Heather Barbre Blades is a Senior Technical Writer at Jack Henry with a career spanning technical communication, conflict management, training, and facilitation. She brings more than a decade of experience from Missouri State University, where her work focused on communication and conflict management, into her current role supporting large, distributed content teams. Heather designs and delivers training, facilitation, and coaching both within and outside her organization, with a focus on influencing others without formal authority. Her work centers on building strong interpersonal connections, collaborating effectively across roles, and developing communication skills that support productive feedback, thoughtful responses to resistance, and healthy disagreement. Heather is also the co‑founder of Communication and Conflict Management Associates, where she provides training, mediation, and conflict coaching services.

MythBusters Lab: Let’s Test What Really Works for Remote Content Teams

Co-presented with: Leann Long & Nicole Edens

Remote content teams are seen as harder to manage, scale, and keep engaged. We’ve heard the myth—and spent years dismantling it.

Since 2020, the Jack Henry Technical Writing team has been fully remote while scaling to 40 team members across 18 states and maintaining 99% annual associate retention. We’re putting our success under the microscope in this hands-on lab.

We’ll explore remote team challenges and apply proven principles to your organization. Through small-group activities and roundtables that connect you to leaders navigating the same complexities, you’ll examine team structure, ownership models, leadership alignment, feedback loops, and engagement practices. You’ll hear what’s working, and what isn’t, helping you anticipate issues, pressure-test ideas, and surface creative solutions.

You’ll leave not only with a practical operating model, but also with new perspectives, shared language, and peer connections that extend well beyond the conference.

In this workshop, attendees will learn:

• Map their current remote or distributed team operating model and identify friction points that limit trust, engagement, or scalability.
  
• Engage with peers in similar leadership roles to compare how different organizations address shared coordination and leadership realities.
  
• Apply tested design principles to adapt—or rethink—team structure, ownership models, and leadership practices.
  
• Anticipate future scaling pressures by examining what has helped or hindered teams as they grow from small to large.
  
• Build shared language and peer relationships that support continued learning and collaboration beyond the session.