Decision Makers: Jenna Flateman Posner, Snipes

Jenna Flateman Posner

Chief Digital Officer

How rugby and real estate prepared SNIPES’ Chief Digital Officer for quick thinking and a life of calculated risk

For Jenna Flateman Posner, life moves fast. In her role as Chief Digital Officer at SNIPES, Posner is a quick-thinking, risk-mitigating, digital mastermind. But outside of work, she sports a wide variety of other titles – mom, wife, former USA Rugby player, writer, MBA, entrepreneur, landlord, and gluten-free pancake expert. Posner’s days start early and end late, with a lot of bustle in between. After waking at 4:30 a.m. to get in a few “quiet hours,” she’s in charge of getting her three sons ready for the day, starting with breakfast. “It’s usually a mad dash in the morning with everyone scrambling to get out of the house,” Posner adds. Once out the door, Posner is off to start her day – either at her home office or at SNIPES’ offices in northeast Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. After a day of meetings and strategizing, she regroups with her wife and kids for a typical evening of dinner and chauffeuring. “I’m the chef in the family, so I do all the cooking,” Posner says. “And then I’m essentially an Uber driver for the kids – whether it’s tennis, squash, swimming, soccer, basketball, piano lessons, or tutoring, it’s always something,” she laughs. When asked how and why she juggles all of her roles, the answer is simple; her family. “I have the pleasure of being in an environment where, at work, I can really ‘turn it on,’ and bring that level of intense energy that’s needed, and have a wife that can pick up for me when I need to unplug and wind down at home,” Posner says. “Most of my free time is focused on my family and enabling them to experience new things and recharge.”

Posner’s path to being a Decision Maker didn’t start with a specific company or industry – but rather a rugby pitch. An athlete her whole life, Posner played field hockey and was a seven-time All-American in track at Wesleyan University. But after spending the spring of her senior year in Australia, she found herself unexpectedly taking in the phenomenon of the Rugby World Cup – a sport she was unfamiliar with but, suddenly immersed in the culture, found incredibly inspiring. “I didn’t know what rugby was at the time,” Posner says. “And I had no idea the gift I was given by being there … I was just so inspired by the game.” After returning home, Posner joined Wesleyan’s rugby program before eventually spending seven years as a part of the national USA Rugby team. Little did she realize, her time on the rugby pitch was preparing her for the career path ahead and giving her the ability to move quickly and effectively navigate risk. “The thing about rugby is it’s an unbelievably cerebral game. It’s all about communication, trust, vision, reading the field, and seeing the gaps,” Posner says. “It’s about being in the right place at the right time and making split-second decisions to support your team.” With that in mind, it’s no wonder Posner credits her time in rugby with sharpening her decision-making skills when working with strategic partners in tech and retail.

When you talk about being fearless, you’re talking about taking risks and trusting yourself. Trusting your teammates and building partnerships is rooted, for me, in being an athlete.

But for Posner, rugby wasn’t the only way she built confidence and strengthened her ability to assess risk. Years ago, while walking her daily route in Brooklyn, Posner saw an opportunity to apply what she’d learned in her rugby career and quickly assessed risk vs. reward. She came across a housing complex under development and asked the contractors if any of the units were still for sale – and at 24, found herself with her first real estate investment. Posner admits that being a landlord at a young age wasn’t easy and says the loan on the property was a “massive risk,” but one she felt she was well equipped to tackle.

Following her rugby career, Posner was unsurprisingly drawn to the fast-paced world of tech, where she worked her way up to Chief Growth Officer for Radius8 (acquired by Fiserve). While attending a work conference, Posner found herself sitting alongside SNIPES COO Brigitte Cooperman, who pitched her on jumping into retail – an opportunity Posner couldn’t refuse. “It was kind of a wild experience, coming into this role and feeling like I don’t have any direct retail experience,” Posner says. “I made it very clear from the start that I was a technologist, not a retailer, and SNIPES made it very clear that was a good thing.” Once at SNIPES, Posner had big ideas to modernize the digital experience. Following her time in tech, she developed ideas and predictions about where partnerships go awry. For her, this meant investing in a complete “tech audit” to identify what she felt was working (and what wasn’t) – especially when fighting a recurring pain point like fraud. “At any given moment, we were running hype sneaker releases where our customer demand was 200-300 times the supply we had on hand, so our infrastructure needed to be sound,” Posner says, describing the flash sales SNIPES is famous for. “Instead, what would have been a 10-20 minute sale would become a four-hour event where customer service reps manually review every transaction. Not only did this cause a lot of stress, it negatively impacted the customers’ experience.” Posner had a hunch: the fraud tool SNIPES had been using wasn’t just costing them money; it was costing the team valuable time that could’ve been spent on more critical initiatives, like nurturing customer relationships. “We were using a rules-based tool, and it was heavy. It wasn’t automated, there was no ‘decision engine,’ and it required a lot of manual intervention from our customer service teams,” Posner says. “What resulted was watching our customer service team spend a lot of time reviewing orders instead of managing customer relationships.” After vetting the market and seeking advice from her industry advisors, Posner felt implementing Forter was the clear next step. Paired with her previous successes building relationships and partnerships through Salesforce, Posner says implementation wasn’t just easy — it made an immediate, measurable impact on both the business and her career. “I was excited about a Salesforce re-platform at SNIPES. And because Salesforce is partnered with Forter, the implementation was quick and painless,” Posner recalls. ”Our customer service reps were freed up, our approval rate increased, and ultimately, our customers were more satisfied."

Within their organizations, decision makers are the audacious ones. Unconcerned with the status quo, they make moves designed to free themselves — and their teams — from the stress of fraud prevention. With Forter, decision makers get guaranteed results so they can focus their time and energy on strategic opportunities that have a bigger impact on their organizations.

Background

Entrepreneurship

Joining Snipes

What's Next

Being a Decision Maker

This story is part of a Decision Makers series featuring industry leaders within our customer base.

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BACKGROUND

JOINING SNIPES

Entrepreneurship

Calculating these risks are skills that rugby and real estate helped hone, and they led me to embrace other risks in life, like in my career. They gave me the opportunity not just to take risks, but to have confidence that I can win.

It helped me build trust with my peers and team, and fulfilled my desire to align with tech providers who are willing to take risks to build better futures.

WHAT'S NEXT

For Jenna Flateman Posner, life moves fast – and that’s not changing any time soon. Building on her relationships in both tech and retail, Posner is embarking on her next endeavor: writing a book. “I decided to lean into this concept of partnership. Thinking about the right recipe for partnership and why retailers and technologists or technologies should be more intentional about partnering together,” Posner says. “It’s all about trying to spell out the right ingredients and what’s being left on the table by not doubling down on the effort and respect these partnerships deserve.” As for the future of fraud (and digital commerce in general), Posner feels that technology and partnerships will only continue increasing in importance – especially regarding data. “I keep leaning into partnerships and opportunities that allow us to leverage massive amounts of data,” Posner says. “Payments, data governance, privacy – will all continue to evolve. And it’s up to us to utilize technology and processes to pivot and react to those changes.”

Being a Decision Maker

Recalling her days of quick thinking on the rugby pitch and the gut feeling she gets about real estate investments, Posner thinks hard about what she wants others to see in her as a Decision Maker – the ability to empower others. “A Decision Maker is someone who tries to create more decision makers. In a growing organization like SNIPES, we have to make decisions at a rapid pace – and the ability to do so is a testament to our leadership’s enablement and autonomy,” Posner says. “We’re making decisions faster, moving quicker, pivoting and evolving … and I hope my digital leadership team feels enabled, empowered, supported, and trusted to make these decisions.” And as to why? The reasoning for Posner is simple; a victory for one is a victory for all.

When the team wins, we all win. And when they fail, we all come together and figure out how we can do it differently next time. So I guess, for me, being a Decision Maker is about being a leader – there is never just one Decision Maker.

Jenna Flateman Posner

Chief Digital Officer

This story is part of a Decision Makers series featuring industry leaders within our customer base.

LEARN MORE

REQUEST DEMO