Sarah Dziatko

I attribute my success to having a supportive manager early in my career who helped our team streamline workflows and create more predictable processes, which allowed me to build confidence through consistent wins. Positive feedback from partners—especially when supporting them on deliverables like slide decks—reinforced my abilities, while being advocated for helped me develop self-belief and eventually learn to advocate for myself. Taking on challenging responsibilities that others avoided also strengthened my growth and proved to be valuable learning experiences.

The best career advice I’ve ever received came from my mom after I graduated from college: if there’s something you want to do, just do it—don’t wait for the “right time,” because it will never feel perfect. She encouraged me not to overthink major decisions or stay stuck wondering whether it was the right moment to make a change, but instead to take the risk when I knew something mattered to me. I applied that mindset when I left a secure role, even though it felt comfortable and stable, and while my life is busier now, it turned out to be the right decision. I’ve also learned that even if a change doesn’t work out, it still provides clarity and prevents long-term regret about “what ifs.”

I would advise young women entering my industry to not be afraid to be seen or to speak up, even when something feels small or you’re unsure whether others will find it significant. Early in my career, I learned the importance of advocating for my own work—for example, in a recent all-hands meeting where I was the only one to share a project update and highlight team wins, which led to meaningful follow-up and recognition from leadership. That experience reinforced for me that you are often your own strongest advocate. I also recommend consistently sharing wins, no matter how small, and keeping a record of accomplishments so you can confidently support your impact during performance reviews and career conversations.

I think that the biggest challenge in my industry is getting people to understand that there is a balance between using AI to assist us in keeping things moving at a fast rate, but also, everything still needs a human touch. You hire marketers because you want somebody that can bring a unique insight to what you're seeing. AI is a word model. It's not gonna come up with a revolutionary idea for you. It's definitely just a challenge of balancing with leadership the realities of what AI can do, and also making sure we're really understanding the value of what humans are bringing to the work that we're doing. I think a really interesting opportunity would be having clear guidelines on where is it really important that we don't use AI, so that we don't lose our creative minds of coming up with a new idea that's never been seen before. AI isn't going to come up with something completely new, completely never before seen, because it's pulling from data of other places. There's so much talk about how we can be using it, but not much talk about where we shouldn't be using it, because there definitely is a balance. We can use it some places to help us, but there's definitely other areas of marketing that we need to be valuing our mindset can actually think, and use AI for the repetitive tasks that we need getting done.

The values most important to me in my work and personal life are mindfulness, mental-health awareness, and thoughtful communication. I also prioritize recognizing colleagues’ contributions, using intentional and respectful language, and protecting human creativity in marketing.