Episode Details

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of chatting with Jenna Kellner, VP Marketing at Workleap.

• (00:00) - Intro
• (01:14) - In This Episode
• (04:30) - How to Manage Marketing Tech Debt During Rapid Growth
• (10:10) - How to Prioritize RevOps Tech Debt Without Perfect ROI Models
• (14:23) - Reasoning Through Broken Systems and Imperfect Data
• (19:23) - How High Performers Progress Anyway
• (24:28) - How to Build Confidence With AI Through Small Experiments
• (33:06) - How to Use Exit Planning and Cost Benefit Analysis for AI Tool Selection
• (35:57) - First principles matter more than tools
• (38:59) - Why Staying Close to Execution Improves Marketing Leadership
• (45:13) - Why Critical Thinking Skills Drive Marketing Career Growth
• (49:33) - How to Build Business Judgment in Technical Marketing Roles
• (53:03) - Why Confidence Without Humility is Dangerous
• (55:47) - How Revenue Leaders Prioritize Daily Energy
• (59:49) - Growing up
• (01:01:10) - Book rec

Summary: Jenna is a VP of marketing that can talk about the weeds of messy systems, uncertain decisions, and personal growth. You can’t hide from it, every company accumulates tech debt as teams rush to hit revenue targets. She frames tech debt as a leadership responsibility and urges executives to reinvest in core systems when patchwork begins to outweigh building. If leadership doesn’t get it, the best way to prioritize it is to shape it as an opportunity cost and lost leverage that will drain revenue the longer we wait. In the face of AI uncertainty, she argues that judgment compounds faster than technical knowledge, and that the marketers who become indispensable blend business awareness, proximity to execution, and decisive action grounded in humility.

About Jenna

Jenna Kellner is Vice President of Marketing at Workleap and a revenue-focused marketing leader who has spent more than a decade building marketing teams and scaling companies. She brings experience across Enterprise, SMB, D2C, SaaS, two-sided marketplaces, venture studios, and other high-growth environments.

Her career spans senior leadership roles at Minerva, On Deck, RBCx, and Ownr, where she led marketing, growth, and revenue functions inside complex, evolving organizations. At RBCx, she served as Chief Growth Officer for Ampli and directed marketing and growth initiatives within a large financial institution setting. She has also co-founded communities such as GrowthToronto and Little Traders, reflecting her commitment to building networks and businesses in parallel.

Jenna operates with a strong sense of ownership and accountability, grounded in her belief that every challenge ultimately becomes her responsibility to solve. Recognized as a WXN Top 100 Women in Canada, she focuses on developing high-performing teams that connect strategy to execution and translate marketing into measurable revenue impact.

The Frankenstein Reality of Managing Tech Debt: How to Manage Marketing Tech Debt During Rapid Growth

You know it.. Most marketers are operating inside half-connected systems. No company has a pristine, perfectly synchronized tech stack. Even if they think they do, it doesn’t last. Growth creates pressure, and pressure produces shortcuts. 

Jenna has seen the same cycle in startups and enterprise environments. In the early days, teams build whatever gets the job done. They start in spreadsheets, layer on point solutions, wire tools together with lightweight integrations, and move fast because revenue matters more than architecture.

Those early decisions never disappear. They compound. Years later, larger organizations inherit layers of systems that were added at different stages of maturity. Tools do not scale in sync. One platform gets upgraded. A