Jennifer Schiffman's career began with a small act of mislabeling. The job was called interior design. The work, she discovered, was sales wearing a tasteful jacket. She had studied studio art and art history, expecting that museum curation might follow. Instead, the first room taught her that she could persuade people. She simply did not yet know what she wanted to persuade them about.
The answer arrived at a best-practices event run by the owners of her employer, Home Depot. Schiffman watched the marketing team work and recognized a different kind of design: arranging a product, an audience and an idea until each made sense beside the others. She left for Pittsburgh, entered the University of Pittsburgh's Katz Graduate School of Business and earned an MBA in marketing. An internship at GlaxoSmithKline led to foodservice brand marketing at Heinz. The would-be curator had found a larger gallery. Its exhibits were brands, buying habits and the quiet machinery of commerce.
This origin story is unusually tidy only in retrospect. It also explains something durable about her work. Schiffman has moved across food, laboratory equipment, energy, identity technology, retail software and facilities operations. The nouns keep changing. Her job stays close to the same verb: translate. Find the shape inside a complicated business, then make it legible to the people who must buy it, sell it or bet on it.
The eye finds the room
At Katz, Schiffman became a Sheth Scholar in Marketing, an honor awarded to two MBA students that year. She has kept returning to the school as a guest lecturer on branding and modern marketing. The relationship has the pleasing circularity of a good logo: the institution that helped her change careers is now one of the places where she helps other people begin theirs.
Her advice is less polished than most commencement language and more useful. Build the network. Keep the mentors. Offer the idea. Stretch into the next role. She has said that she was once a rule follower and that confidence did not arrive factory-installed. It was built through repetition, teachers and visible attempts.
“Don't wait for permission.”Jennifer Schiffman on career momentum
There is a sly piece of organizational intelligence beneath that sentence. Initiative helps the person taking it, but it also makes the manager look good. Schiffman frames ambition as a cooperative act rather than a solo trumpet. Her other recurring instruction is generosity: give time, share knowledge, help early-career women and remember that even the newest person in the room owns a useful angle.
The 40-person bet
The decisive professional turn came after Heinz was acquired. Schiffman and her husband were rooted in Pittsburgh, so simply following a familiar large-company path was not the obvious move. Then a small software business called. Blacksmith Applications needed its first marketing leader. It had roughly 40 employees, a startling change after organizations with workforces counted in the thousands.
She jumped. At Blacksmith, marketing could not disappear into the neighboring functions because the neighboring functions were sitting at the same table. She built the department from scratch and learned the intimate arithmetic of a growth company: a campaign affects pipeline; positioning affects a sale; an acquisition produces a stack of names, products and customer promises that somebody must reconcile before Monday.
The Blacksmith chapter
Blacksmith grew fivefold, completed four acquisitions and eventually sold to TELUS. Schiffman joined the deal team and pitched the company to prospective buyers. For a marketer, there may be no stricter edit. The corporate story must survive contact with people trained to question every adjective. She has called the experience surreal, rewarding and career-defining.
It also fixed her professional preference. She liked enterprise SaaS companies backed for growth, places where brand was not a decorative layer but part of the operating system. After Blacksmith and TELUS came a global CMO role at identity-technology company Roqad, then the top marketing post at retail software provider Bamboo Rose.
When a small team meets a blank page
Bamboo Rose gave Schiffman a familiar puzzle at a new scale. The company served global retailers across product development, purchasing, supply chain, finance and logistics. Its marketing team was small. Its ambitions included demand generation, content, product marketing, acquisition integration and a refreshed brand. The workload had the serene proportions of an avalanche.
Schiffman brought in an enterprise generative-AI platform to help the team draft, repurpose webinars, shape customer stories and harmonize material from acquired companies. A press-release draft that could consume two days fell to about an hour. Writing projects moved from days to hours. The team supported 15 account-based campaigns and doubled its content output.
The more interesting result was not more copy. It was recovered attention. When people spent less time facing an empty page, they could spend more time coordinating with sales, distributing the work and learning whether anyone cared. Schiffman admitted that the white canvas could paralyze a personality like hers. The machine offered a first plank across the gap. People still decided where the bridge should go.
Her sequence for retail technology is terse: strategy first, then process, then tech. It is an unfashionable order in moments when a tool becomes the story. It also travels well. Software companies often adore their product long before a customer has found a reason to change. Schiffman's order makes the customer's world the opening scene.
Selling the work nobody sees
Fexa, which Schiffman joined as chief marketing officer in June 2025, sells software for facilities and asset operations. Its world includes work orders, vendors, refrigeration records, budgets and the repair histories of hundreds or thousands of locations. It is consequential work with little instinctive glamour. A roof leak has dreadful timing and no personal brand.
That makes translation valuable. The facilities leader understands the operational bruise. Finance wants a defensible investment case. An executive team hears “AI” and wants either savings or shelter from being left behind. Marketing must connect those perspectives without pretending they began in agreement.
Schiffman's recent Fexa work leans into that junction. She hosts conversations about how facilities teams earn internal alignment before issuing a software request for proposal. She helps assemble a weekly intelligence brief translating AI news for multi-site operators. In 2026, she asked the facilities community to nominate women whose leadership journeys deserved coverage in a company-owned industry publication. The pattern is familiar: build an audience by helping it see itself more clearly.
Her attention to networks makes practical sense here too. Enterprise technology is rarely purchased by a lone hero with a corporate card. It moves through coalitions. Schiffman has argued that tech providers need people who genuinely speak the customer's language, even if those experts join part-time. Partnership begins with fluency, and fluency begins by listening long enough to stop confusing vocabulary with understanding.
Two microphones, one neighborhood
An executive biography tends to press a person until only the blazer remains. Neighbors Neighboring, the podcast Schiffman co-hosts with Amber Battaglia, returns the wrinkles. The two friends are real neighbors in Mt. Lebanon, just outside Pittsburgh. Their material is the low-stakes theater that unfolds over fences and in group chats: lawn-mowing hours, public FaceTime, community gardens, surprise parties, gummy-bear flavors and the social hazards of a badly timed leaf blower.
The program began in 2025 and found its rhythm as a kind of suburban court, warm enough to welcome the accused and opinionated enough to issue a ruling. Schiffman has argued that Texas Roadhouse is basically a dive bar with better staffing. She once corrected herself on air after discovering the green Haribo gummy bear is strawberry rather than lime. Retractions are rarely this cheerful.
Podcasting reveals something the career record merely suggests. Schiffman likes a live audience, a clear point of view and the friction produced when other humans bring their own. She describes herself as an introvert and a type-A marketing professional, but not as a quiet one. Her hands join the conversation. She credits her Italian heritage for making her enthusiasm difficult to conceal.
The side project is not a disguised demand-generation strategy, which is part of its charm. Yet it exercises the same muscles: a recognizable voice, curiosity about how people behave and respect for the details that make a subject feel inhabited. The workday asks why a CFO should approve facilities software. The evening asks when a neighbor may morally begin mowing. Both questions become interesting once somebody cares enough to frame them properly.
The long way around, on purpose
Schiffman's route from art history to facilities software resists the tidy fiction that a career should be obvious at 22. Each chapter donated something. Sales supplied nerve. Art supplied the eye. Heinz supplied brand discipline. Blacksmith supplied ownership and proximity to consequence. Acquisitions supplied lessons in combining voices. A difficult career interruption in 2025 deepened her faith in the network she had spent years maintaining. Fexa gave the next chapter a new operational language.
The result is not a reinvention artist forever discarding the past. She accumulates. Museum curation still echoes in the arrangement of a market story. Pittsburgh is not merely the place she stayed but the place where she studied, teaches, records and has built a life. The habit of volunteering before permission has become a way of spotting the unclaimed work.
There is a modest lesson here for anyone staring at an apparently miscellaneous résumé. Coherence may arrive from the way you work rather than the category printed above it. Schiffman's industries change. Her method does not. Look closely. Find the structure. Learn the customer's language. Bring people into the room. Then, if necessary, convene neighborhood court over the green gummy bear.