Shanna Akley-Feldmann

Success never comes from staying neatly inside the lines.

Looking back, my path has wound through nonprofit fundraising, academic medicine, patient advocacy, pharmaceutical strategy, and global medtech. On paper, it might look like a scattered series of unrelated turns.

But the thread was always there. The rooms kept changing. What did not change was my willingness to walk into work I hadn’t done before and figure it out anyway. To keep saying yes, even when the opportunity showed up in a form I never would have planned for. That is what built the career I actually have, instead of the one I originally tried to map out. It came from trusting my own capabilities, welcoming the unexpected pivots, and realizing that my value was never defined by the box someone else tried to put me in.

A close friend and mentor once told me that positivity is the first thing people lose when times get hard, and it is usually the thing they need most in that exact moment. He pushed me to hold onto my optimism, not as a personality trait, but as something worth protecting on purpose. He told me simply, "It's what draws people to you, and it's what makes people actually want to work with you".

Skills get you into the room. How you make people feel is usually what gets you invited back.

Stop waiting until you feel completely qualified to speak up in the room.

Early in my career, I thought building a career would be a linear path. Learn one thing, master it, and move naturally into whatever came next. What I've learned is that some of the best opportunities rarely arrive that neatly. They came when I was willing to walk into a room where I didn't know everything, ask the questions anyway, and trust in my own abilities to fill in the rest. There is real value in building range. Learn how different stakeholders think, what matters to them, and what they need from you. Get curious about the parts of the business that technically have nothing to do with your job. The more perspectives you learn to understand and connect, the more valuable your own perspective becomes.

And protect a life outside of all of it.

Marketing, in any industry, moves fast, and it is very easy to let that pace convince you that slowing down means falling behind. It doesn't. Make room for whatever brings you back to yourself, whether that's coffee or tea in the morning, a walk in a beautiful park in the afternoon, getting on a plane and going somewhere you've never been, or simply closing the laptop when the workday is over.

Ambition can build an incredible career. Just don't let it become so loud that you miss the life you're building alongside it.

I think one of the biggest challenges in medtech marketing is that innovation is moving faster than our ability to make sense of it for the people we're asking to care. Complexity doesn't speak for itself. A clinician, a patient, and a health system can look at the same innovation and need to understand it in completely different ways. Our job is to know who is on the other side, what matters to them, and make the complex more human. That's also where I see the opportunity. We need to stop treating product, brand, customer experience, and storytelling as separate conversations and start connecting them into one story people can actually follow.

I value positivity, not as forced optimism, but as a choice in how I show up. Every project hits friction somewhere. Priorities shift, budgets change, something doesn't go the way you hoped. In those moments, I try to be the person who brings energy back into the room rather than taking it out. Problems are easier to solve when people aren't afraid of them.

I also value openness. Staying curious about people, ideas, and opportunities before deciding what they can or can't become. That openness is a big part of how a career that started in nonprofit eventually led me to global medtech. It wasn't the plan. I said yes anyway.

And this doesn't stop when I leave work. It's traveling somewhere I've never been, picking up a book, getting on my yoga mat, or finding a trail and disappearing for a while. I've never really seen my work and my life as two separate versions of me. I'm the same person in both: curious, optimistic, and always ready for whatever comes next.