Meet & greet in the Mentorship Lounge with virtual ELEVATE MENTORS in engineering, product, no-code / operations, career development / upskilling, AI & more – discussing career stuff, interviewing, promotions, resumes, & more! Mentors are here to answer your questions!

See who’s coming & the table topics / expertise!

Playing off the theme of her popular ROAR podcast, Lakecia Gunter (Chief Technology Officer, Global Partner Solutions at Microsoft) will share the advice she’s found most impactful throughout her career — including the networking strategy that helped her land nearly every role she’s ever held.

She’ll walk us through how she overcomes imposter syndrome, how her team once stopped her from self-selecting out of a key opportunity, why and how you should build your own team, and the importance of reflection and codifying lessons learned so you can grow from your experiences.

Why does the race of psychological safety matter at work? In this ELEVATE session, Agatha Agbanobi (Founder of Relevé) shares the psychological safety challenges experienced by racialized individuals in the workplace. Attendees will learn to identify 1-2 popular teachings of psychological safety that undermine the experience of racialized individuals, a crucial equity principle supporting differentiated solution design for psychological safety, and acquire skills for cultivating psychological safety through an anti-oppressive lens.

Unlock the secrets and pass your next systems design interview with flying colors. In this ELEVATE session, Sophie Novati (CEO & Founder at Formation) will identify the key scaling bottlenecks that is unique to each specific prompt. She will talk about using product requirements to justify design decisions, and explain tradeoffs between decisions, but be opinionated about recommendations. You won’t want to miss this talk if you are thinking about or current preparing for technical job interviews!

Applying to jobs is a numbers game. If you play the numbers game, you are likely to win. In this ELEVATE session, Tal Flanchraych (CEO & Founder of ApplyAll) lays out the statistics about job applications. Her bulk-apply AI applies you to hundreds of relevant jobs to supercharge your job search, whether you’re looking to work at a startup or big tech company.

A technical project lead is in the unique position to scope projects for making progress against technology investments and technical debt, as well as increasing the effectiveness of every developer on the team. In this ELEVATE session, Dominique Simoneau-Ritchie (Chief Technology Officer at Affinity) will share proven techniques to set up projects in such a way that everyone on your team ships with high confidence and quality. She will talk about establishing the automated testing frameworks, data, and examples required to make it mandatory to add automated tests as part of every code change. She will also talk about how to ensure all developers have quick feedback loops to implement and test their changes, and prioritize technical debt and defects that will cause slow downs and problems later. To make progress against your engineering goals, ensure projects are built according to areas you’re investing in (e.g. converting code to TypeScript, adopting React and GraphQL, leveraging new frameworks, etc.)

Are you ready to take charge of your career and elevate your professional journey? In this ELEVATE session, Liliya Sabitova (TikTok) introduces a framework for strategic personal growth. She will share her three key components: personal skill assessment, understanding market needs in your profession, and creating a tailored action plan. Attendees will discover how this framework can propel your career by aligning your skills with market demands and crafting a strategic roadmap for success. She is attending ELEVATE in a personal capacity and not speaking on behalf of the company.

As companies’ UX offerings mature, so too do the capabilities, offerings and value it can bring to the product team. In this ELEVATE session, Duaa Gettani (Senior UX Researcher at Square) explores the approach to building out the UX function at Square banking, demonstrating how to take control over the growth and interaction between other disciplines that ensures you maintain control over the process, build a better understanding and ultimately get the best outcome for all.

What is data visualization, and what types of jobs are available? In this ELEVATE session, Michelle Maraj (Senior Business Intelligence Manager at Gigpro) will share her career path in data viz, and how she became a Tableau developer. She will talk about how to build a data viz portfolio and get your own internship / job.

No one is immune to layoffs, so here’s advice from a jobseeker who recently found a job in this economy. In this ELEVATE session, Olivia Ouyang (Product Designer at Finix) will share her 5-step design process for crafting a job search plan tailored to your individual skills and aspirations. Attendees will learn how to recognize the transferable skills acquired from previous experiences and match with the current market needs like the AI trends, and how to fight back imposter syndrome and burnouts during the job searching process.

What is universal design is and how to apply it in a design process? In this ELEVATE session, Celeste Bean (Senior Hardware Engineer at Sony Interactive Entertainment – PlayStation) will recognize the  importance of hardware accessibility, using gaming controllers as a case study. Attendees will learn multimodal inputs / outputs and frameworks for implementing hardware accessibility.

With the prevalence of specialized tools tailored to security monitoring and posture checking, there is an opportunity for organizations to automate the risk registry feeds and reporting structure. In this ELEVATE session, Nas Hajia (Security Architect at Autodesk) will review some of the commonly seen pitfalls and review options to avoid them. She will share lessons learned in the realms of People, Process, Technology, and Data that are shared between organizations.

This former Google product manager for Google Shopping now runs her own social shopping startup. In this ELEVATE session, Anna Fuller (CEO & Founder at Halo) will speak about when is the right time to make the leap and leave your job. She will talk about going from idea to execution, from how to navigate the idea maze, to validating your idea by talking to customers and testing an early prototype and minimum viable product launch. Attendees will leave with tactical tips for setting up a company.

Have you ever wondered how AI is transforming the intersection of consumer and enterprise? In this ELEVATE session, Savita Kini (Director of Product Management, Speech & Video AI at Cisco) will talk about where is AI intersecting with the enterprise consumer. She will discuss how to navigate the consumer and enterprise product domains, as well as responsible AI in the enterprise domain, with lessons learned from consumer domain.

Have you wondered how to scale effective product leadership? In this ELEVATE session, Stephanie J. Neill (Vice President, Product, Twitch at Amazon) will discuss how a high-performance product team is crucial to shipping the right product at the right time. From evolving responsibilities and onboarding new team members, attendees will learn how product leaders can build teams with big impact, and what it takes to do the same at your organization.

Feeling nervous about your product interviews? Prepping for execution and metrics questions? In this ELEVATE session, Tanvi Shah (Principal Product Manager at Upwork) will share why metrics are important, and how to find North Star metrics. Attendees will be able to practice answering questions around North Star Metrics after attending this can’t miss session!

Why is cultural change essential for a digital transformation? In her ELEVATE session, Anusha Dharmalingam (Executive Director and Senior Architect at Athenahealth) will discuss how cultural change is essential for digital transformation. She shares the importance of culture of a company when it goes through digital transformation, what “being innovative” means. She will reveal her ideas on how to build effective teams excited about transformation journey.

Do you believe in redefining technical project management for the digital age? In this ELEVATE session, Shayla Gibson (Technical Services Operations Manager at Treasury Prime) will talk about the various tools for technical project management, and discuss how to invest in the technical and the people skills. Attendees will learn how to prepare for the unexpected.

In this ELEVATE session, Danielle Good (Channel Account Manager at Thales) will discuss her career pathway from an opera singer to cybersecurity sales, the skills and principles she learned in the arts that she applies to technology, and the words of wisdom she learned from Anthony Hopkins and Julie Andrews.

In this ELEVATE session, Hana Rasheed (Senior Engineering Program Manager, Office of CIO, Cloud and Software Optimization at Adobe) will encourages attendees to craft their professional impact. She makes her case for planning your 30-60 second elevator pitch to make an impression, such as impactful data and numbers.

Eulogy writing is a mechanism to reshape your life, define your own path, and live your fullest life. In this ELEVATE session, Eileen Grimes (Founder of Loved As You Are) shares her inspiring story. She will empower attendees with reflection prompts for those looking to build trust in themselves and dig in to living their fullest lives. She uses activities for how to move forward after introspection so as to move past the “stuck”

How will you engineer your impact as a mid-to-senior engineering leader? In this ELEVATE Sesssion, Sumita Palanisamy (Director of Engineering at CarGurus) will impart her three keys for making an impact as a director. She will discuss the relationship hero, and make the case for being an objective player, and rethinking your organization. Attendees will be sure to get inspired and find their chart their own impact and path.

Meet & greet in the Mentorship Lounge with virtual ELEVATE MENTORS in engineering, product, no-code / operations, career development / upskilling, design / UX, data science / AI / ML / LLMs & more – discussing career stuff, interviewing, promotions, resumes, & more! Mentors are here to answer your questions!

See who’s coming & the table topics / expertise!

Stop by the Fluid Lounge for another way to mingle with attendees.