybe think it equates to reducing your team, where I really think it's an opportunity to have your team run things more efficiently and have more opportunity to grow the business, because these menial tasks that I myself have for 10 years had to handle manually can now be automated. So if you can automate those kind of things and free up your team to focus on bigger picture strategy, I don't think AI equates to headcount, at least in the space that I'm in. I think that's both a challenge and the opportunity right now.

Transparency, for sure. I think transparency and relationship building - it doesn't matter what aspect of the industry that I've been in. I feel like your relationships are gonna determine your success, and when I've been laid off or I've had to restart in other industries, it's always those relationships that I go back to that are kind of supporting me and holding me up.