Latest / CEOs and ABCs / Jennifer Kattula (Microsoft, Meta, & America Express) A Conversation on: Spearheading AI at Work and at Home, Bringing Workplace Systems into the Home & Creating an Intentional Life #038

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Jennifer Kattula (Microsoft, Meta, & America Express) A Conversation on: Spearheading AI at Work and at Home, Bringing Workplace Systems into the Home & Creating an Intentional Life #038 · CEOs and ABCs

• 0:00
  Jennifer Kattula: My philosophy in work and in life is I need to be spending my time doing things that only I can uniquely do. The only thing you can do to be ready and prepared is to use and understand the tools and to form a point of view on how your specific discipline and this new technology should work together. When I became a mom, that is when my career took a different turn. I was so not expecting it. What I found is that I developed develop some sort of new superpower where.
• 0:33
  Kevin Rice: Welcome back to CEOs and ABCs. My guest today is Jennifer Katula, Global CMO of Microsoft Advertising. Today we dive deep into how she's leading AI transformation at Microsoft and how she intentionally brings that same systems thinking home to design her own family life. Jennifer shares her perspective on how families can create their own brand, how she built an AI application to help others design their own family manifesto, and that ambition and motherhood don't compete. They actually compound. This is a conversation about leading AI implementations at scale and how she's using AI and business methodologies that she learned at work to create more time and connection for her family.
• 1:12
  Jennifer Kattula: At home, I got super focused on what I wanted to crush. Not trying to be everything to everyone, trying to crush a few things and do them really well and being known for a couple of things that I do really, really well.
• 1:27
  Kevin Rice: Welcome to CEOs and ABCs. Real stories from execs who lead at work and show up at home. Career moves, parenting, wins and fails, and everything in between. I'm your host, Kevin Rice. Here's today's episode. Jennifer, thank you so much for being here today.
• 1:41
  Jennifer Kattula: It's great to be here. Kevin, thank you so much for having me.
• 1:45
  Kevin Rice: Oh, I've been excited to chat with you. When I look through your journey, your career path to the CMO of Microsoft Advertising doesn't look like everybody's typical kind of marketer origin story because you actually started as a chemical engineer. So let's start there. What, what was your early career plans and how did you end up in marketing?
• 2:06
  Jennifer Kattula: That's such a good story, such a great question. I, I was always really good at math and science and I went into chemical engineering, kind of just picking engineering because it was interesting. I liked chemistry. I was good at math, got my degree and realized that the jobs for a chemical engineer are usually in like small towns, kind of middle of nowhere. I remember interviewing for like a paper towel factory and it was like, not in a big city and all I wanted to do was go to New York. So I decided to go into consulting and and the one class that I was really good at in college was programming, like my first coding course. And it just came very naturally to me. Like, I'm a very logical thinker. I think in frameworks, I think in systems. And so I went into engineering. I was you building websites and databases in the first.com era, which was really fun and exciting. And. And then I realized that maybe I'm like too extroverted for just coding. I found myself always gravitating towards the. Talking to my colleagues, if you will, and wanted to go back to this. I went back to business school. I thought, I'm gonna, you know, sort of do a career change, and found myself just obsessed with marketing. And where I really wanted to focus was tech marketing because it's this love of technology that I have and I. I get really excited about new technology and love to get my hands dirty and the ability to take something that's really complicated and simplify it for people. So that's basically been my career. After a very short stint at American Express, I went to Microsoft. I then went to Facebook. Almost 12 years. I did a couple of years at Web, three startups, and then I found myself back at Microsoft in this. In this leadership CMO role.
• 4:10
  Kevin Rice: Amazing. And you spent, yeah, like you said, about 12 years at Meta across a lot of different roles. What was so special about the organization at that time? What kept you there for so long? And then what did you learn from that experience of spending so much time at Meta when, you know, the organization was really flourishing?
• 4:29
  Jennifer Kattula: It was such a great experience working there. And I think the theme of what I learned is how motivated I am with my own growth and my own growth trajectory. And the thing about being at Meta at that time, I think I started when there were about a thousand people there. It was just up and to the right, hockey stick growth. There was more work to do than there were people. There was always a job to be done. So there was this very much a super collaborative culture of like, let's just get it done. We're building an entirely new category. And because I was learning so much and learning so fast, that's what really kept me there. Because every couple months it seemed my team expanded or, you know, we invented new big disciplines that we needed to actually do or launch or build. And so I was constantly building. And I think that's part of who I am just at the core is I'm definitely. I'm a builder type. I like to get my hands dirty. I like to go from zero to one and then of course, from one to a hundred. But that idea of having a blank piece of paper and figuring out what should be on it has always been really motivating to me. And I, because I had so many different roles, I basically had the opportunity to start a lot of different functions while there. And of course people came after me and made those things better and made them bigger. But that ability and that opportunity to build was what really kept me there for so long.
• 6:09
  Kevin Rice: That's great. That's something that I always thought about with my own company, was that it wasn't about growth for growth stake, it was about growth to create new opportunities for teams. Right. If, if the organization was expanding, we could add new layers of management, we could add new funct, new disciplines, we could invest on more internal development projects. And so finding an organization where things are changing fast is really a breeding ground to develop skills early in a career.
• 6:37
  Jennifer Kattula: Absolutely. I, I learned, I learned so much there. And I think a lot of the, the Facebook culture of moving fast, not necessarily breaking things, they took that away after a little while. Being bold, super, super customer obsessed, having a priority prioritization stack that was like the end user, the businesses and then Facebook at the bottom, like it's in my blood now. So it was so ingrained in how we did. We worked and we did work that it's really shaped who I am as a leader and a, you know, a professional.
• 7:18
  Kevin Rice: I would say, yeah, for somebody who's maybe like earlier in their career and they're trying to move upwards and maybe they feel like they're not moving fast enough. What something that you learned from your own trajectory that maybe you could share that might help them move the needle.
• 7:33
  Jennifer Kattula: Yeah. My perspective on this has. Has kind of shifted in the last year. And I would say there's. There's two things that I think are really important right now. Number one is sort of is learning outside of work. So. And I'll go to the AI topic and question right now because I, I see a lot of people, some people leaning in really hard with AI and then others standing back, maybe waiting for their company to put together a training course or give them a mandate. And my perspective on this is we don't actually know where it's going to go. There's a lot of AI creation and building out there that probably will get thrown away and other pieces of it that we will. That will be required to get to the next. The next stage or the next phase. And the only thing you can do to be ready and prepared is to use and understand the tools and to form a point of view on how your specific discipline and this new technology should work together and how you use it and have stories to tell. And I'll share. One of the questions I ask in every single interview now is, what are you building? Because I. I think it's really important that, that we're hiring in people that don't. That don't see the boundaries of their role, really, and, and say to themselves, I can solve that problem, and I'm going to figure out how to do it. So there's an element of being sort of in the driver's seat on your own learning path, and then the other side of it is, is really owning and declaring your own narrative. So what I mean by this is we are all, you know, a unique fingerprint, one of ones, and we're coming to the table with our experience, our education, our worldview, the companies we've worked at. And everyone has a secret sauce and a secret power. I don't know if everyone's really going deep to tap into what makes them so special, what makes them them. You know, if you're a marketing manager, there's lots of marketing managers out there. By not necessarily leading with your job title or your company and enriching that story with the experience or the trials and tribulations that you've had, you can tell a much richer story to a potential employer or to your current employer. If you're trying to get a promotion, you'll set yourself apart. So I think that personal narrative is so critical, especially today, when you know the job market is in an interesting place. Let's just say that. And there's definitely a lot of real fear of will my job exist in the next year or will I have a job in the next year? So I think the best approach here, if you are looking to advance, is to do those two things.
• 10:45
  Kevin Rice: I think that's so important to lead with your point of view. We fell into the trap of bringing too many people into meetings fairly often. So we created this litmus test. And if you have a point of view that you need to share at this table, then you belong at the table. And I think it's kind of the same thing, is everybody brings a unique perspective. And this wasn't saying that anybody didn't have a point of view. It was more of. To encourage them to share their point of view.
• 11:09
  Jennifer Kattula: Yep, exactly. Exactly. I think I only realized, like, at the last couple of years when I was empowered again, like as a former engineer, that I'M actually a builder. Like that is who I am building brands now. I'm building stuff on the side and I'm building things internally like agents and workflows. And I feel super empowered. You can see like my smile right now because it's exciting to me and it's my favorite thing to talk about is building because it's, I actually find it so fun.
• 11:42
  Kevin Rice: Well, I could definitely see kind of all of the origins of engineering thinking, systems thinking and how that's kind of come into your career. One of the things I've been really interested in is how are people using AI to free up more time for themselves both at work and at home. And I know that you've been dabbling quite a bit and that might be an understatement. So tell us a little bit about how are you using different tools at work to help save time both in your career and at home.
• 12:09
  Jennifer Kattula: Absolutely. It's really pretty fun to be at Microsoft right now because there's such an investment and intention around AI in our products as well as the investments across the board. So we're kind of in the thick of it and sometimes I forget that I'm in the thick of it. I think everybody else is living this life where you're vibe coding all the time. So at work we're, we're doing a ton of experimentation and building actual agents that are saving time but also improving the quality and the personalization of the output so that the end business result is driving actual more rep, actually more revenue. I'm actually leading AI transformation for Microsoft advertising and it's been really interesting. We actually started the journey looking at our adoption numbers. So how many people are using Copilot on a daily basis? And we hit like basically 100% super fast. And then we said okay, well does adoption equal effectiveness? Does it equal impact? And we started to dig in a little bit more and realized that in order for AI to be truly a scalable enterprise effective on that level, you need solutions and systems that are very much role specific. Number two, you, you also need to make sure that the AI can connect effectively with high fidelity to the, the data underneath it. So we've spent a lot of time over the past year, you know, cleaning up our SharePoint to make sure that when Copilot needs to, we need to build an agent on some certain like body of information. It's clean, it's accessible, it's high fidelity so it can access it. Same thing with connecting into some of our martech tools like so we're working on and actively building MCP servers so that we can connect into those Martech tools so we can have more information for more personalization. My team is saving dozens to hundreds of hours a week using creative tools for efficiency, for production, for writing, for briefing, and basically across the board. So I. The mandate that I've given, I hate to call it a mandate because I really want people to feel more inspired and empowered to just get their hands dirty, is that we are transforming and we get to define what the next version of our marketing organization looks like. And the last thing I'll say is not everybody is super technical and nor should they be, because some of this stuff gets really complex really fast. So we've actually started to hire AI builders who are engineers with a functional background. And the most recent person we hired is an has expertise in marketing and is super technical also. So when we find the use cases that are more complex, maybe they have to access systems that a regular enterprise user doesn't have access to. They can do it and make sure that it is privacy, safe, secure passes, our responsible AI criteria, etc. And then, you know, I at work have a whole bunch of, of my own personal workflows to save myself time and make me smarter. My philosophy in work and in life and at home is I need to be spending my time doing things that only I can uniquely do. And I, I think that's true for the marketing team too. Like what can marketing uniquely do for the organization? Let's like really focus our time there. Being at home, what can I uniquely do? Presents with my kids. Like nobody else can do that. I can't delegate that. But I can outsource like my gardening and my cleaning to someone else very easily.
• 16:20
  Kevin Rice: You just beat me to it. I was going to ask you, how does that kind of thinking show up for you at home? So you already answered that question.
• 16:26
  Jennifer Kattula: But like my workflows at work, I have a morning briefing. For example, I never start my day in email. I literally started in Copilot. And it will go through all the things that happened in the last 24 hours. Surface what only I can do that I need to prioritize. Surface things that I can delegate. And then I have another agent that does newsletter briefing. It summarizes them and then pops up unique insights that are aligned to my point of view on the world so that I can kind of make those connections a little bit easier.
• 17:01
  Kevin Rice: I saw a quote, I don't know if you maybe you posted on LinkedIn or something, but you had said something along the lines of, you can't lead AI transformation from the sidelines. And it seems like you've really embraced that because you're actually in there getting your hands dirty, developing agents and using the tools.
• 17:18
  Jennifer Kattula: That's exactly right. Using the tools as a leader. It's not just like modeling the behavior. I don't think you actually can know the potential unless you're playing around and you see it and you feel it for yourself. This, you'll have a lot of pain in the beginning because it'll be hard and it might take you longer to do something. And then you'll start to have these magical moments where you're like, oh, my God, I can offload some of this so I can spend more time doing what I uniquely can do and have more fun while I'm at it. And marketers, we know, we love to make. We are. We are creators at heart. And I talk to so many marketers who are mired in the admin and the tickets and the handoffs and the briefs, and really we all want to just create. That's why we got into this in the first place. So if I can help my team move in that direction, even though a little bit, I think I'll be successful.
• 18:23
  Kevin Rice: Yeah. Did you have a moment where something clicked, where you moved beyond just kind of basic chat AI applications and you saw this could be really something more transformational than I ever thought it would be.
• 18:36
  Jennifer Kattula: Yes. I. The first agent I built, it's I. I downloaded or I got access to a. Somebody SharePoint that had like 250 of those. I think it was like a 2025. Predictions for the beauty industry, predictions for the auto industry, predictions from HubSpot. They. Every company kind of comes out with their own version. No one can read all of them. They're all at least 20 pages long. So I built an agent, I put them all in a SharePoint, and I was able to mine those for insights to be smarter on. We're going to go talk to some retail clients in the luxury category, and here's what's important to them right now. Because in my role, I'm not really an expert in any of these categories, but I need to be sometimes. And I was like, this is amazing. This could have been hours and hours of desk research. So it really unlocked my thinking of what's possible. And that's the kind of example that I. That I think when you see it and you feel it, you start to get more ideas of what you could make that would have that kind of benefit for Your team.
• 19:50
  Kevin Rice: How are you introducing AI at home to your kids? I know they're 8 and 5, but do you talk to them about AI? How are you preparing them for a world that's really hard to even imagine what it's going to look like when they graduate high school?
• 20:04
  Jennifer Kattula: I know, I don't, I have to say, I don't really have a good answer to this right now. They are, they don't have computers yet. The most we've done is, you know, ask ChatGPT, like explain the speed of light to an 8, 7 or 8 year old because I think I did a bad job of explaining the speed flight as we were talking about the meteor and the off the coast of Massachusetts and the speed of sound and sonic booms and what they are. So that's probably the most. We've made some podcasts with AI, but we haven't done a lot. And I know I need to actually probably come up with a learning agenda for them and how they, how they use it, like only with my supervision at first because I do worry about the offloading of the, the cognitive motion. You know, this computer can do all the thinking for you and curiosity and the learning aspect is so important to us. Part of that is the friction and the pain of figuring things out or going through the reps on something so that you can actually get good at it on your own. And that does make me nervous. I've talked to a lot of parents who have older kids and the sense I get is that a lot of their older kids are using it for research and building, which I think is really cool. So it gives me hope and encouragement that those kids are not offloading their thinking, but more to come in this space. I don't have a great answer. I'd love to know what you think.
• 21:45
  Kevin Rice: Actually, my kids are about the same age, so it's not something I'm super worried about yet. Right. I'm actually more focused on allowing my kids to be kids as long as they can because they don't get their childhood back. Right.
• 21:57
  Jennifer Kattula: Right.
• 21:58
  Kevin Rice: I could force them to grow up and I could start teaching them about economics and politics, but I don't think that's, you know, where they're at. Like they need to just enjoy this time. And so we've done things like we'll go on, you know, an AI tool and we'll describe a picture and we'll try to see who can create the most like accurate picture using descriptions. But I think the most important thing that I have talked to them about that, I'm just going to keep cementing is exactly what you said of this isn't meant to offload your thinking, this is meant to augment your thinking. And there's amazing tools that we can use. But at the end of the day, like, you need to be creative, you need to be resilient, you need to have ingenuity. These are all just like the core values that I'm really trying to work with them on, because otherwise, if, if they can just go and do their homework in two seconds using an AI tool, that doesn't help them learn how to learn. And that's probably the most important thing. As a kid, when I went to college, I didn't learn anything that I actually used in my career, but I learned how to learn, and that was the most important skill that I developed.
• 23:06
  Jennifer Kattula: That's such a good point, the learning how to learn and the. There's like the pain of going through the learning process too, because we all learn differently and some things are easier than others for us. So I love that approach and that philosophy.
• 23:24
  Kevin Rice: Well, what do you think about the idea that the robots are going to take our job? Are there things that the robots can't replace that people need to continue to lean into?
• 23:35
  Jennifer Kattula: You know, it's judgment and taste and real, like, context. It's the feeling that you have that when you're around other people, when you can sort of read the room or read the energy, the robots can't, can't, nor they should, nor should they take that. The experience you have of, like, doing something over and over and over again, so, you know, all the ways something goes sideways. And then I also think there's this movement towards imperfection and, and the human element of how can I be imperfect? Because humans are imperfect. And so there's an element of we are undeniably human beings that we have all of our idiosyncrasies and leaning into those and leaning into why you are the way you are. So I think there's this element of people are really leaning into their weirdness in a way, and I, I think it's so cool, actually, I, I think that's so cool. But to get back to your question, like, are they going to take our jobs? Some of our jobs, probably things that are repeatable, that can be offloaded. What I hope happens is that it unlocks the potential of humanity in a way that we haven't had before. Unlock the potential of that human to do, to do great things, to use their imagination to build and create and Things like that. That's my hope for where this all takes us. I'm a total optimist. I think it's really exciting and empowering for a lot of people and it does level the playing field too. If I can be an engineer again and I haven't coded in 20 years, like, I just, I really do feel empowered.
• 25:21
  Kevin Rice: Yeah, it really changes the skill sets of somebody who's building software. Right. My days of building enterprise software for large chain restaurants or retailers, we'd have a 20 person team. We'd have product managers, project managers, maybe 10 engineers, QAs like this huge team. And now all of a sudden you could take a product manager who was the main business mind on the team, who was figuring out how to connect like the business goals and the customer needs and turned it into requirements. Now all of a sudden they're the ones who can actually develop the application. And so it goes back to your point earlier of finding somebody with a business vertical domain expertise and also allowing them to like be a builder. So it creates entirely new roles. Have you guys hired any new roles recently that maybe didn' exist a couple years ago or have the job descriptions changed as much that they wouldn't have been the same a few years ago?
• 26:21
  Jennifer Kattula: We actually just this year started hiring these AI builders who do have this domain functional expertise and they're technical. And the expectation of the job is your part product manager, you're part of user researcher, you're part marketer. You need to kind of understand how marketing works today so you can reinvent it and have so much agency and a little bit of technical expertise to go make stuff for us. So it's, it's very interesting and really what I want from my marketing team is I want all of us to feel that, that way that we are all builders and can control the destiny of the world that we oversee and have the empowerment to do that. But yes, those are the roles that we're hiring for. I, I, we had, I mean, so many applications for these roles. They were in high demand because they're cool. They're like, ooh, they're cool, they're super fun. You can move really fast. Whereas building enterprise software like you did in the past, it's, that takes a long time and it should, but if you're building tools for the marketing team, maybe the, in their internal, like you can move really, really fast. It's pretty cool.
• 27:46
  Kevin Rice: That's amazing. Yeah. So if, if somebody was listening and they maybe are just using AI for research or augmenting their thinking but they're feeling behind like, I need to learn how to build agents. I need how to automate more of my processes and workflows. How would you advise them to get started?
• 28:03
  Jennifer Kattula: Well, they' many trainings out there and you can actually go to your AI of choice, whether it's Copilot, whether it's Claude, and build your own learning plan and give it the outcome. I want to, I want to learn how to build agents. Or maybe the starting point is I have these outcomes for my role that I need to achieve. And how might I build these use cases using Claude or Copilot or Codex or what have you. So, I mean, you can get your own learning agenda back. I'm actually running like two or three vibe coding sessions when I'm going to can in a few weeks to do just this to show people that it's natural language, it's a prompt box, and then it's iteration. The fun slash challenging part comes is when you want to start to connect things like I'm connecting my CRM to this experience, or I'm connecting my customer feedback to this experience, or I'm connecting my whole product database to this experience. So then you can really start to see it take off.
• 29:15
  Kevin Rice: I. I connected my newsletter to Claude.
• 29:21
  Jennifer Kattula: Yeah.
• 29:21
  Kevin Rice: And I wanted to start digging into Cohorse to understand, okay, my Open rate dropped 10% last week. Are these from subscribers that just subscribed in the last few days? If so, that tells me maybe the ad campaign that we were running for subscribers was a little off this and the analysis it was doing. I would have had three or four people and it would have taken so much work to figure out these answers. And now the, the idea of a CRM completely changes because now you're just interfacing with it. It just blew my mind to see how insightful I could get with an AI tool digging into my newsletter database.
• 29:57
  Jennifer Kattula: It. It's true. I. I think you said two really important things. One, I think a lot of these SaaS tools will be required to be headless in a way where it's just the connection to your AI and then you can build whatever kind of interface you want on top of it. Then the second thing is you can turn that analysis, once you like the output, into a routine or a repeated task, a scheduled task that goes in every week and does the analysis in the way that you want and presents you with a dashboard in exactly the way you want. So it's like your personal interface, your command center. And when you have a bunch of tools that you're using. It's pretty powerful. I made. I made one for myself, my personal command center. And it. I have it. I have read access to Gmail and my personal calendar and not write access. And then for my. My content that I post on social media, there's a whole content thing and it's awesome. I just type in daily brief and that's. I know what I'm supposed to be doing. And so, like, you have to know your own behaviors and what tools work for you. I think a lot of. A lot of times we introduce new tools and then that's just so much more friction to get the job done. I use a lot of voice. Like, that's my behavior. So I want voice interfaces and I don't necessarily need, like, I don't want to go into a hundred different tools or a hundred different apps. I went off on a tangent on that because I got so excited by what you just told me with analyzing your newsletter.
• 31:41
  Kevin Rice: Hi, Kevin here. If you're enjoying this conversation and you know someone else who's working to grow in their career while staying present at home, I'd really love it if you could share this episode with them. It's one of the best ways to. You can help us and help more leaders build their careers in a way that they're proud of without missing the moments that matter most. So I'd love for you to share a little bit about, like, what you're working on right now at Microsoft. And I can also see that it's followed you home. And I would love to talk to you about your family life and what looks to me as something that's been designed as very intentional and purposeful. Maybe you can start by telling us a little bit about your family. What's. What's alive for you guys right now.
• 32:20
  Jennifer Kattula: I'm married to a wonderful man named Andrew. We have two kids. They're young. They're almost five and almost eight. And we live in Atlanta. So I think when we talk about intentionality, one of the things we did before we even got married, my husband and I, is we were dating long distance and we wrote a one pager because we wanted to be really intentional about what our future life would look like. Because you can imagine we had to. One of us had to move cities, and then we had to kind of start as a couple somewhere else where we're, like, living together. And so we just wanted to all of it to be so intentional about what the next phase of our life would look like. So my husband, he's Actually, a writer, he wrote the one pager and me. This is so stereotypical. I did the Excel spreadsheet of what city we're going to live in. And are there direct flights from, like, both of our families? And is it city enough, but not too city? All this stuff we had. I had a whole scoring system for the cities. We ended up in Seattle when we first were together. And I think that intentionality has followed us through our marriage and evolved over time. So that exercise sort of transformed into kind of a yearly vision that we would sit down and write together. Like, what do we want the next year to look like for each of us individually so that we're spending time on our own passions for us as a family, for each of our kids, traveling to see our respective families and making sure that we're being, like, thoughtful about what our priorities are and what we want to achieve so we feel good at the end of the year. So we started to do that, and we. We kind of make it very bougie because we'll go out to lunch or dinner, and we'll have wine and get our computers out. I don't. I don't know. It's probably not for everyone. But I will tell you, this practice has helped our family become so much more harmonious, purposeful. The priorities are so clear, and then you don't have to renegotiate or re litigate things that you've decided. And we revisit it, too, because, you know, your life looks different when you have no kids to one kid and then one kid to two kids, and then, you know, moving cities, different jobs. Like, you have to recalibrate over time and get into another steady state, only for that steady state to then be upended by something else.
• 34:57
  Kevin Rice: I think what you shared about coming together and aligning on an intentional vision for your future is really powerful because sometimes people in early relationships miss those conversations and they get down the path, and then they realize, oh, wait, I want to have kids. You don't want to have kids. And all of a sudden, some of these big, major things that we envision for our life don't align with our partner. So I think it's such a great practice to get that early alignment and then, like you said, kind of revisit it. I don't know that everybody thinks that way. So where did this idea even come from for you and your husband?
• 35:34
  Jennifer Kattula: Yeah, well, I have to give my husband a ton of credit because he. He is a writer, and this is how he sort of processes and thinks, is through writing. I also around that time, was doing my own visioning practice just for me. And I. I will say I think you're right that a lot of families don't do this together. However, I think a lot of individuals do it for themselves, like your own vision writing, your own personal career plan, whatever it may be. So I was already doing that practice of this vision writing. And he is a writer, so we came together like that. And that's kind of where I was born. Like you. I've talked to a lot of people who said, oh, my God, I would. I wish I started doing this. I need to start doing this with my partner. And they kind of get inspired by the practice of it. And then I talk to some people that say, you know, I don't know if my partner would want to do this with me. Like, they might be resistant to the. To the idea of it. So I think there's probably ways in to make it a little less daunting, like, oh, you're going to write a one pager now, so business and professional, and you bring that into the home. So, you know, I can see some people saying, oh, yeah, like, that might be a little cheesy, but it's so powerful. And anyway, that's the long story of how we. How we got it, how we started doing it.
• 37:00
  Kevin Rice: Yeah, no, it's right up my alley. It's something that I had to do when I was figuring out how to be a single parent and kind of shifting from my, you know, business hat to my parenting hat was take a lot of the lessons I learned in my career and apply them at home. And you shared. Shared kind of an idea with me where companies have brands, families need brands, too. And so I'd love for you to share a little bit about your perspective on what does that mean to have, like, a brand for your family?
• 37:30
  Jennifer Kattula: Yes, I absolutely believe this. I worked in marketing for a long time, and a brand is your purpose, it's your mission, it's your values, it's your priorities. It's. And it's how you show up in the world. And I think a lot of families are bringing in. They're bringing in two different people with two different histories, two sets of values, two sets of experiences from their childhood and their upbringing and bringing them together and the process and the practice of sitting down with your partner and thinking through what do I want to bring in from my upbringing in my childhood, what sits with me and, like, brings joy to my face and what is part of our legacy or my family's? Legacy that I want to bring through and want my kids to have. And what do I want to leave behind? Because we all want to leave behind something. And then what do we want to create together? What's our ambition for it, for our family? How do we want our kids to describe their family life growing up? Like, what do we want them to say? How do we show up as a family in the world? So all of those things together. I call this kind of like your identity layer as a family. And it is a brand. It is like, if you break it down and you do the comparison, it's your mission statement, it's your core values, it's the operating principles or otherwise known as I call them for the family, your house rules. And it's like a manifesto of who you are. And I think it's a living, living and breathing kind of document, too, because you do go through seasons, and you're going to prioritize different things at different times based on where you are personally and your family and your kids and everything else you can build on top of that. So then you can build the systems that allow you to be super present at home and grow your career at the same time. That balance equation that a lot of people talk about, I'm not sure if I'm totally bought into balance. It's more design. And then you can layer on the aesthetics piece of it. You know, how. How do you actually show up in the world? What does your house feel like when people walk in? And if you go back to the brand analogy, a brand has a visual identity, too. So I think there are parallels here for families to really consider when you're coming together and when you're going through different phases of your life.
• 40:02
  Kevin Rice: For. For hundreds of thousands of years, families had crests, right? It was their visual identity for their family. And that's kind of one of the things that we've, you know, lost over time. Can you kind of bring this to life a little bit for us? What are some of the values that you and your husband are working to instill with your own children? And what are some of the things that you do to kind of cement those values?
• 40:24
  Jennifer Kattula: Well, we have five family rules. I'll share them here. My kids are five and eight. Remember, safe hands and body is number one. Kind words, respect. Listen to mommy and daddy the first time and have fun. So those are the rules, and we come back to them a lot. The values are kindness, education, curiosity, getting outside all the time, generosity, learning. Just like a love of learning. We're really instilling that and learning in all different dimensions. My. My husband is very big into sports and history and music and is teaching the children all about music from the decades, but really instilling those. And then the way it comes to life in our house is a lot of structure. So everybody knows when we're getting up, when we're going to bed, what days we have tv, we get outside every single day, and we do a lot of special time. So. So we try to create the sort of the framework so that there can be flexibility within it, if you will.
• 41:34
  Kevin Rice: That's the point. Frameworks and structure actually give you more freedom, and it kind of seems like the opposite, but really, like, once you have the routines and rituals in place, then you don't really have to think about all the structure. You can really spend your time thinking about how do we fill the space within this structure to create the most connection, to teach these values and whatever you want to accomplish as part of your family.
• 41:58
  Jennifer Kattula: Exactly.
• 42:00
  Kevin Rice: How do you handle it when, say, you have a stressful day at work and you come home and you've got pressure on the work front and you're supposed to go spend time outside, but you're exhausted. How do you switch from, you know, being in career mode to coming home and being in parenting mode?
• 42:19
  Jennifer Kattula: Yeah, I'm gonna be honest. Like, it's not always easy when you. Your phone might be blowing up next to you and you're like, this is my two hours to hang out with the family or cook dinner or whatever. I. I'm religious about the evenings after work to bedtime. So I. I just put it away because I know I'm going to go back to my computer in three hours if there's something urgent or on my mind or that I need to close out. And I've also really set a lot of expectations with my teammates, my manager, around what my boundaries are. And it's very rare that I'll step out unless it's like an actual emergency, which doesn't happen very often, but it does every now and then where you can't align schedules and everybody has to meet at like 6:30pm Eastern time. For me, what works the best are the boundaries that I've established from the beginning. Yeah.
• 43:18
  Kevin Rice: Because I always found it really hard. What I had to do was create a ritual where I was like, okay, when I leave my work office, I reengage with my kids. And so we have a special handshake and I ask them some questions that don't elicit the response of good. And because that's the only thing I ever get back, whenever I ask them a question, it's like, oh, it was good. Well, I love all of the examples of how you're using AI at work, but you've also taken it and applied it at home. And you've created this really awesome application that I would love for you to share with anybody listening.
• 43:51
  Jennifer Kattula: Oh, thank you for. Thank you for asking. I built an application called House Rules that essentially is a conversation that you can have you and your partner to build out your. Your house rules, basically your manifesto, your mission, your values, what you stand for, your priorities. And it's a. It's sort of a series of maybe 10 different turns that you answer questions. It's this. It's a very like similar flow, but not all the questions are the same. You know, you can do it on your own and represent your partner, or you can have your partner answer as well. And it turn and it produces like a very beautiful document that has all of these components in it. And the people I've shared it with have said, I feel so seen like that's. That's really what they've said to me. And it goes back to what we were talking about before about the intentionality of creating that identity layer for your family to honestly to help families that haven't done this before. So you can, you can spend 15 or 30 minutes on this, on this together. And it. And it spits out something that's like really useful and really valuable and grounded and points you in the direction that you're already going, but puts words around it. And I think it feels really good when you're like, this is mine. So that is what I'm building. It is at House Dash Rules Co and I. It is password protected now, so you'll have to sign up for my newsletter if you want want to get access.
• 45:35
  Kevin Rice: Perfect. We'll definitely add the link in the show notes. But I want to ask you the first question that comes up from your own application. First of all, it says, hello, Kevin. I'm honored to be here with you. As you think about your life you're building with your family, what is one smell sound or feeling from your childhood that you hope your children will have their own version of?
• 45:56
  Jennifer Kattula: I consistently write the this in the chat. It's unconditional love. My parents would always say, we always love you unconditionally. My mom would say, I'm the president of your fan club. And then from a smell perspective. I grew up in the country in Michigan and it's like fresh cut grass, open space and silence. So all of that comes, comes up for me when I answer this and what I remember from my childhood, that I want my kids always to feel like, no matter what, even when we get mad at each other, I always love them.
• 46:34
  Kevin Rice: Yeah. You know that sense of belonging, right. Regardless of your behaviors, no matter what happened throughout the day, like you're always loved and you always belong here and you don't need to perform in any sort of way to know that, you know, this is your family and this is your home.
• 46:52
  Jennifer Kattula: Exactly.
• 46:52
  Kevin Rice: Amazing. I loved it. One thing I loved about reading off of your website was where it said that, that ambition and motherhood don't have to compete. They can compound it. Seems like that's a really important thesis for you. But most parents, mothers that I talk to, fathers, they feel those forces really pulling against each other. You know, what's your perspective on that? Like, what would you say to somebody who's just really in that tension kind of season where work and family are just like stretching them thin?
• 47:25
  Jennifer Kattula: I will say I, I feel your. I feel it for you. The reason I believe this is because when I became a mom, I think that is when my career took a different turn. Like it accelerated in a way. And I was so not expecting it, Kevin. Like, I really wasn't. I thought, thought, okay, I'm going to become a mom and I'm going to plateau at whatever level I was and I'm going to do the 9 to 5 and spend all my extra time with my family and be really present. And I think what I found is that I developed some sort of new superpower where I got super focused on what I wanted to crush. Like I, at work, like not trying to be everything to everyone, try to try to crush a few things and do them really well and being known for a couple of things that I do really, really well. And, and same as at home. At home. I've said very clearly I'm not taking on any volunteer opportunities and my kids right now in this season, I can't, I can't do it well, but it at work, you know, maybe I don't know if this is a, A, a me thing or a professional thing or a mom thing, but I had a tendency to say, say yes to everything and really stretch myself thin. And I think being, becoming a mom just got me super focused on what am I going to be known for and what am I going to crush. So the advice I would give to the people that are in the Thick of it. I can't. I can't make your baby sleep. Sleep more. But I will say, like, that is a tough season. It totally is. But zooming out, I think that focus and prioritization is a real skill to build, and it will unlock a lot of purpose and joy too, because you'll be focused and you'll be able to do something at like 150% and feel really proud about it.
• 49:41
  Kevin Rice: I think that's important. Yeah, it's so important not to, like, overextend yourself. It's. Especially as a parent with a career, it's really easy to sacrifice all the things you need for yourself, but at the end of the day, you gotta put your oxygen mask on first. And you mentioned, like, constraints, right? Constraints are actually a good thing. Constraints can be overcome with creativity. And that's where, like, the magic really happens.
• 50:05
  Jennifer Kattula: Mm. I agree with you. Um, and I, I give this advice to expecting moms a lot and who ask me not. They don't say, like, how do you do it all? I hate. I hate. Actually hate that how do you do it all? Thing. But, like, how should I. They think about transitioning back into the workforce after being a mom. And it's, it's true. I'm like, just stay focused on what you're gonna crush and it'll be a lot easier for you to feel that purpose at home.
• 50:40
  Kevin Rice: Well, I think your point is don't do it, all right? Focus on the things that only you can do exceptionally well and focus on those things. I had the same kind of thinking when I was leading a sales organization. It was like, okay, what are the things that I can do really well that nobody else can do? And for me, that was kind of more higher level strategic thinking of connecting dots and positioning and differentiators and how we're going to craft this narrative. But then once we could create a system, other people could fit into it, and it just freed up so much of my time because they could take the ball and run with it. So, Jennifer, you've built global marketing organizations, you do coaching, you have this amazing perspective on kind of the family brand and operating system. And now you built an app for families. It does seem like you're doing everything. So how do you do it all? But more importantly, know you're. You've said you're a builder, and I can see it. What are you. What are you building next? Like, what. What is all of this gonna come together to create?
• 51:41
  Jennifer Kattula: Um, gosh, right now, a lot of my building is to satisfy My creativity and personal passions. Um, but like, where is this going? I. I think what I really want for the marketing community, I want to inspire everyone to get their hands dirty and like you can do it too. And I'm very generous with a lot of things. It's maybe a downside of like generous with my time in a lot of ways, but I, I feel like I just want to give it out and give it away and inspire people and same with families who might have not thought about a family in this way before, but how powerful could it be to write all of this down or have help writing it down so that you can live like just a more intentional life and create more calm, have more systems, have more identity around who you are as a family and where your family is going. So starts with like my own personal passion. I don't know how it all fits together or like where exactly it's going. I'm glad I have a full time job because I don't have to. I'm not banking on any of it, so hopefully it's helpful to people.
• 53:01
  Kevin Rice: Well, that's where all that uncertainty of the unknown is. That's what makes it all exciting. Anyway, so I'm doing the same thing with podcast and newsletter and I don't know where it's going to go, but I'm loving getting to meet amazing people like you and having these conversations that are just so important to me and I just think like creating a venue to talk about the realities of how tough it is to grow a really ambitious career and not sacrifice your relationship with your kids. So you're doing an amazing job of it. I. I love how you intentionally are designing your family vision and values and how you've translated those ideas into an app to help others as well. I really appreciate your time, your advice, your energy. So thank you so much for being here.
• 53:44
  Jennifer Kattula: Thank you. I love what you're building too. I think it's such an important conversation to have and, and everyone should go back and listen to some of those past episodes too.
• 53:53
  Kevin Rice: Awesome. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate you for being here today.
• 53:56
  Jennifer Kattula: Awesome. Thank you.
• 53:58
  Kevin Rice: If you're enjoying this conversation, make sure to hit subscribe so you don't miss future episodes. CEOs and ABCs is all about helping you grow in your career and show up at home. We've got many more amazing guests coming up, so tap, follow and stay tuned.