Her Story
About Maryanne
My day is quite variable. I lead everything in AT&T business product, from portfolio-level decisions and strategy planning to customer experience, roadmap and product development, all the way into issue triage. I look at trade-offs that need to be made in development roadmaps or offer constructs. It's an exciting place to be, and you have to be flexible, to be able to think broadly and think deep at any given moment of the day. What I love about AT&T is that my career has been really dynamic, but it's all been under one company roof. I've been able to both have a very intentional and progressive career arc, but also something where I have learned P&L management, strategy, technology, networking, consumer, business, digital transformation, and call center transformation, all under the same brand. You can both really diversify your skill set as well as really deepen your expertise with each move that you make. What's fun about working with the company is that you can mentor and nurture talent within your teams or cross-functionally across the business. There's a lot of power in being able to take a risk, take a leap, go do something you've never done before, without having to change your badge.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Maryanne
01What do you attribute your success to?
I love a good challenge. I love being the person to dive into a challenge and inspire other people to also believe that we can overcome these big mountains that we need to climb. It's all part of my brand, it's what I enjoy doing, and that's how you make a big impact. You can't do it alone, you gotta do it as a group.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
The best career advice I got was to believe in myself and not be afraid to take risk. What might be perceived as a risk today could be something that ends up being a really obvious and powerful choice in the future. But if you believe in yourself, the upside and downside of risk starts to be minimized. But you have to start with really investing in yourself and believing in yourself.
03What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
I think our industry right now is very competitive from a go-to-market perspective. We're really leaning into knowing our customers and better understanding what our customers' needs and wants are, and how we better understand how to differentiate beyond price and what we've always done to new, creative offers and products and ways of meeting customers' needs in the market. But I think on everyone's mind is both the challenge and opportunity of AI. Are we prepared for it? Is our company able to stay up with the trends? Do we have the right governance processes in place? Are we moving fast enough? Do we have the right use cases? There's this explosion of creativity, of what-if thinking, of people really stretching to see how we experiment faster and faster than we ever have before. And striking that right balance of speed and risk is kind of a daily conversation. It's really fun to watch, but it's something that we spend a lot of time investing energy into to make sure that we're constantly trying to stay on the right path.
04What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
I am a big believer in integrity and authenticity. Those are words that are used often, but when leaders really live those values, I've seen how much it is noticed, valued, and appreciated with teams, both people that report to you, but teams that you work with every day. And it's something that's really important to me. I also very much value communication and transparency. I believe that sharing information, obviously as appropriate, but the more you can give people information and context, and let people roll around in discussion and dialogue, the more armed your teams are going to be to work autonomously and be successful.
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