Kylee Holden

I wouldn't be where I am without the people I've worked with throughout my career. My professor Leslie Rill, who I knew as Dr. Rill in college, taught me everything about strategic thinking and questioning why things matter - I literally hear her voice every single day. She had all the new media and tech classes and taught me to look at the big picture and ask why about everything. Beyond that, I've been blessed to work with the best teams and managers throughout my career. At Intel AI, we called ourselves the Dream Team, and I learned so much about collaboration and working at a nimble speed while producing high-quality work consistently. My manager Jessica positioned me to learn and grow in social media strategy, and later my manager Ray helped me build the community program from the ground up. I'm the type of person that just soaks it all in when I'm around expert product marketers, messaging experts, social media directors, and branding experts. The hands-on experience of working around people who are experts in their fields has been invaluable - you learn so much just by being around them.

Social media is living and breathing, so there's something happening every day that affects our work. We're constantly dealing with crisis management - when there's tragedy in the world, we have to decide if we want to market in that environment, and sadly most of the time nowadays it's mostly tragedy. On a day-to-day basis, I'm handling so many different crises, managing escalations, and funneling information from the top to the people who are executing and providing recommendations - it's non-stop, and I wish it wasn't like that. AI has also inundated the industry in a way that challenges us to move faster and produce better results. We have these tools that help us get work done faster, but there's also just so much happening in the world, in marketing, and in tech that nothing ever stops. The pace has definitely increased since I started in 2016 - where we used to go on social media and spend time, it's nothing like it is now. People are so physically dependent on their phones, checking them 24-7, which creates both opportunities and challenges for how we approach marketing.

My biggest and most important thing in my life is my faith and my life with Jesus. I'm often at church functions or with my friends from church, building relationships and doing life with them, and bringing my children up in that environment. In my work, I truly value every single person, no matter how much experience they have - I value their input, what they have to say, and what knowledge they bring to the table. I believe in empowering the people on our teams to produce and achieve excellence while growing themselves in their careers. I want people to be able to do whatever they need to do with confidence. As a manager, I love being able to see people and the value they can bring, recognizing where they might have a passion or vision or something to say, and then bringing them into those conversations so they can grow and be exposed to so much more. I hope that all the people I've worked with have left feeling supported and encouraged, and that work is better because we're working with people who are kind and loving and understanding. With my children, I focus on what's important versus what's urgent, and I'm always trying to learn and grow and become a better mom and give them the life they deserve.