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“Jumpstarting Your ML Journey in Cyber Security”: Melisa Napoles with Splunk (Video + Transcript)

Transcript of Elevate 2020 Session

Sukrutha Bhadouria: All right. Up next, Melisa Napoles, we’re so excited to have, will be our next speaker. She’s a solutions engineer at Splunk, where she helps customers solve interesting data problems in security operations, as well as in business intelligence. Melisa will now be sharing with us her favorite lessons learned from organizations that jumpstart their machine learning journeys in cyber security. Welcome, Melisa, and thank you so much for making time for us.

Melisa Napoles: Excellent. All right, I’m going to go ahead and share my screen. All right. Can you confirm you guys see my screen all right?

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yes, we can see your screen.

Melisa Napoles: Excellent. Well, hi everyone. Thank you for those of you who are still on with us, and hello to those of you who are just now tuning in. For the next 15 minutes or so, we’re going to hopefully get you all out of here having jump-started or substantiating your knowledge around doing machine learning and cyber security.

Melisa Napoles: All right. Here’s what I have for our agenda the next 15 minutes. When I think about jump-starting this journey and I think about all the clients I’ve worked with, it feels natural to me to segment the conversation in these four areas. Before jumping right into it, though, I’m going to take just a moment to tell you a little bit about me so you can put some history with the face on the other side of the screen here with you.

Melisa Napoles: I moved around a lot growing up, and this slide just talks about what makes me me. As my company likes to call it, these are my million data points. My family immigrated to the United States from Cuba, so I am first generation born American. After graduating from school and having various internships and consulting experience, technical specialist experience, sales engineering experience, I landed myself at a big data company called Splunk. I currently live out of Chicago, Illinois, supporting some of our larger Splunk customers, but my heart is somewhere between Miami, Florida and Seattle Washington, where I have my family. They say that your home is where the heart is, right? That’s a bit about my situation.

Melisa Napoles: And what being a solutions engineer really means is that I’m sort of like a consultant with Splunk solutions and everything Splunk touches, which is a lot of things. Splunk got its initial start in IT and security, but it’s since translated into a platform that serves almost every business unit in an organization. And the reason that’s cool is it’s allowed me to be exposed to how businesses run their practices, in particular, their cyber security practices. And so from this work over the last five years now, there are certainly patterns that have emerged to show what really good looks like in a cyber security practice, embarking on machine learning and what not so good looks like and some of the things that cause organizations to stalemate and not be able to move forward. In this particular visual, something that I’m particularly proud of in working here at Splunk is we just have absolutely stellar, quality female engineers, and I’m thankful to have that support system around me.

Melisa Napoles: All right, so let’s jump right into it. When I first started working in this space, it took me a good long while to really get the gist of AI and ML, and I went to school for physics and I took a lot of math classes. I was pretty much forced to figure it out because of the clients I was working with and the questions they were asking me that ultimately I was also asking. And what I learned is that for starters, ML, or machine learning, is a subset of AI or artificial intelligence, to put it simply. AI is the broader concept of machines being able to carry out tasks in a way that we would consider smart, and ML is an application of AI based around giving machines access to data to make some decisions on their own. It’s really not as scary as people make it seem. And when we’re talking about cyber security in particular, I’m finding that many organizations are really still in the realm of the machine learning area, at least today.

Melisa Napoles: When I embarked on this journey a few years ago, I also ran into asking, “Well, is machine learning statistics or is it not?” And even to this day, I get organizations asking me this, trying to understand this on their own, too. And what I’ve learned is that machine learning is very much based off statistics. And the main difference between them is their purpose. All ML certainly uses statistics, but not all statistics can necessarily be classified as machine learning. Statistic models are designed to make inferences about the relationships between data variables themselves and the machine learning models are designed to make the most accurate prediction off those inferences. It seems like everyone has an opinion about this these days, but this is the best conclusion I’ve come to, at least to date. We’ll see how long it lasts for, but this seems to be working in separating my logic in this space.

Melisa Napoles: And of course, like all good things, there are also lots of opinions on this sort of thing that you see quoted here as well. There’s comedy as a part of this quote, but I do find this to be true. At a very practical level, what ML typically represents when an organization is first starting out is in fact basic statistics. And right, this is just the thing that we all learn about in the mandatory high school or college stats class that we were forced to take.

Melisa Napoles: And so with all the buzz around machine learning and AI in the industry, you’d think everyone is doing it. Right? But what’s surprising is that organizations are not. And for those who are doing it, they’re running into major issues that effectively put a brick wall in front of them. And it’s really hard to get over. Oftentimes, I work on projects where a good number of organizations do, in fact, feel like this is all hype because they don’t know where to start or they got started too quickly and didn’t understand some of the foundational pieces to having longevity in this space, but it’s definitely not all hype.

Melisa Napoles: And so the way that I think about working with any data is like this. Everything we ever do with data for the most part can route back to a question we are trying to answer, a question that is formulated by our brains that we are trying to answer. And oftentimes those questions, if not all the time, can be categorized as your known knowns, the questions you know you need to be asking and in which you have confidence in how to find the answers, your known unknowns, the questions, again, you know you need to be asking, but you really are not very confident how to go about finding those answers and your unknown unknowns, the questions you don’t even know to be asking and you definitely don’t know the answers. Most organizations implementing machine learning and cyber security live in the first two spaces here, your known knowns and your known unknowns. Only the ones with extremely good resourcing can also say they’re incorporating the unknown unknowns, and we’ll talk about why that is.

Melisa Napoles: All right, so I’m going to give you just a moment here to see if you can count the number of bears on this visual. If any of you have played Where’s Waldo before, this as much the same. ML can help you reduce noise and look for the things you care about, the known unknowns, “I know I need to be asking about this, but I’m not really sure what the answer is or how to come about it.” Because we’re short on time, I’m going to jump to the next screen, and there they are. There are four bears, but that was a lot of noise to sort through, right?

Melisa Napoles: And keep in mind that I told you, you were looking for bears. What if you didn’t know to look for bears? What if you didn’t know they were representative of something you cared about? Because you knew to look for the bears, this was a known known. You knew the bears were what you cared about, so now where are they? Let me count them. Had you not known you were looking for bears, this would have been a known unknown, “I don’t know what’s anomalous here, but I know something likely is. Let me look for similarities and dissimilarities to find it.” You may ask why we used bears here and not just a Where’s Waldo visual. Fancy Bear is a Russian cyber espionage group. They target government, military, and security organizations, so think NATO and the like, and they try to steal secrets, hence finding your Fancy Bears.



Melisa Napoles: And it’s easy to get overwhelmed with where to start with ML and cyber security or really ML in any practice, and you don’t have to be doing the most advanced things with ML to be getting incredible value. Go after, and what I often advise organizations, and the most successful ones, what I see them doing is going after what the industry likes to call low-hanging fruit. Go after the low complexity, high benefit use cases. What’s in the upper right hand quadrant here is representative of where I see organizations first implementing machine learning and where they’re very successful. When you see things like malware detection or intrusion detection, think about asking questions like, “Do I have employees visiting weird websites that have long complex URLs that are sort of unrecognizable and are not indicative of something normal? And if they are, how often do they do it? Are they doing it more than they normally do? And how do I even define what normal is? Is it no times and they’ve been there the first time? Is it more than five times?” Understanding what that normal is, is where machine learning is incorporating.

Melisa Napoles: When you see things like … We’ve got here, a variety of things, but even think about asking, “Do I have employees failing to log into their corporate-issued laptop more times than they normally do in a given period?” I’ll take myself in particular. I mean, I fail authentication on my laptop at least five times every single day for a solid week every time Splunk forces me to change my password. It’s just a habit. And with Splunk incorporating machine learning into cyber security practice, they should be able to ask, “Well, when is Melisa failing to authenticate on her laptop way more than she normally does?” So these are some things to think about.

Melisa Napoles: What’s working for organizations and where are they in their AI and ML journey besides what we’ve just talked about in that upper right hand quadrant? Most organizations get started on machine learning or anomaly detection in cyber security with static thresholds. Imagine for a moment that you’re part of a security organization and all that really means is your job is to protect the company from the bad guys and gals doing any variety of things. And you’re tasked with being able to answer, “When do I have employees failing to authenticate more times than they normally do, failing to log in more times than they normally do?” And the first way that organizations tend to answer this question is by saying, “Okay, well, let’s just set some static threshold in place.” In this case, in the visual I’ve got, it’s 100, so any data point where the failed logins are more than 100, I’m going to be notified. But how do I even know if 100 is the right number and if it’s the right number for every individual in my organization?

Melisa Napoles: Oftentimes, while that is an awesome way to start doing machine learning and cyber security in that particular one example, organizations will then often upgrade to incorporating statistics with standard deviation, so then being able to ask, “All right, well, instead of tell me when I’ve got employees failing to authenticate more than 100 times, tell me when I have employees failing to log in more than they normally would.” And so that’s what you see here.

Melisa Napoles: And so organizations will get here. They’ll live here for a while, but as they start to incorporate a larger volume of data, a larger variety of data, as they try to model this at the speed at which their data moves so that their models are not stale, they realize the three Vs, and the three Vs being volume, variety, and velocity, volume being more data means more history means more time to get to look back in those models, which is important for accounting for fluctuations in seasonality. What about your employee like me who fails to authenticate every six months when password refresh has happened? More variety of data, the more accurate your insights. And again, if your machine learning can move at the speed at which your data moves, you won’t have stale models, and that means you’ll be making more accurate decisions based on your insights.

Melisa Napoles: What happens typically next when organizations realize the three Vs is they then begin to incorporate fit and apply concepts or train and test concepts, essentially breaking up a single workflow with statistics into two workflows for scale so that we can account for the three Vs. Imagine for a moment that you have a data set that represents a fruit basket. You’ve got records for oranges and bananas and apples and grapefruits and you’ve trained that data set to recognize that when there’s a banana, the banana’s yellow and it’s curved so that when new data gets corroborated against that training data set and it sees a data point that is yellow and curved, it can say, “Oh, I know what that is. That’s a banana.” So that’s what incorporating train and testing concepts means. It’s really, in large, part starting to do what we call supervised machine learning.

Melisa Napoles: And sometimes at this point, organizations they’ll start to dabble in creating supervised machine learning models, but it gets to a point where you’ve got such a large volume and variety of data moving so quickly that it’s hard to know all the models you should be using to fit your data … because you don’t want to fit your data to a model, you want to fit the models to your data … that they bring in supervised and unsupervised solutions to help in the world of machine learning.

Melisa Napoles: And so the fit and apply concepts, I would say, fit more in the world of the supervised machine learning, but then you have those unsupervised machine learning models. And if you think about us talking about your unknown unknowns, that third aspect of your known knowns, your known unknowns, and then your unknown unknowns, the questions that you don’t even know to be asking, that typically falls under what unsupervised machine learning helps you solve.

Melisa Napoles: Here’s an example, just one example, one view, one solution of what unsupervised machine learning in the world of cyber security can look like. Forget all the antics of what’s on the visual here. What you’ll notice is if you follow my storyline, you’ve got seven distinct anomalies using machine learning, telling you a larger story of an employee’s account being hijacked and used to steal data. You see anomalies of a ridiculous amount of data being taken from the computer of the employee. You see the employee’s login being logged in from Chicago, from China, from Russia, right? That defies the laws of physics. It’s impossible. You see all these weird things happening in conjunction together that strung together by a bit of supervised machine learning and a whole lot of unsupervised machine learning over a two month period tell you a larger story of what’s happening, things that you wouldn’t have even known to ask about because you didn’t even know what the patterns were to be looking for.

Melisa Napoles: What’s holding organizations back from doing more, from getting to this point of doing unsupervised machine learning and any variety of other things in the world of AI? I firmly believe in all the clients I’ve worked with, small and large, across different industries in cyber security and even in other spaces, but especially in cyber security, it’s the fact that there’s not an onus on being a citizen data scientist, whether it’s leadership not promoting that or individuals not having that fostered within them. And being a citizen data scientist is not being a data scientist, but as the person who works with your data, who creates the data, who is most knowledgeable of your data, there’s nobody better than those people to understand the business impact of that data. And so that’s what it means to be a citizen data scientist, understanding some of the fundamentals so that you can take that data, work with your data science counterparts and really propel the business forward in doing machine learning, doing AI so that you can ultimately impact an organization’s bottom line, whether that’s efficiency or revenue or what have you.

Melisa Napoles: The most prevalent are what you see on the screen here, so don’t be intimidated by AI and ML. It’s very powerful, but it’s nothing that can’t be wrangled. Embrace that idea of being a citizen data scientist. You do not have to be doing the most advanced things with ML to be getting incredible value and have impact. And remember those three Vs, volume, velocity, and variety as you embark on really testing and playing with ML type things.

Melisa Napoles: Remember these concepts of training and testing in the world of supervised and unsupervised machine learning, and then lastly, we didn’t have enough time for it, but remember that you should never be forcing your data to fit algorithms. Rather, you should be able to pick algorithms that fit the flow of your data so that you have accurate insights and you can make really quite powerful data-driven business decisions.

Melisa Napoles: I am going to play a very quick video here, which I find to be very inspiring and works its way into the world of figuring out ways to use machine learning to advance really the business and the world.

Speaker: One inventor is Benjamin Franklin.

Speaker: Leonardo da Vinci.

Speaker: Thomas.

Speaker: Edison.

Speaker: Alexander Bell Graham.

Speaker: No.

Speaker: That’s kind of a tough one.

Speaker: Um.

Speaker: In school, it was always a male inventor, I just realized.

Speaker: To know that there were women before me…

Speaker: It gives me motivation that I can invent something, make maybe a change in the world, and that would be really cool.

Melisa Napoles: All right, so that was a campaign that Microsoft put out for International Women’s Day in 2016. I fell in love with it when I first saw it and I still watch it every now and again just to remind me of a few things.

Melisa Napoles: Lastly here, I do just … Let me see. There we go. What I have to remind myself of, and what I hope that I leave all of you with, is in the world of figuring out how to work with machine learning and not be intimidated by it, but find productive uses for it, don’t be afraid to go out there and really respectfully challenge the status quo.

Melisa Napoles: All right. That’s all from my part. Thank you so much to the Girl Geek organization for letting me speak with you all here today and also letting me learn from the rest of the speakers. It’s been a great event so far.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hi. Thanks so much, Melisa. This was great. I want to make sure to thank you for making time for this on a busy weekday. We have some questions that we will take offline, so they’ll be answered offline. Thank you so much, Melisa.

Melisa Napoles: No problem. Take care.

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21 Insightful Quotes on Leveling Up: Becoming a Manager of Managers

On Friday, March 6th, senior female tech leaders & engineers came together to celebrate International Women’s Day with over a dozen tech talks & panels during the Girl Geek X Elevate 2020 virtual conference. Today’s blog includes quotes from a session with Arquay Harris, Senior Director of Engineering / Slack; Bora Chung, SVP of Product Management / Bill.com; Ines Thornburg, AVP of Customer Success / Splunk; and Gretchen DeKnikker, COO / Girl Geek X. In addition to the YouTube video replay, a full transcript from the talk is also available.

  1. “When you make the transition from managing individual contributors to managing managers, what happens is you go from this very directive, sort of supporting, coaching state of mind to managing to outcomes.

    When you have a person who is also responsible for managing other people on the team, you don’t want a person who is managing or doing things in the way that you would do them. You want them to manage in the way that feels comfortable for them.

    I would never say to a manager, ‘Hey, I want you to do this, and this is step one, two, three.’ It’s like, ‘This is the outcome. How can I support you to get there?’ You have to really trust them to be able to do it. And so the unlearning comes from wanting to be the person who is the hero, jumps in, saves the day, maybe writes the code — to really growing and empowering that next generation or that next level of leadership.” —Arquay Harris, Senior Director of Engineering / Slack

  2. “One mistake I made when I became a manager’s manager was just having one-on-ones with my immediate direct reports. They also have a set of teams and maybe not as frequently, but making sure that I check in with the team members made a big difference. When I hear some of the key themes and strategies being played back in skip level one-on-ones, I think that’s when things are going well. If you hear a game of telephone being played and have a disconnected kind of direction and alignment, you’ll know that things are not going well. Do those skip level one-on-one check ins. They’ve served me well.” —Bora Chung, SVP of Product Management / Bill.com

  3. “I had to learn to balance my time across the different responsibilities in a way that, frankly, I wasn’t getting too involved. I learned to trust the expertise on my team and learn what was good enough. Perfection is not always the end goal. We have to continue to progress multiple workstreams at one time in initiatives, and really make sure that no one gets left behind.” —Ines Thornburg, AVP of Customer Success / Splunk

  4. “I struggled to learn when to stop helicoptering in and trying to rescue everyone. I’m still learning it, but to me, the biggest difference between a junior employee in a very small startup versus a manager’s manager is learning how to do helicoptering in and helicoptering out at the right moments.” —Bora Chung, SVP of Product Management / Bill.com

  5. As you grow in your career and you become more visible, have more responsibilities, the one thing that I’ve learned is that when you say something, the impact of what you’re saying really is that much stronger, that much more gospel, so to speak. When you’re facilitating a meeting or when you’re communicating, you have to realize that, again, as your responsibility grows, people really listen.

    You have to be careful, so if you’re trying to facilitate a brainstorming, for example, what I’ve learned is to facilitate the dialogue, get the conversation going, but I reserve what my opinion is until the end, because I don’t want everybody to just think that my opinion is the right one, because it’s certainly not. That’s why I bring together, and when I’m doing hiring, I always try to look for complementary skills.

    So I’ve learned to really be cautious about what I say and when I say it and to whom I say it, because I realize that what I’m saying does affect and impact a lot of the folks on the team.” —Ines Thornburg, AVP of Customer Success / Splunk

  6. “Be friendly, not friends. If my team’s watching, they’re probably laughing about this, because I say this a lot. Very early in my career when I made that transition to manager, these people are your best friends. You hang out with them every night and when you are friends with the people who report to you, you cannot be impartial, right? You can’t say to your best friend, ‘You really screwed up on that thing. I need you to work harder in this area.’ It can be really awkward.

    And so what I really learned later in my career was how to set boundaries, because I do you a disservice if I’m not able to give you that really constructive and helpful feedback and help you grow. And that doesn’t mean that you have to be this monster who’s just a robot, but boundaries are really, really important and I just wish I’d learned that earlier.” —Arquay Harris, Senior Director of Engineering / Slack

  7. “In the early part of my career, I was thinking that I should be the smartest person if I’m the manager, and I was somewhat reluctant and afraid of hiring people smarter than myself. But what I am realizing is that it’s absolutely cool to hire people smarter than me. It actually elevates the team. It improves the quality of the thinking and ultimately, what we deliver to our customers is going to be much stronger. So I think I had to shed that a little bit of early stage career insecurity to really put together a strong team.

    I don’t have to be the perfectionist that knows all the answers. Sometimes a great value as a manager or manager’s manager comes from asking the right question, maybe asking the powerful question that nobody else is asking, because they are afraid or there’s a big elephant in the room.” —Bora Chung, SVP of Product Management / Bill.com

  8. “As your responsibility grows, you’ll have lots of different experts on your team in different disciplines, different business units, and you can’t be the expert on everything. It’s just physically impossible as your organization grows, and so what you do need to do is to be really, really comfortable working with these teams of experts in helping them accomplish their mission.

    As a leader, my value to my team is making sure that we’re working towards the same goals and cascading those company goals down. I make sure everybody understands those goals, that we’re progressing on those goals, and that we’re communicating our progress effectively in working together.” —Ines Thornburg, AVP of Customer Success / Splunk

  9. “Really, you should make your management style situational to the person and to the stage that they are in their career. It really just goes into this first quadrant, which is directive, which you might do to a more junior person. You might say, ‘I need you to log into this machine, do this work,’ and then you move up into coaching, which is you have a little bit more skill and it’s like, ‘All right, you kind of know what you’re doing. How can I coach you through it?’ Onto supporting, which is, ‘You know what you’re doing. How can I support you? How can I help you get to that next level?’ And then the final magic kind of golden quadrant is delegation, and that’s just, ‘I don’t even really need to tell you what to do. You probably are bringing me the problem, telling me what it is that needs to be solved.’

    The thing that’s really interesting is it’s not really a straight line. You might kind of hover, depending upon your skill set, maybe in communication you’re in full on delegation mode, but at technical proficiency, maybe you need a little bit more support.

    When I’m managing managers, I really try to think about each individual’s strengths and how I can help really, really uplift a person’s strengths, and how do I help them really either correct for or counterbalance any weaknesses that they may have?” —Arquay Harris, Senior Director of Engineering / Slack

  10. “Understanding what type of leader you are and what you can contribute is way more important than a very specific checklist of skills. If you’re interviewing someone and they haven’t done that exact thing, can they describe to your their approach or their philosophy? What I really look for is ‘is this person a structured thinker? Do they have best practices or some kind of toolkit or some sort of methodology in the way that they approach leadership?'” —Arquay Harris, Senior Director of Engineering / Slack

  11. “When I first transitioned to managing managers, I thought I needed to know everything and I was so embarrassed when I didn’t know what was going on. It took me a while to realize I’m just air traffic controller. The less information I have on a tactical level, the less opportunity I have to screw things up… I should just let the expert be the expert.

    And then my most amazing moment as a manager’s manager was when I walked in, I was planning this 10,000 person conference and there were hundreds of people setting up all of these little tiny details that we’d spent a year making. I only knew the names of like six people that I could see at any given moment. And I was like, ‘Okay, this is working. They have this. They’ve got it. I don’t even need to know what’s going on right now. This is amazing.'” —Gretchen DeKnikker, COO / Girl Geek X

  12. “It’s really fulfilling and rewarding to see people grow — to see them go from kind of more junior manager to senior manager to director, to see them be able to come into their own as a manager, develop their own styles. That’s probably the best thing about progressing to higher level of management.” —Arquay Harris, Senior Director of Engineering / Slack

  13. “Part of management is about soft skills and developing and augmenting those skills in your team. So that means communication skills, collaboration, meeting facilitation. It means executive presence, making sure that when you’re representing your company or your team, that you do it in such a way that you’re proud of that. So, when I know I haven’t prepared my team and I see a train wreck about to happen, that’s cringe-worthy.” —Ines Thornburg, AVP of Customer Success / Splunk

  14. “My most proud moment is when I’m absent on a sabbatical or extended vacation and the team doesn’t even notice that I’m gone. I think that’s the ultimate success of coaching and grooming the right team. If they noticed you were gone, your team isn’t quite where you need them to be.” —Bora Chung, SVP of Product Management / Bill.com

  15. “During my skip level one-on-ones, I start with a very broad question of ‘How are things going?’ I try to also let the manager in the middle know that we are having the skip level. I think the worst outcome is if the manager in the middle gets alienated in this conversation.

    I don’t really have an agenda during skip level one-on-ones. With some folks, I talk about just their career aspirations. With some folks, since I’m one level away, they could maybe ask more questions about the big picture strategy and whatnot, so it’s a little bit different, but I always let the team member drive the agenda.” —Bora Chung, SVP of Product Management / Bill.com

  16. “I want to be the finalist on all interviews because I really take pride in knowing people. One of the things, as a leader of a large organization, that I like to understand is, is career aspirations. This is where we have a much larger purview of opportunity as a leader, and frankly if I have a conversation with someone and I understand really they want to be in another part of the organization at some point in the future, I would love to make that match and keep that talent within my company rather than seeing people leave and take all that wonderful knowledge and great talent to another company.

    I don’t want people leaving my organization necessarily, but at the same time, if we can promote from within and give people more opportunity within our organization, people appreciate that and I love a team that culturally has a strong morale and knows that we’ve got each other’s backs.” —Ines Thornburg, AVP of Customer Success / Splunk

  17. The top trait to focus on developing if you’re interested in a management role is adaptability, because the thing about being an IC is that it’s a pretty defined trajectory to go from associate to engineer to senior to staff to senior staff, right? You might not know exactly what it is but some part of it is mapped out.

    It’s a little bit more opaque when you’re talking about leadership, because in any given moment, you could have to deal with people’s emotions and you have to coach and you have to support and you have to discipline. It’s just all of these things that you have to do, and so you need a growth mindset. You have to be willing to iterate and change.

    If you’re a person who’s really rigid and you like things just so, you maybe want to consider something else.” —Arquay Harris, Senior Director of Engineering / Slack

  18. “At more junior levels, there’s a mindset that meetings are a waste of time. Meetings are your lifeblood when you get to a certain level. If you spent your whole day in meetings, you were doing your job all day — and I think that’s a mindset thing that a lot of people really struggle with changing.” —Gretchen DeKnikker, COO / Girl Geek X

  19. “There are two major mental shifts that occur when you transition into engineering management. ICs generally think about execution for the most part, so you have to start to blend in execution as well as strategic thinking. So I think that’s maybe the first shift you need to make to become a manager.

    You’ll also shift how you think about time horizons. Let me take product development as an example. Maybe when you’re an IC, you’re thinking mostly about next release, the release after that, but when you eventually become a manager, you think about an annual roadmap or a three year vision. I think those are maybe the differences in time horizon of your thinking, and there’s not a right or wrong.

    I think there need to be different parts of thinkers. Some people need to execute, some people need to think strategy. Some people need to think next release, some people need to think about the three year vision, but I think those are some of the shifts that need to occur in order to transition into a managerial role.” —Bora Chung, SVP of Product Management / Bill.com

  20. “To overcome bias and avoid being stereotyped as the ‘quiet, introverted Asian woman,’ I spent extra energy on developing what we usually call the executive presence and executive gravitas, because especially when you become a manager of managers, it’s not just your personal brand and personal reputation any more. It’s your team’s effectiveness that you have to be responsible for. I try to overcome the bias by being more vocal and represent the team more actively.” —Bora Chung, SVP of Product Management / Bill.com

  21. “I think one of the hardest things about being a woman in engineering, especially a woman of color, is just the big issue of low expectations. What happens to me a lot in particular is people think that I’m not technical.

    I’ve had interns be like, ‘Do you code?’ which is a ridiculous question that you probably never ask a male who’s a director of engineering. You face that a lot and it’s really unfortunate.

    On the bright side, I think things are changing, particularly as we get more and more women in leadership positions, I think just having different voices in the room is really contributing to the conversation.

    When I was coming up, there weren’t a lot of people who look like me who did the job that I do, and so it just wasn’t a thing that I could even see myself doing. The idea of a CTO was Andy Grove, right? With the khaki shirt… a blue shirt and khaki pants. So make yourself aware and available, and let people know that you are a source of information.

    Sponsorship is a big thing that people are doing right now.

    If there’s someone that you see who you think has potential, maybe encourage them. If I have people on my team who show interest in management, I try giving them some tasks. Like, ‘Hey, maybe try managing this intern for a summer and seeing how it goes, or maybe you might want to run the sprint meeting.’ That kind of thing. Just give them these little nuggets to see if they have the aptitude and really understand what management is.” —Arquay Harris, Senior Director of Engineering / Slack

To hear more from Arquay, Bora, Gretchen and Ines, check out the transcript from their March 6th panel during Elevate 2020, or watch the video replay on YouTube!

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“Leveling Up: Becoming a Manager of Managers” — Girl Geek X Elevate (Video + Transcript)

Transcript of Elevate 2020 Session

Gretchen DeKnikker: The inspiration for this panel was, you think it’s really, really hard becoming a manager until you become a manager of managers, and you don’t realize it’s just like another rung on the ladder. It’s like a whole different skill set and you’re lost, and it’s super hard, and so because we have such an amazing senior audience tuned in today, I thought this would be a perfect topic. And then, thanks to these wonderful ladies, we were able to put together the perfect panel, also.

Gretchen DeKnikker: So we have Ines Thornburg, who’s the Area Vice President of Splunk, works in their customer success arm. Arquay Harris is the Senior Director of Engineering at Slack. She actually got her intro at Slack through a Girl Geek dinner, so you should be coming to those dinners, because if you want to be Arquay, and don’t we all, you should do that. And then Bora Chung, who’s the Senior Vice President of Product Management at Bill.com. So, they’ve all worked at different sized companies. They’re at different sized companies now, so they have all of this amazing perspective. Bora’s going to come from product and Arquay’s going to come from engineering and Ines is going to come from customer success, and it’s going to be amazing, and all I have to do is basically sit back and let these women talk.

Gretchen DeKnikker: So, if we want to do a quick kind of round of intros, and why don’t you start, Arquay? And let us know kind of how many people that you’re managing now and a little bit about how you got where you are.

Arquay Harris: Sure. Hi, I’m Arquay, a senior director of engineering of essentially the growth team here at Slack. My org is about 70 or so people. I manage two teams. One is called customer acquisition and one is called expansion, and essentially they make up the product purchase funnel. How I got to Slack, as mentioned, I went to a Girl Geek dinner. I highly recommend that you go. It’s very rewarding. I’ve been here for about four years. I’ve watched the company grow from a company that was about 500, where engineering was roughly 100 or so, to now engineering is well over 700 and at our largest we were 2,500 people.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Bora?

Bora Chung: Hi everyone, I’m Bora Chung. I am SVP of Bill.com and I lead an organization of about 40 product managers and product designers. Just to give you context of the size of the company, we are about 13 year old company that do workflow automation for SMBs and our revenue’s about, I think last fiscal year was about 110 million. The entire company size is about 550, so product managers and product designers account for about 40 of them. We just went public December of last year so we’re going through a transition of being a private company to public company.

Bora Chung: How I got here, even though I manage both designers and product managers, my own professional heritage is more on the product management side, so I spent nine years out of business school at PayPal, four years at Apple, and then four years at eBay.

Gretchen DeKnikker: The quick unmute is not working. Ines, can you go?

Ines Thornburg: Absolutely. Thank you, Gretchen. So, Ines Thornburg. I am responsible for the Americas portfolio and customers for customer success at Splunk. My team is about 100 people, comprising of customer success managers as well as the renewal function and the renewal team that supports Americas customers. Been here about two years now and my career spans back to a series of different software companies where I started off as a consultant doing implementations, moved into presales, joined Oracle through the acquisition of Hyperion, so I went from a small growing company to a midsize company to a mega company. Was there for a while, learned a lot and then decided to try a venture startup.

Ines Thornburg: So, why I’m at Splunk, the technology’s very relevant in today’s data explosion as well as where we are in our journey in terms of maturity. And so Splunk is going through a pretty massive business transformation, shifting to a SaaS and subscription model, so that’s what really excited me. We’re still what I would consider a medium size company and really on a trajectory of growth, and that’s what I feel like I can make an impact on for our customers.

Gretchen DeKnikker: All right. So, you guys can see … Y’all, I’m trying not to say “you guys”. Y’all can see why I’m so excited about this panel. They have just an amazing set of backgrounds. It’s a completely different skillset, right? Ines, what do you feel like you kind of had to relearn in that very first time that you went from being a manager to managing managers?

Ines Thornburg: Gretchen, for me it was all about how I spent my time, really. And so going from being, as I mentioned, starting off as an individual contributor, doing the work myself, then being able to manage people doing work, then to manage multiple workstreams and priorities and making sure that those managers responsible for different workstreams not only were competent and experts in their field, but then, me balancing my time across the different responsibilities in a way that, frankly, I wasn’t getting too involved, I learned to trust the expertise on my team and learn what was good enough. And frankly, perfection is not always the end goal. We have to continue to progress multiple workstreams at one time in initiatives, and really making sure that no one gets left behind.

Ines Thornburg: And so, me figuring out that right balance between rolling up my sleeves and doing versus allowing people to do and coaching along the way was really that arc that we continue to perfect over time.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Bora, you were within the first 100 employees at PayPal, right?

Bora Chung: That’s right. When I first started, I started out as an MBA summer intern and the company was about 100 people.

Gretchen DeKnikker: What was that journey, along the same vein that I’m assuming it sort of started there where you were drinking from the fire hose?

Bora Chung: Sure, sure. I think the soft skill that I learned during that period was just mental agility. So, there were a lot of ambiguous situations when you’re a fast paced startup with just very few resources. You don’t really have a very well defined job description, so there were lots of ambiguous situations that hit you every day but just figuring out how to be a go-getter and get out of that ambiguity using mental agility was a skillset that I picked up in the early days of my career, and then if I could just connect that with the manager’s manager tradition, when I get to manager and then a manager’s manager, what I had to unlearn a little bit was when do I helicopter out versus when do I helicopter in. There’s absolutely no management course or management book written about how to do it, when to feel it out.

Bora Chung: So I think that’s a basic soft skill that you have to pick up very quickly and I struggled through that a little bit. I’m still learning it, but to me, the biggest difference between a junior employee in a very small startup versus a manager’s manager is learning how to do helicoptering in and helicoptering out at the right moments.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Right. Yeah, I like that analogy. Arquay, what’s a skill that served you really well as a manager and then you kind of had to unlearn?

Arquay Harris: Oh, that I had to unlearn? As an engineer, I got into engineering leadership in the way that most engineering managers get into engineering management which is you’re the most technically proficient person on the team and so your manager says to you, “Have you ever thought about management?” And you’re like, “No, but I’ll try it,” right? And so it’s a really hard transition because … It’s really hard because you know that you’re technically most proficient and so you just want to jump in there and do PR reviews and all of the stuff, and so you have to really make this transition from being able to be the person who was the peer on the team to the person who is the leader on the team.

Arquay Harris: And then when you make the transition from managing individual contributors for people playing bingo to manager, what happens there is you go from this very directive sort of supporting, coaching state of mind to managing to outcomes. So, when you have a person who is also responsible for managing other people on the team, you don’t want a person who is managing or doing things in the way that you would do them. Right? You want them to manage in the way that they do them and the way that feels comfortable for them.

Arquay Harris: And so I would never say to my manager, “Hey, I want you to do this and this is step one, two, three.” It’s like, “This is the outcome. How can I support you to get there?” You have to really trust them to be able to do it. And so the unlearning comes from this thing of wanting to be the person who is the hero, jumps in, saves the day, maybe writes the code, to really growing and empowering that next generation or that next level of leadership.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Yeah, absolutely. Maybe let’s go to Bora. What skills have you gained along the way that you feel like, “If I’d just learned that earlier, it would have been so much less painful?”

Bora Chung: Right, right. I think it’s doing skip level one-on-ones and getting the right communication done in those sessions. So, one mistake I made when I become a manager’s manager was I was just having one-on-ones with my immediate direct reports, but then they also have a set of teams and maybe not as frequent, but making sure that I check in with the team members and the delightful moments are when I hear some of the key themes and strategies being played back, I think that’s when things are going well. When you completely hear game of telephone being played and have a disconnected kind of direction and alignment, that’s when you know that things are not going well, so I think one thing that I recommend, and is a pretty tactical thing that you could easily do is maybe a little bit less frequent but do a skill level one-on-one check in and I think that I didn’t realize early enough but I picked it up and that has been serving me greatly.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Yeah, I’m taking that one back with me for sure. How about you, Ines?

Ines Thornburg: I think the one thing as you grow in your career and you become more visible, have more responsibilities, the one thing that I’ve learned is that when you speak or when you say something, the impact of what you’re saying really is that much stronger, that much more gospel, so to speak, and when you’re facilitating a meeting or when you’re communicating, you have to realize that, again, as your responsibility grows, is that people really listen. So you have to be careful, so if you’re trying to facilitate a brainstorming, for example, what I’ve learned is, facilitate the dialogue, get the conversation going, but I reserve what my opinion is until the end, because I don’t want everybody to just think that my opinion is the right one, because it’s certainly not. That’s why I bring together, and when I’m doing hiring, I always try to look for complementary skills.

Ines Thornburg: So I’ve learned to really be cautious about what I say and when I say it and to whom I say it, because I realize that, frankly, what I’m saying does affect and impact a lot of the folks on the team.

Gretchen DeKnikker: How about you, Arquay?

Arquay Harris: Things I wish I could have learned earlier?

Gretchen DeKnikker: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Arquay Harris: This is a thing that I say all the time, which is … I say, “Be friendly, not friends.” If my team’s watching, they’re probably laughing about this because I say this a lot and it’s basically very early on in my career when I made that transition to manager, these people are your best friends. You hang out with them every night and when you are friends with the people who report to you, you cannot be impartial, right? You can’t say to your best friend, “You really screwed up on that thing. I need you to work harder in this area.” It can be really awkward.

Arquay Harris: And so what I really learned later in my career was how to set boundaries, because I do you a disservice if I’m not able to give you that really constructive and helpful feedback and help you grow. And that doesn’t mean that you have to be this monster who’s just a robot, but boundaries are really, really important and I just wish I’d learned that earlier.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. You’d kind of talked a little bit before about another skill, about learning to delegate, and you had this example of quadrants.

Arquay Harris: Yeah. I kind of dug into that a little bit earlier. I wish I could claim credit but it’s essentially situational leadership. You can google it. There’s lots of videos on YouTube about it, but it’s basically about how when you are leading a large organization, or any organization, what a lot of managers will do is they will try to bend the team to the way that they lead. “I’m really introverted” or, “I’m super extroverted” or whatever it is, like the people need to fit into what I expect of them, but really, what a really good leader should do is you should make your management style situational to the person and to the stage that they are in their career.

Arquay Harris: And so it really just goes into this first quadrant, which is directive, which you might do to a more junior person. You might say, “Bora, I need you to log into this machine, do this work,” and then you move up into coaching, which is you have a little bit more skill and it’s like, “All right, you kind of know what you’re doing. How can I coach you through it?” Onto supporting, which is, “You know what you’re doing. How can I support you? How can I help you get to that next level?” And then the final magic kind of golden quadrant is delegation, and that’s just, “I don’t even really need to tell you what to do. You probably are bringing me the problem, telling me what it is that needs to be solved.”

Arquay Harris: And I think the thing that’s really interesting is it’s not really a straight line. You might kind of hover, depending upon your skillset, maybe in communication you’re in full on delegation mode but at technical proficiency maybe you need a little bit more support, and so I think that when I’m managing managers, I really try to think about it in that way, about what are the strengths and how do I help really, really uplift a person’s strengths and how do I help them really either correct for or counterbalance any weaknesses that they may have?

Gretchen DeKnikker: That is a good segue. Hiring is so different. All the skills that you learn to vet people when you’re a manager, and you’re just vetting them for do they have the skillset to do this role and do I think they’ll be the right fit with this team? But when you start hiring managers, what’s your suggestion there? Where do we start, Ines?

Ines Thornburg: One of the best practices that we have, and we really are very firm about it at Splunk, is at any role at this point, we have a panel. We have a select group of people that bring different questions to the table to assess skill. So, for example, we may have someone assessing the technical skill, we may have someone assessing behavioral type skills, situational skills, collaboration skills, et cetera. I always like to make sure I speak to the finalists.

Ines Thornburg: I like to know every single person on my team, a little bit about them, and really I have two primary questions that I’ve always asked as a leader doing hiring through every company I’ve been at, which are, number one, why am I talking to you today about this role, whatever the role is? Because what I’m looking for in that question is really what is their career journey? Why does this particular role fit into their long term career journey? I’m not looking for someone that’s just applying for a job because they may have seen something. I want somebody who’s put thought into how this role is going to help them along their long term career journey.

Ines Thornburg: Second, why Splunk or why whatever company? And to me, that shows me they’ve done their homework, they have a passion about what the company is we’re trying to achieve and we can have a dialogue. And from there, those two questions really help me take it on to the next level conversation, which is something that, frankly, how I always start those … And I’m not looking for skill, I’m not looking for technical proficiency. I’m looking for the long term drivers that really want that person to be on my team.

Gretchen DeKnikker: So, Bora, you’re at a company that’s one sixth the size of Splunk, so you might not quite have all the bells and whistles that Ines has at her disposal, so what is your process and how is it different?

Bora Chung: We start with the fact that interview is definitely a two-way street. We want to make sure that we evaluate the candidates, but candidate’s evaluating us, so we try to actually put an interview panel together that represents cross functional relationships, because teamwork, team play is an important element of culture at Bill.com, so we make sure that the candidate experiences the characters and the types of people that he or she will be working with. So, I think that’s one.

Bora Chung: The other piece is I think we have different seniority levels represented in the interview panel as well, so that I think some of the maybe early career folks could really test out the technical chops. You know, is this person a great designer? Is this person a great engineer? And then maybe someone like me could maybe test a little bit more about their soft skills, right? Can you actually influence the cross functional teams? Are you going to think more for the company versus your own output versus your own team’s output?

Bora Chung: So, I think we have a good balance of technical assessments and culture fit and teamwork elements going on. So I think we could definitely do more in terms of strengthening the recruiting process, but we’ve been hiring a lot of good talents through this.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Arquay, you’re kind of at the midsize between the two, but also, what did you have to change about how you interviewed? What skills did you need? What muscle did you need to build to be able to vet people to be managers as well as you did for ICs?

Arquay Harris: Having worked at very, very large companies where you have an interview process that is pretty set in stone and pretty precise, the cool thing about working at a hyper growth company like Slack is that I had the opportunity to really be involved in crafting that interview process and seeing it evolve over time, and we, right now, have a pretty defined rubric where we have pretty set slots where you’re judging people on things like teamwork and collaboration, ability to execute, strategy, and then we try to make it so that we have really diverse panels that are representative of gender and race and tenure and that type of thing.

Arquay Harris: But I think that the difference between evaluating an IC versus a manager is that to a certain extent when you’re judging an IC, there is the work product. That can be a really good weeding out factor, because if you do a coding exercise or you do … even when you come in and you’re doing white boarding exercises, not necessarily algorithms but something that shows technical proficiency, it’s a little bit easier to see whether or not a person can thrive or not thrive. It’s not perfect, but you have more signal, right?

Arquay Harris: When you’re evaluating a manager, it is, as I was mentioning, a lot more about the soft skills, and so you’re really trying to see if given certain scenarios, how they can fit and I think that it really does depend on your particular company and size and what you’re looking for, and so, for example, in those early days of Slack, one of the things that was really important was hiring managers who had experience or aptitude for scaling teams.

Arquay Harris: Because recruiting, if your engineering org is like 50 people or 100 people and we’re trying to grow to 7, 800 within a couple years, recruiting is going to be a very big part of it and do you understand to build strong relationships with recruiting? Do you understand how to really evaluate your pipeline? Fill gaps on your team? And so it’s these types of questions that we’re really looking for.

Arquay Harris: In terms of making it so that it’s a really fair and consistent process, we really make sure that we try to have our interviewers stick to the rubric, look to the way that people are answering the questions and that it’s not just subjective, like, “Oh, they’d be cool to hang out with,” kind of thing. We like to make it so that there’s some fairness and consistency built into the process.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Yeah, absolutely. You got me thinking, also, I think some folks really hesitate to hire that person with way more experience, right? Especially if you’re at the hyper growth company, because if you’re in a senior role at the hyper growth company, you’re gaining the skills at a rate that does not keep up. You might have perfected your job yesterday and you might be finally good at it, but the next day, it’s a different job and you’re not good anymore, and you’re constantly going. So how do you sort of fight that … I think some people get really nervous about, “I need to hire someone who knows what it looks like when we get there,” but that’s also a person that may know a lot more than you do, and I think people hesitate with that. How do you advise people to work with that?

Arquay Harris: Yeah, when I started at the company, my team was two people. Literally two people. And that was fine. I was like, “All right, let’s roll up the sleeves, let’s get it done,” but I was really excited about working for this particular company at that time and I think … You can suss a little bit of that out in the interview. If you’re interviewing someone and they haven’t done that exact thing and they can really describe to your their approach or their philosophy, what I really look for is, is this person a structured thinker? Do they have best practices or some kind of toolkit or some sort of methodology in the way that they approach leadership?

Arquay Harris: Because part of it is what you just said. It’s all intangible. The ambiguity is so high at a company like this, that I think understanding what type of leader you are and what you can contribute, that’s way more important than a very specific checklist of skills, because like you said, tomorrow it’s going to be different anyway.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Bora, you were nodding your head on that.

Bora Chung: Yeah, I was thinking about the early part of my career when you asked that question. I think when I was more junior in the early part of my career, I was thinking that I should be the smartest person if I’m the manager, and I was somewhat reluctant and afraid of hiring people smarter than you … smarter than myself, rather, but what I am realizing is that it’s absolutely cool to hire people smarter than me. It actually elevates the team. It improves the quality of the thinking and ultimately what we deliver to our customers is going to be much stronger. So I think I had to shed that a little bit of early stage career insecurity to really put together a strong team, so I think that was one.

Bora Chung: And then I think it goes back to one of the comments that Ines made earlier. I don’t have to be the perfectionist that knows all the answers. Sometimes a great value as a manager or manager’s manager comes from asking the right question, maybe asking the powerful question that nobody else is asking, because they are afraid or there’s a big elephant in the room. So I think a lot of wisdom I gained over the years is that it’s awesome to have team members that are smarter than you. They elevate you and your team and then, two, is you don’t have to have all the answers. Sometimes asking the powerful question could really be helpful as a manager or manager’s manager.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Absolutely. So, Ines, you have this huge organization. What do you have to add in? You have 400 people, right? Or something. It’s a crazy number.

Ines Thornburg: At Splunk, my team’s about 100 but in other jobs and other companies, it’s certainly been a lot larger, and that’s the thing. As our responsibility grows, you’ll have lots of different experts on your team in different disciplines, different business units, what have you, and it’s impossible just to chime in with Bora and Arquay. You can’t be the expert. It’s just physically impossible as your organization grows, and so what you do need to do is to be really, really comfortable working with these teams of experts in helping them accomplish their mission. And so, as a leader, really, my value to my team is making sure that we’re working towards the same goals and cascading those company goals down. Everybody understands those goals, that we’re progressing on those goals and frankly that we’re communicating our progress effectively in working together.

Ines Thornburg: Splunk’s a very technical company, like all these others, and am I technical? No, but I have a business degree and frankly we’re running a business at Splunk, and so my goal is to make sure that from a customer perspective, that those customers are getting value out of our technology so that they renew and we grow as an organization. And so, my value to my team is different than the value of them to our company and that’s what we have to make sure that we’re always balanced on so that together the team is stronger. So, that’s the way I think about it.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Okay. Time is going way too fast. We’re going to do one more question and then I see that we have some amazing, amazing questions in the Q and A also. So, your most cringe-worthy and your most exciting moments when you first made this transition, so that everyone can sort of go along with you. I can go first. My most cringe-worthy was like what Bora said. I thought I needed to know everything and I was so embarrassed when I didn’t know what was going on, and it took me a while to realize I’m just air traffic controller and actually the less information I have on a tactical level, the less opportunity I have to screw things up and I should just let the expert be the expert.

Gretchen DeKnikker: And then my most amazing one was when I walked in, I was planning this 10,000 person conference and there were hundreds of people setting up all of these little tiny details that we’d spent a year making and I knew the names of like six people that I could see at any given moment and I was like, “Okay, this is working. They have this. They’ve got it. I don’t even need to know what’s going on right now. This is amazing.” So, why don’t you kick us off, Arquay?

Arquay Harris: Cringe-worthy is definitely bad hires. Unlike hiring a bad IC hire, the blast radius is just so large when you have a bad management hire and it could affect the careers for quarters and quarters of the people in the team. Most amazing moment is really fulfilling and rewarding to see people grow, to see them go from kind of more junior manager to senior manager to director, to see them be able to come into their own as a manager, develop their own styles, and yeah, that’s probably the best thing.

Gretchen DeKnikker: How about you, Ines?

Ines Thornburg: Most cringe-worthy is when I feel like I’ve not done enough preparations and prepared my team, and so specifically, again, we’re all in some sort of technical discipline. Learning the technical skills, I think, is one aspect of the job, but let’s not forget about the soft skills. And so Arquay mentioned soft skills and looking at those in hiring, but also continuing to help the teams augment them. So that means communication skills, that means collaboration, meeting facilitation. It means executive presence, making sure that when you’re representing your company or your team, that you do it in such a way that you’re proud of that. So, when I know I haven’t prepared my team and I see a train wreck about to happen, that’s when I’m like … That’s the cringe-worthy.

Ines Thornburg: The most proud, frankly, Splunk just had our sales kickoff and we’ve been working really hard as a customer success organization over the past couple years to get to a point where we’re really ready to support almost 20,000 customers globally and the team recognition and what I saw … what my executives and the company recognized on the customer success team was just extremely rewarding to see the people on my team winning awards, being part of large contributions to customers, and frankly it just made me really warm and proud inside.

Gretchen DeKnikker: That’s awesome. All right, Bora.

Bora Chung: So, cringing moments. When you become a manager’s manager, naturally a lot more escalations hit your desk and escalations could stem from conflicts between people or conflicts between departments or sometimes goals are not aligned. Just having to resolve conflicts on behalf of the team, sometimes you’re successful, sometimes you are not so successful and disappoint the teams. So I think the escalation handling and conflict resolution, I think I had some rough spots at the beginning of my career, so I think that’s the cringe moments. The most proud moments, there are times that when you go on an extended vacation or extended business trip, you come back and your boss is basically telling you that, “Oh my God, Bora, your team was perfect. I didn’t even know that you were out of the office.” And at the beginning, again, you’re like, “Does that mean that I’m not adding any value? Did you not know that I was out of office?”

Bora Chung: Sometimes I would wish that some crisis would happen just so that they know that I was absent, but I think the real truth is that that means that you have a fantastic bench and you have a great top talent manager. So, my most proud moment is when I’m absent on a sabbatical or vacation and then the team doesn’t even notice that. I think that’s the ultimate success of coaching and grooming the right team.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Absolutely, yeah. Okay, so we have a ton of questions. The first one, and we’re going in order of their voting, as women of color, have you experienced any difficulty or veiled biases while managing male coworkers? What did you do to handle that situation? So, Arquay, Bora?

Arquay Harris: Sure, I’ll just jump in. I think one of the hardest things about being a woman, especially a woman of color, is just the big issue of low expectation. What happens to me a lot in particular is people think that I’m not technical. I’ve had interns be like, “Do you code?” Which is a ridiculous question that you probably never ask a male who’s a director of engineering. And so I think, yeah, you face that a lot and it’s really unfortunate. On the bright side, I think things are changing, particularly as we get more and more women in leadership positions, I think just having different voices in the room is really contributing to the conversation.

Bora Chung: For me, the usual stereotype where sometimes the hardship is, especially as an Asian woman, getting stereotyped into a bucket of, “Oh, you must be quiet, you must be an introvert,” so I think this is why I spent extra energy on developing what we usually call the executive presence and executive gravitas, because especially when you become a manager of manager, it’s not just your personal brand and personal reputation. It’s your team’s effectiveness that you have to be responsible for. So, I think those have been some tough spots, but I think I try to overcome it by being more vocal and representing the team more actively.

Ines Thornburg: Gretchen, I think you’re muted.

Gretchen DeKnikker: I need to unmute. Okay. Bora, this one’s for you. What are the things that you discuss during your skip level one-on-one? I’m thinking of setting up a skip level one-on-one with my skip level manager but I don’t know what we should discuss during those meetings.

Bora Chung: Right, right. So, I think it starts with just a very broad question of how are things going? And the other kind of check in is that, is there a certain expectation? So I try to also let the manager in the middle know that we are having the skip level. So I think the worst outcome is that if the manager in the middle gets alienated in this conversation, so I don’t really have an agenda. I think just like our services are getting more and more personalized, I think the skip level one-on-ones need to get personalized. So with some folks, I talk about just their career aspirations. With some folks, since I’m one level away, they could maybe ask more questions about the big picture strategy and whatnot, so it’s a little bit different, but the two things that I just always do is I let the team member drive the agenda. I just start by just checking in on overall things and I make sure that the manager in the middle is aware of the fact that we are having this conversation, and we’re not breaching confidentiality.

Bora Chung: There are some key things that I think the manager in the middle should know. I also make it pretty obvious and public as well.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Ines, do you do skip level?

Ines Thornburg: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I even do double skips. Like I said, I want to be the finalist on all interviews because I really take pride in knowing people. One of the things, as a leader of a large organization, that I like to understand is, is career aspirations, as Bora mentioned, because honestly this is where we have a much larger purview of opportunity as a leader, and frankly if I have a conversation with someone and I understand really they want to be in another part of the organization at some point in the future, if I see that connection and see that match, I would love to make that match and keep that talent within my company rather than seeing people leave and take all that wonderful knowledge that we have, and great talent, to another company, frankly.

Ines Thornburg: So, I do that a lot and, frankly, when I’m looking … I don’t want people leaving my organization necessarily but at the same time, if we can promote from within and give people more opportunity within our organization, it just makes … frankly, people appreciate that and I love a team that culturally has a strong morale and knows that we’ve got each other’s backs.

Gretchen DeKnikker: I think this one’s for everyone, so we’ll have Arquay kick us off. What are the top traits and qualities you recommend focusing on for someone looking to get into a management role?

Arquay Harris: Adaptability for sure, because the thing about being an IC is that it’s a pretty defined trajectory to go from associate to engineer to senior to staff to senior staff, right? You might not know exactly what it is but there are some … some part of it’s mapped out. It’s a little bit more opaque when you’re talking about leadership because in any given moment you could have to deal with people’s emotions and you have to coach and you have to support and you have to discipline and you have to … It’s just all of these things that you have to do, and so you have to take, like we say, growth mindset. You have to be willing to iterate and change. So if you have these kind of qualities …

Arquay Harris: If you’re a person who’s really rigid and like things just so, you maybe want to not consider … Consider something else.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Or find people that are just like you.

Arquay Harris: Or that.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Yeah. How about you, Bora?

Bora Chung: I would say maybe two shifts and mixes, right? One is if ICs generally think about execution for the most part, I would say you have to start to blend in execution as well as strategic thinking, right? So I think that’s maybe the first shift. The second one is just how you think about time horizons, so let me maybe take product development as an example. Maybe when you’re an IC, you’re thinking mostly about next release, the release after that, but when you eventually become a manager, you think about maybe an annual roadmap or like a three year vision. I think those are maybe the difference in time horizon of your thinking, and there’s not a right or wrong. I think there need to be different parts of thinkers. Some people need to execute, some people need to think strategy, some people need to think next release, some people need to think about the three year vision, but I think those are some of the shifts that you start to … you need to have to transition into a managerial role.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Ines?

Ines Thornburg: Yeah, in addition … I mean, the adaptability is huge, and Bora’s comments, I think, were spot on. I will add onto those, communication, and, frankly, as you think about just rallying a team from what they’re doing at a macro level down to the micro, everyone needs to have a proper communication cadence and understand where we’re all marching toward. So, I think a lot about communication and different ways that we communicate, whether it’s quarterly all-hands calls, weekly cadence calls, the one-on-ones, the skip levels, Slack, we have Slack channels, we have email … I mean, we communicate in lots of different ways.

Ines Thornburg: We actually have spent the starting part of our year thinking about all the different communication … You know, the different communication means and important forums that we need to do to make sure, frankly, everyone is marching in line. At these high growth companies, things are moving so fast and, frankly, as a leader, we have to make sure that everyone is working towards the same goal. So, tops down, bottoms up, communication to me is super, super important and sometimes we just don’t think about it enough. So that’s one that I’ll add on.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Yeah, or the mindset that meetings are a waste of time. Meetings are your lifeblood when you get to a certain level. If you spent your whole day in meetings, unless they were just … you’re not careful with your time, if you spent your whole day in meetings, you were doing your job all day, and I think that’s a mindset thing that a lot of people really struggle with changing.

Ines Thornburg: Yep, agreed.

Gretchen DeKnikker: So, next question, I think this would be for Arquay. In engineering, what can we do as an organization to encourage more women in manager of managers positions? Was there anything specific that helped you get to where you are in your career and that is Katie coming from the Scotland, UK today so [crosstalk]

Arquay Harris: Thanks for joining. Part of it is basically making sure that there’s some sort of support system at your company and paying it forward and being that person who can encourage. So, for example, one of the things that I do at my company is every week I have office hours and I post it, and the women’s ERG … bingo … So I’ll post it in certain channels and get people to sign up and try to be mentor and support system when I can.

Arquay Harris: And then the other thing is, I think, really just having … When I was coming up, there weren’t a lot of people who look like me who did the job that I do, and so it just wasn’t a thing that I could even see myself doing. The idea of a CTO was Andy Grove, right? With the khaki shirt … I mean, a blue shirt and khaki pants, and so that’s part of it too. Just making yourself aware and available and aware to other people within engineering and letting people know that, hey, you are a source of information.

Arquay Harris: And then sponsorship is a big thing that people are doing lately. If there’s someone that you see who you think has potential, maybe encourage them, and if I had people on my team who show interest in management, maybe try giving them some tasks. Like, “Hey, maybe try managing this intern for a summer and seeing how it goes, or maybe you might want to run the sprint meeting.” That kind of thing. Really just give them these little nuggets to see if they have the aptitude and really kind of understand what management is.

Gretchen DeKnikker: I can’t believe we’re already at time, but I just want to thank you on behalf of everyone who’s tuned in right now because you guys just gave them most amazing session. So thank you again to Arquay, Ines, and Bora, and we will be back in just a moment.

Ines Thornburg: Thank you all.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Bye.

Posted on

“The Next Million” — Girl Geek X Elevate (Video + Transcript)

Transcript of Elevate 2020 Session

Rachel Jones: All right. So we’re going to move on to our next panel, but first some housekeeping. So, we are recording all of these sessions. They’ll be available on YouTube in just a couple weeks. If you’re hosting a watch party, we want to see. So please share, tag us on Instagram, use the hashtag Girl Geek X, and remember to submit your questions in the Q&A box and upvote your favorites. Right. So a background check typically excludes people, but at Checkr, a high level goal of theirs is actually to get one million more people into the workforce. So this group of Checkr girl geeks will share how working at a mission driven company is core to engineering, product, and design. So I’m going to hand it over to the moderator of our panel, Krista. So Krista is an engineering manager at Checkr. So, Krista, take it away.

Krista Moroder: Thank you. Hi everyone. So as you mentioned, one of our goals is to bring people back into the workforce. So a quick background on Checkr, we are an API first background-check company that was started about six years ago, went through Y Combinator back in 2014, and since then I have taken on the background check industry and worked with a lot of on-demand startups as well as enterprise companies. And so I joined about nine months ago, and one of the things I was most impressed with when I joined was the big focus on mission at the company.

Krista Moroder: And so the goal is not just to help people be more efficient in hiring, but also to make sure people aren’t losing opportunities because of how the background-check industry has historically worked. And so in this talk, we’re going to talk to a few people on our team, in product and engineering and design, about what they do every day and how that’s impacting our mission. So I’ll start before handing it over. As mentioned, I’m an engineering manager and before that I’ve had a few careers, software engineer. I started a company at one point and I also spent a decade in education, including as a high school English teacher. So I’ll hand it off over to Melanie.

Melanie Cernak: Hi. I’m Melanie. I’m a product designer here at Checkr and I care a lot about social impact in criminal justice reform. I believe that everyone has the right to work and create a viable living and that there’s truly a right position for everyone. Prior to Checkr, I was at a different background check company where I realized how antiquated the industry is and how there’s these really deeply entrenched norms. And that’s I came excited about Checkr. I feel like it’s really shaking things up and a key progressive player in this space, working to expand employment opportunities for people with conviction histories.

Jess Zhang: Hi, I’m Jess. I’m an engineering manager in Checkr. I joined Checkr about four months ago. And what impresses me is Checkr is with our technology, we disrupted– The industry is so–20 years behind the modern era. And another thing impress me was the Checkr’s mission. For me, the first impression of background check is just to block people. To check your background, you have everything you said you have. I never thought of the other side as we want to actually get more people into the workforce and how if we do things too strictly, we’re actually not doing anybody a favor. And I’m very glad to join the risk team. And now that my team and I have a chance to detecting fraud and help to make the workplace a fairer place for everyone.

Michelle He: Hi. My name is Michelle. I’m an engineer on the motor vehicle report team at Checkr. I actually have a background in structural engineering and architecture. I transitioned into tech about four years ago and now I’m with Checkr for about four months. Personally, I’m very interested in use of technology to improve efficiency, solve problems at scale. And as a society, we have seen a lot tremendous progress with what technology has brought today. And, personally, I’m very fascinated by the way we discovering new ways we can be more productive and increase efficiency and reduce human errors. So the reason why I joined Checkr is that the opportunity to help shape the future of an industry that is stuck in the very long distance past. And it hasn’t seen a lot of innovations recently, and Checkr is actually a company that has a very strong north-star mission to help people get work, to guide its own growth, and it has a strong culture of nurturing individual growth. And, lastly, the office is lovely and every day it provides healthy lunch and snacks. That’s the last reason I joined.

Vivian Chen: Hi. I’m also a software engineer on the motor vehicle report team. And I also really like improving efficiency through the use of technology. I think it’s extremely gratifying to build practical solutions to make people’s lives a little bit easier to solving real-world problems. There are two main reasons why I decided to join Checkr. First one was, it was important for me to find a mission-driven company when I was switching jobs. I saw an article about how Checkr was making the initiative to be more inclusive of people who are formerly incarcerated and I thought that was really cool. Second, Checkr provides a lot of opportunities to work on interesting engineering problems. Checkr’s a operations-heavy company by virtue of being in the background-check industry and the amount of business logic required for completing background checks requires a lot of creative engineering solutions.

Krista Moroder: Thank you. Yeah. So let’s get into it. The whole mission of Checkr is very big and it’s abstract, but the actual day-to-day nature is a little more difficult. There’s a lot of system complexity in trying to actually go through the workflow of a background check. And so I’m curious, and maybe we can start with Jess, what does that look like in your role every day? And I know that Vivian and Michelle and I, being on the same team, we joke all the time about how we feel like philosophers every day. So from your perspective, what does that look like in the fraud-detection world?

Michelle He: I think you were muted, Jess.

Jess Zhang: Sorry. Thank you, Krista. This is a great question. I start smiling because it’s exactly what my day looks like as well. So on the fraud team, basically our mission is to detecting fraudulent identities. People using people, selling, they sometimes they create account and then they sell this to, their illegitimate accounts, to people who wouldn’t have, or to people who have bad intentions. There are people who fake out all sorts of documents identities. So our job is to block those people, but with Checkr’s mission will encourage me and challenge me to think outside the box, think of how I can not… It’s easy just to block people out, but it’s harder to how to block only the people who’s truly a fraud out and to keep the people who maybe made a mistakes, maybe have typos and have a mistake in their identities, and in their IDs, in their documents, how to keep those people in.

Jess Zhang: So that challenges me every day to think creative solutions. And with this, I also believe that the solution we bring to the market will be completely different from the companies who don’t think about this a daily basis. In the long term, we have a lot of questions to answer. Who are we blocking? And really what is our cases of fraud? With that, right-and-wrong questions answered? Is our data biased? Is our judgment, decision-making biased? How do we know? We have so much data to collect and to analysis and to build a [inaudible]. So these are very exciting and big challenges ahead of us. And it makes me excited every day.

Krista Moroder: Thank you. Michelle, you are going on support next week for our team, so tell us a little bit about what that looks like.

Michelle He: Yeah. So our company is a API-first service. So on a yearly basis, we process millions of reports and through all this process, unfortunately, there are some stuck reports. So, once in a while, because of a system can take care of some [inaudible] edge cases, we end up with these reports [inaudible], and they will end up being a support ticket coming to engineering’s desk. So as engineers, we actually look into these reports and figure out the reason why they were stuck and we actually have the power to grant or delay someone’s permission to get a job. So I think that’s a very powerful thought and that makes our support tasks even more meaningful. And at a granular level, for long term planning, I think because Checkr has such a strong mission that actually guides our decision making on how to invest resources and prioritize in our roadmaps on a quarterly basis. So, for example, next quarter, it’s very easy for us to come to a conclusion that data accuracy is our first priority because of our mission.

Krista Moroder: Awesome. Yeah. And Vivian, do you want to talk a little bit more about that as well? I know that you’re dealing with a lot of the same support issues as Michelle, but also with data accuracy, I know you’ve been very involved with that this quarter, especially.

Vivian Chen: Yeah. There’s a lot of coordination involved between these various entities in the life cycle of a background-check report. And so we have to make sure that as we’re passing this along, that we are parsing the information correctly, displaying it correctly. And to be more concrete, some of these entities include the data furnisher, which is where we get the information about the candidate. This could be information such as education verification, employment verification, and motor vehicle records. The customer who is the company that is actually requesting the background check and the candidate experience team who interfaces with the candidate and helps resolve any issues that come up during the process. As engineers, we have be cognizant of how our decisions are impacting the background-check life cycle and ensure that whatever we’re building is in the best interest of the candidate. And we have to avoid any mistakes that would delay a candidate from starting their job, therefore negatively impacting their livelihood.

Krista Moroder: Yeah. Thank you for sharing all that. That’s really useful to think about all these different things. When I was first joining Checkr, I remember there was this aha moment where I realized that at a high level, we’re doing background checks, at the actual deep level, we’re trying to help clean up this awful data interoperability problem across every single court system in the U.S. Because every single state sends data differently, maps it differently, uses different codes. And so, as we think about this giant data problem, moving to all these different people we have to work with, Melanie, I am super curious what you have to say about how you think about all of these different personas, because as a designer, you are the person who often has to think about how the candidate is making their way through this entire life cycle. So love it if you could talk a little bit about that.

Melanie Cernak: Yeah, absolutely. So we just created candidate personas, and candidate, if you’re not familiar, is anyone who’s going through the background check process. So we created three personas. The first is someone who’s been incarcerated for a long period of time and is now reentering society and has done a lot of rehabilitation, really ambitious, made a bunch of positive improvements in their life, but is still facing a lot of bias in the hiring process. The second is someone who has misdemeanors and struggles to understand what’s going to show up on their background check report. And then the third is someone who has a clear record and is applying for jobs.

Melanie Cernak: And so we use these personas in our product development process to really humanize the experience, make sure we know who we’re building for. For example, and I’ll touch on this a little more in depth later, but we’re working on this feature called candidate stories that lets candidate share information directly with employers. And when I was designing this, I was really thinking about the persona of someone who was incarcerated and now reentering society, they’ve done so much positive change, and now we’re giving them the opportunity to actually share that with customers. And so hopefully customers will take in this information and instead of not giving someone a job, reconsider and give them employment.

Krista Moroder: Yeah. I’d love to follow up on some of that. And I’m also curious if you’ve worked directly with some of our fair-chance talent in thinking about some of these designs, because we make it a priority as a company to make sure we’re bringing in people to our organization that have been impacted negatively some way by the court system. So what are some of the favorite features you’ve designed and how have you collaborated with our team to build on these?

Melanie Cernak: Yeah, absolutely. So at Checkr, five percent of our workforce is fair-chance talent. So people who have conviction histories, which is amazing. And they’re so great to work with and especially on our mission-related features, I often have focus groups with them where I can run the current progress and get their feedback on it. We did that with the personas and then two other projects. So the first is around candidate stories, which I mentioned earlier. So this lets candidates share information, either general information about themselves, so they can share evidence of rehabilitation, certain certificates or volunteer work, or they can share context about a specific record and say like, “Hey, here’s what happened in this charge. Here’s why it happened. Here’s what I’ve been doing since. Here’s why it won’t happen again.” And the goal for this is really, again, just to give more information to customers. Have them have the opportunity to give a personal statement and really make it more human.

Melanie Cernak: The second project we’re doing is around expungements and this actually came out of a hackathon project that won first place. If you’re not familiar, an expungement is the process of sealing and removing a criminal charge from someone’s record. And this is especially relevant when you think about marijuana charges. So this showed up in one of the recent democratic debates, that a lot of States have legalized marijuana and people who have low level of marijuana possessions are eligible to get their records expunged. And in certain States is actually mandated that they’re expunged, but this can still take years to process. And in the meantime, people are being denied employment, housing, licensing. So we wanted to take a two-pronged approach to addressing this. The first is just around education of going through and finding who has a potentially expungeable record and educating both the customer and saying, “Hey, look, this record may qualify for expungement. We recommend that you don’t deny employment based on this charge.”

Melanie Cernak: And then the other is telling candidates like, “Hey, did you know that this charge you have on your background check could be expunged?” And then the second part of that, which is a really exciting part is we’re exploring building the nation’s fastest and most affordable expungement service. And this would be an end-to-end experience for candidates. So they’d be able to go in, Checkr would tell them, “Hey, you have a expungeable record.” They could fill out a questionnaire that determines if they’re actually eligible and then they can actually process and pay for their expungement. And then we would contact all the CRAs, it’d be taken care of and removed from their record. So we’re really excited about this. This has the potential to affect hundreds of thousands of people’s lives and really move in the direction of getting a million more people with conviction histories into the workforce.

Krista Moroder: That’s awesome. And I just learned about that second part after talking to you today, which I think is just evidence of how many different things are going on at Checkr. So I guess as a final question, what are some of the other ways that people here have gotten involved in the mission at Checkr? And Jess, you mentioned that you’re going to be doing a prison visit sometime soon.

Jess Zhang: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for mentioning that. I learned that in Checkr will provide entrepreneurship and employment training for people who are currently incarcerated and the day consists of a one-on-one coaching sessions, assisting them with job-related training, as well as the time for connections. So next month, my teammates and I will actually join a prison visit through our partner on Defy Ventures. So it’s part of this program. I’m very excited and my team and I are also participating in many of the volunteering opportunities in the Bay area. We decided to use our team building time slot in a quarter to do volunteering and to give back to society. So we feel like nothing is more fulfilling than working together and make a difference to our society and Checkr provide that opportunity for us.

Krista Moroder: Thank you. Michelle, do you want to jump in and share your upcoming work?

Michelle He: Yeah, actually I am going to be on the same prison visit with Jess. I’m very excited about going on the visit. But also I want to mention, again, that Checkr is actually walking the walk as well. We’re not just talking to talk. We’re also fair-chance employer. And I actually have personally the opportunity to meet some of the fair-chance talents at Checkr, hear their personal stories, and work with them. They’re wonderful people who were just in bad situations, oftentimes not by choice. They’re hardworking people who have overcome many barriers after they have left the system and that I can only myself imagine and they deserve equal opportunity just like any others. So I love the fact that I have firsthand experience working with people who have prior record and they definitely deserve more than what they currently are getting.

Krista Moroder: Thank you. And Melanie, you’re also involved with Bounce Back, right?

Melanie Cernak: Is that correct? Yeah. So Bounce Back is a committee within Checkr. That’s solely focused on the mission and I’m one of the leaders of the Bounce Back product sub-committee. So I really try to champion our mission product initiatives and make sure that our mission is reflected in our product experience. And in addition to that, I volunteer for a reentry simulation, which is really powerful. It’s kind of walking the mile, empathy-building exercise, where you go through what it’s like for someone who’s been incarcerated and is reentering society. And you see all the challenges and barriers that they face. We had a conference in the fall called Checkr Forward, and we held this reentry simulation with all our customers and they were very moved and really excited about fair-chance hiring and how they could get involved afterward.

Krista Moroder: Yeah, and that’s a great example. Someone just posted something in the Q and A about is their business impacted by customers who are very conservative in their views on background checks. And we can talk more to that later, but the reentry simulation, I think, was a perfect example of a lot of people responding afterwards that they didn’t realize how difficult it was for a lot of people and opened up a lot of customers’ eyes to exactly what that experience is like. Anyway, I want to make sure that we save time for questions. So I want to thank everyone for listening.

Krista Moroder: There’s a lot of different technology design challenges we’re working on, but one of my favorite things is always thinking back to the Bill Gates quote about how the first rule of any technology is that when you apply automation to something efficient, it makes it better. If you apply it to something inefficient, it makes it worse. And I always think back to that when we’re talking about background checks, because they have never, ever been clean or efficient or well-run. And so that’s why it’s so important that we’re constantly asking ourselves these bigger questions about what we’re actually trying to do and what our mission is. To make sure that we’re making things actually better and not worse. So, yeah, we’d love to take some questions with any of the few minutes remaining.

Rachel Jones: Great. So I know that you just touched on this question about customers who are very conservative in their views on background checks. So how do you manage that when you’re marketing yourself to potential customers?

Krista Moroder: Actually, let’s see here, who would like… Maybe we can take this from a design perspective? We don’t have anyone on marketing on board, but I know you think about it often from design.

Melanie Cernak: Yeah. So I know that our sales organization like varies the pitch based on what the customer is looking for. And if they’re a little bit more conservative and they’re not initially interested in fair chance, we pitch on kind of our other benefits first. And once we have them on board, it’s more of like, “Hey.” It’s a lot of education. So we have a fair-chance learning center course where it talks about the benefits of fair-chance hiring and how much it can expand your talent pool. And so really it’s getting people on board as customers and then helping educate why fair chance matters. And we do a lot of marketing and contents around that.

Rachel Jones: Great. Anyone else want to weigh in on that or just ways that you present yourselves to customers as a company?

Krista Moroder: Yeah, I guess I can join in on that. So a lot of the features that we have around things like fair chance are optional because there is no requirement for customers to actually use them. But, again, the marketing that we try to do is around why it’s important to think about these things. And I think as people use the product to maybe meet legal requirements, they start to see the benefits of opening up their candidate funnel, especially when a really good candidate applies and there might be something small on the record. That discussion they continuously have with their candidate, doesn’t have to be a one-off conversation. It can be a toggle setting or a shift in functionality that they can open up to many more people like that person who just might not have raised their hands and said, “Take a second look at me.”

Melanie Cernak: Yeah. And we also have certain product features that help promote fair-chance hiring. For example, we have a new product feature called Assess, which you can filter out certain records in advance. So like [inaudible]. Certain things that we shouldn’t be making negative hiring decisions based on. It’s improving operational efficiency just to not have to look at those charges and then helping promote fair-chance talent as a result.

Rachel Jones: Great. Our next question, what are some of the biggest challenges, designing products for customers who are more modern, like tech companies, versus more traditional, like educational or government institutions?

Krista Moroder: Melanie, do you want to take that one as well?

Melanie Cernak: Yeah. I think there’s definitely very different product needs for some of our more traditional staffing companies versus on-demand companies. We started with on-demand, which has traditionally been our bread and butter. And we’re now working on diversifying and understanding a lot more of the needs for these more traditional and conservative companies. I think, yeah, one design challenge is just to be mindful that we’re not building anything for any specific customer. If a customer is large and they’re more conservative, we try not to build just custom solutions for them. We try to find a good middle ground of something that addresses their needs, while still is progressive.

Krista Moroder: Yeah. And I can speak to that a little bit from the motor vehicle side with Michelle and Vivian. We’ve, since the beginning, have done a lot with companies that are doing ride sharing or part of the gig economy, but as we branch into more enterprise-specific customers, a lot of the work we’ve done over the last year has been to support commercial drivers and making sure that we’re meeting regulations that might be required to be a truck driver, for example. And so a lot of the product features have been to make sure that we’re handling all these more specific situations of the types of background checks that you might need for a job that’s not in an office, but might require special certifications and requirements.

Rachel Jones: Great. We have time for one last question. So are there any industries that fair-chance employees struggle getting into and do you offer any training or help getting training?

Melanie Cernak: Yeah, so we offer a lot of resources and are partnered with a lot of organizations that do training and help like interview skills for people who are reentering society, in general, like professional and skills trainings. And then I think we also give recommendations of places that are fair-chance friendly and try to guide people who write in through our Bounce Back website. We give like individual feedback of where might be good for them to look based on their report.

Krista Moroder: Yeah. And there’s a lot of information on that if you go to our website. I think it’s bounceback.checkr.com but there’s a lot of resources there for different customers or just anyone to learn more about ways to get back into the workforce and support people who are in that situation.

Rachel Jones: All right. Great. Thank you so much, ladies.

Melanie Cernak: Awesome. Thank you.

Michelle He: Thank you for having us.

Krista Moroder: Thank you for inviting us.

Vivian Chen: Thank you.

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70% of Girl Geek X partner companies are still actively hiring. Here are the jobs they’re hiring for!

We read the headlines about soaring unemployment and tech layoffs, yet when we asked dozens of our mission-aligned partners if they are actively hiring, over 70% said yes!

WEBFLOW IS HIRING

Webflow empowers designers to create beautiful, responsive websites—without writing a single line of code, or relying on a developer. Its drag-and-drop interface looks, feels, and works like familiar desktop design tools, and writes clean, semantic code any developer would be proud of.

More jobs at Webflow!

STRAVA IS HIRING

Strava builds software that makes the best part of our athletes’ days even better. And just as we’re deeply committed to unlocking their potential, we’re dedicated to providing a world-class, inclusive workplace where our employees can grow and thrive, too.

More jobs at Strava!

OPENDOOR IS HIRING

Opendoor’s mission is to empower everyone with the freedom to move. We believe the traditional real estate process is broken and our goal is simple: build a seamless, end-to-end customer experience that makes buying and selling a home stress-free and instant through technology. Real estate is broken. Come help us fix it.

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ATLASSIAN IS HIRING

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Slack has transformed business communication. It’s the leading channel-based messaging platform, used by millions to align their teams, unify their systems, and drive their businesses forward. Only Slack offers a secure, enterprise-grade environment that can scale with the largest companies in the world. It is a new layer of the business technology stack where people can work together more effectively, connect all their other software tools and services, and find the information they need to do their best work. Slack is where work happens.

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OPENAI IS HIRING

OpenAI is a research and deployment company whose mission is to ensure that general-purpose artificial general intelligence —by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity. We will attempt to directly build it safely and beneficially, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome.

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UNITED STATES DIGITAL SERVICE (USDS) IS HIRING

United States Digital Service (USDS) is a tech start up at the White House, with a diverse group working across the federal government to build better tools and services for the American people. USDS is looking for candidates with hands-on skills and leadership to improve our Nation’s most critical digital services. You’ll join a team of talented technologists from across the private sector and government to serve time limited tours of service to untangle, rewire and redesign critical government services (e.g. millions of people use Federal Government Services everyday, veterans apply for healthcare, immigrants apply for naturalization).

Apply for USDS here!

CARTA IS HIRING

Carta (formerly eShares) is a software platform for founders, investors, and employees to manage equity and ownership. Carta helps companies and investors manage their cap tables, valuations, portfolio investments, and equity plans. Carta’s mission is to map and expand the global ownership network in order to increase liquidity and transparency between shareholders.

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Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) is an industry leader, creating world-changing technology that enables global progress and enriches lives. Inspired by Moore’s Law, we continuously work to advance the design and manufacturing of semiconductors to help address our customers’ greatest challenges. By embedding intelligence in the cloud, network, edge and every kind of computing device, we unleash the potential of data to transform business and society for the better.

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MAESTROQA IS HIRING

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FISHER INVESTMENTS IS HIRING

Fisher Investments is a different kind of investment firm. We don’t come from Wall Street, nor do we believe we fit in with most of the finance industry, and we’re proud of that. We work for a bigger purpose: bettering the investment universe.

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At Freedom, we believe our people are the key drivers of our market-defining innovation and success. We strive to nurture an inclusive, caring culture that positions everyone to do their best work. We’re deeply committed to providing work that makes a meaningful impact by helping everyday Americans move forward toward a better financial future.

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Think you’ve found your dream job in this list?

We highly recommend watching the video replays from the company’s Girl Geek Dinner or Elevate talks on YouTube to learn more about each organization, get to know some of their women leaders and technologists, and get an inside peek at what it’s like to work there.

We recommend reaching out to one or two speakers from the company directly via LinkedIn, Twitter, or email to strike up a conversation about the role, project or department you’re most interested in.

Remember, making a genuine human connection can help you stand out in a crowded talent market!

Good luck!!

Please let us know if you successfully land a job from this list, we’d love to hear about it!

Email us at hello@girlgeek.io

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“Checkr Coffee Break: Fair Chance Hiring”: Margie Lee-Johnson with Checkr (Video + Transcript)

Transcript of Elevate 2020 Session

Angie Chang: Hey, welcome back. Right now we are having Margie Lee-Johnson, who is the VP of People at Checkr and previously she was a Senior Director of Global People Operations at Twitch. And in this Checkr Coffee Break we will hear from her about today’s hiring landscape and understand that women are the fastest growing population in prisons and uncover potential business impact and increased our life through fair chance hiring. Welcome, Margie.

Margie Lee-Johnson: Thank you. Hopefully everyone can hear me. I’m going to assume that’s a yes. First of all, I wanted to just start by telling you that I am working from home today because of coronavirus. We are now working remotely. And I have a four year old who is at home sick, so if you hear some movement or potentially yelling, that’s her. She’s being her fantastic four year old self.

Margie Lee-Johnson: I have 15 minutes and I have a lot of content. So if you don’t mind I’m going to jump right in. And I’m excited to talk to you about diversifying your work force and increasing your social impact through fair chance hiring.

Margie Lee-Johnson: So a little bit about Checkr. So we are a technology first background checking company. We are headquartered in San Francisco. We have our second headquarters in Denver. And it’s interesting because when you talk about fair chance hiring and that is hiring people that may have had conviction histories or formerly incarcerated, people often wonder why would a background checking company be so interested in this?

Margie Lee-Johnson: And it’s important to know that we’re a mission driven company and as a background checking company we run 1.5 million background checks a month. And we realized that there were a lot of people who were qualified to do work that were being excluded from work because of their conviction history. And when you think about that, it really seems a little bit of counterproductive in terms of what we’re doing. But our goal is to make the right decisions based on the right type of work. And we’re going to talk about that a little bit more.

Margie Lee-Johnson: But our mission at Checkr is that we believe that everyone deserves a fair chance at work and we have become a fair chance employer as well as an advocate. And we specifically look for ways in our product to remove bias from the background checking process.

Margie Lee-Johnson: So when we talk about fair chance, the movement, because there is a movement, and we’ll talk about that in a bit more detail, but when we talk about it, we oftentimes frame it with the journey of civil rights. And I want to just do a quick run through from the 1960s to where we are today, which is actually 2020.

Margie Lee-Johnson: 1960s, we all know about the Civil Rights Movement and the outcome, but we rarely focus on the fact that the Civil Rights Movement was really a fight for equal employment and included a fight for equal employment for people regardless of their race, their ethnicity, their gender, their religion. And we oftentimes romanticize the Civil Rights Movement. We have a tendency to think about the March on Washington, the inspirational, I Have A Dream speech. But in the beginning it was really hard and it was really unpopular. And it started with a small group, a small movement of people, that were really dedicated to making a difference.

Margie Lee-Johnson: And when we think about this population, we eventually came together and acknowledged that our nation was acting against our values and we stood up together for what was right, despite furious opposition. And citizens of the US came together and effectively organized for civil rights for all people, which is really a luxury that we enjoy today and sometimes take for granted today.

Margie Lee-Johnson: When I look at this image, it’s one of my favorites. We actually have a mural in our Checkr office based on one of these pictures of people joining hands during the Civil Rights Movement. I always look at–pick out the white guys because they had really nothing to gain and they risked so much in this movement. I just think it’s a real testament to Americans banding together when we really believe something is fundamentally wrong.

Margie Lee-Johnson: And then we get to the ’64 Civil Rights Act which outlawed and banned discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin, and it was signed into law to give these protections to marginalized groups and give people equal access to work. It was a game changer for employment. And it, for the first time, paved the way for real federal protections for these marginalized groups. And that was only 56 years ago.

Margie Lee-Johnson: We’ve come quite far as a nation and we still have a little bit of work to do, but what’s interesting about the civil rights era and the ’64 Civil Rights Act is it’s basically just how we do business today. Every single employer in the US has an equal opportunity policy and standard practices. They state it when you go and apply for their jobs. And 63% of Gen Zers expect to work at diverse employers. It has fundamentally shifted the way that we think about going to work and how we employ people.

Margie Lee-Johnson: But who did we leave behind? When you think about where we are today, fair chance, which is basically hiring people with conviction histories, it’s a grassroots movement and it’s pretty much unpopular, and it’s about giving people, again, equal access to employment. And when we think about fair chance, think about the fact that these are people that have already paid their debt to society, served their time, and are reentering our communities. And just like in 1964, it’s not popular yet.

Margie Lee-Johnson: And I think about this early days in this movement, we’re really starting to gain momentum and I’m hoping that as we talk about it and encourage other employers to think about it and more and more companies step forward and say, I’m signing up to do this, and we take away the stigma, and we start to make it commonplace.

Margie Lee-Johnson: This is a statistic on formerly incarcerated people, and when we think about fair chance, I don’t necessarily know if we really think about it in the context of the fact that people that were formerly incarcerated and when they re-enter our society, they all have a hard time finding work, but it disproportionately impacts previously incarcerated African-Americans and women.

Margie Lee-Johnson: Women are the fastest growing population in our prisons and when they come back into society after having served their time, Hispanic women, African American women, and white women are disproportionately impacted by unemployment. And it’s a proven fact that the number one cause of recidivism is unemployment. It’s as simple as that.

Margie Lee-Johnson: So when you think about 2019, or 2020, need to update my slides, this is actually a picture of a Checkr employee. We encourage our employees to go on prison visits and there’s a specific program that we partner with called Defy.

Margie Lee-Johnson: And this is one of our Colorado visits, our HQ in Colorado visiting women who are incarcerated going through the Defy program. And it’s an incredible opportunity. We’ve actually hired some folks from the Defy program at Checkr.

Margie Lee-Johnson: So again, this is one of our prison visits, one of our employees at our Defy prison visits in Colorado. And we again have hired some folks from the Defy program. But what’s important to remember, or to know rather, is that one in three Americans have a criminal conviction. That’s 2.3 Americans, I’m sorry, 2.3 million Americans, who are reentering our communities every year have criminal convictions.

Margie Lee-Johnson: So when we think about this population, we have a tendency to feel somewhat distanced by it, but it’s really close and these folks are our friends, our neighbors, or people you may go to church with, siblings, parents, future colleagues. So it’s really important to humanize it and think about this population that is so dramatically impacted by unemployment when they re-enter our communities.

Margie Lee-Johnson: So when I talked about earlier about a lot of companies are starting to make a public statement that they’re fair chance employers. We’re really challenging the status quo. JP Morgan came out about four months ago and made a commitment that 10% of their hires are going to be fair chance. It’s an incredible story.

Margie Lee-Johnson: Slack also has made a commitment to be a fair chance employer. We actually just went to a Bridge Award ceremony, which celebrates innovative employers in the Bay area, and we won the 2019 Bridge Innovative Employer of the Year and just handed off the reins to Slack, both of us for recognition for being fair chance employers.

Margie Lee-Johnson: Also, celebrities are very talkative about it, very energized by it. So John legend and Common and Van Jones actively advocating fair chance employment. And even the White House is engaged with the First Step Act, which is a policy around the movement towards fair chance hiring.

Margie Lee-Johnson: So there’s just a lot of groundswell of employers stepping up and what is very energizing to me as more and more companies come out and publicly state that they’re fair chance employers, I hope other people are less nervous about it and really start to consider it.

Margie Lee-Johnson: When we think about fair chance employers, people have a tendency to think that you’re bringing people in as tokens and that old view on affirmative action, and that’s not really the case at all. What we talk about is lowering the barriers, not the bars. And SHRM reports, which is the Society of Human Resources Management, reports that 82% of managers and 67% of HR professionals who have hired fair chance talent believe that the quality is the same or higher than their workers without records. That’s very much Checkr’s experience as well.

Margie Lee-Johnson: So for Checkr, 6% of our employees are fair chance. We have a 79% retention rate, and 44% of our fair chance employees are promoted. So they have a tendency to stick around a lot longer, and they’re seeing a tremendous amount of success at Checkr, which is so exciting.

Margie Lee-Johnson: One of the things that’s important is when we talk about our diversity statistics as a company, and we’re very open with this, all of this is published on our blog, we include fair chance talent in our diversity statistics. We have a specific hiring goals, diversity hiring goals every year, and it includes fair chance talent. So I’m really proud of our statistics here. But again, if you want our full demographics, I would encourage you to go and download our diversity and belonging ebook.

Margie Lee-Johnson: So what can you do if you’re inspired by this? Become a fair assessor. A fair assessor is, we actually have a class on this, so anyone who’s doing it at their company, background checks with their company, or knows who’s actually making those decisions on what’s meets company standards or not, I would encourage you to ask them to become fair assessors. And that is conducting an individualized assessment with each background check. It’s looking at the nature of the job, the time since the conviction, and the nature of the offense, and it’s giving people really the opportunity to tell their stories and looking at it on the more than face value, but really looking at the details and considering the nature, time, nature test.

Margie Lee-Johnson: Also remove bias from the candidate consideration process. So one of the tools that we use at Checkr, and of course we use our own product, is that we look at our jobs and we say, hey, we don’t have any people that drive on behalf of the company, so we don’t worry about people with DUI convictions, as an example. So we have the ability to say, don’t even show me the records or report that there is a record that needs to be considered if it meets these criteria, because as a company, that’s not the type of work that we do and that’s not something we want to be concerned about.

Margie Lee-Johnson: But there are different areas like, hey, we have a lot of people data and so if someone happens to have a conviction of any type of forgery or identity theft, those are things we absolutely want to take a very close look at. And then fair chance talent, again, should be part of your diversity metrics. We feel very strongly that companies should look at what they’re doing on this particular front and maybe they’re, without even recognizing it, their policies or their practices are disproportionately impacting this population. If you’re looking at it, then you’re aware of it.

Margie Lee-Johnson: Also, talk to community partners, talk to other companies that are practicing, that are fair chance employers, and these are the programs that we work with, Defy Ventures, I mentioned earlier, runs programs within prisons. CEO is a great nationwide community partner that we engage with. The Second Chance Center, all of these folks, all of these organizations, work with folks that are formerly incarcerated or may have been justice-impacted to help them build their skills to go into the work environment. And they really don’t have a tremendous amount of employers that are keenly interested in doing this work.

Margie Lee-Johnson: So I would encourage you to get engaged and see if it’s something that your company would really like to be interested in. And of course we’re always available if anyone who would like to chat with us, we will share with you what our practices are, what’s worked, a lot of our learnings through the journey.

Margie Lee-Johnson: So I know that was super fast, but I had 10 minutes. My apologies for my slide issues, but if anyone has any questions, I’d love to answer them.

Angie Chang: So we do have some questions and I think we have time for just one. Do you think there are sufficient programs to help the currently incarcerated population gain both technical and soft skills to help them once they finish their sentence?

Margie Lee-Johnson: Say that slowly, one more time please. That’s got a lot packed in it.

Angie Chang: Yeah. Do you think there are sufficient programs to help the currently incarcerated population gain both tech and soft skills to help them once they finish their sentence?

Margie Lee-Johnson: The answer to that is there’s not enough, and it varies pretty dramatically. So The Last Mile is a organization that’s headquartered [crosstalk 00:15:17].

Angie Chang: I can see you.

Margie Lee-Johnson: Thank you, I got the video up. See, tenacity. Is headquartered in the Bay area and they have a program that they run in San Quentin to help folks that are incarcerated learn how to code. And we actually hired a gentleman, and I would encourage all of you, he’s been very vocal about his story, so if you ever do any Google searches on Checkr and fair chance it will likely come up. The prison he was in in California didn’t actually have computers, so he went through The Last Mile Program and he learned to code with pen and paper, and he was in a medium security prison and he asked to be transferred to San Quintin, a maximum security prison, because he wanted to actually code on a computer and that’s amazing to me.

Margie Lee-Johnson: And he was transferred. And for the first time he got to code on a computer and he’s a software engineer. He’s fantastic. And we hired him. He was released from San Quentin, went and worked for The Last Mile, did a lot of work with them, came on with us as an intern and we’ve hired him and he’s just amazing.

Margie Lee-Johnson: But there’s not enough of those programs. And to actually go through a program that’s teaching you how to code and to learn to do it on pen and paper is just beyond my comprehension. So there are programs. There aren’t enough. They’re really tough for people to get into.

Margie Lee-Johnson: When I was on a prison visit in Colorado, it was a level five, so their most maximum security prison in Colorado. There was a gentleman who had already been incarcerated for 30 years and the Defy Program was the first program he was able to get into. He had an incredibly long sentence and they prioritize the limited number of slots, understandably, based on your release date, and for 30 years he wasn’t able to get any education beyond just what he checked out of the library.

Margie Lee-Johnson: So there aren’t enough. There’s a tremendous amount of interest from these folks, and whatever we can do, please make donations to The Last Mile, make donations to Defy, because their limitation is not interest, it’s really funding, because they’re all privately funded.

Angie Chang: Okay, thank you for that. So, we’re going to be wrapping up this Coffee Break. Thank you so much,, Margie for your talk and thank you for joining us today. We are going to take a five minute break now and then we’ll be back with our next speaker.

Margie Lee-Johnson: Thanks everyone.

Angie Chang: Thank you.