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Episode 16: Software Security

Transcript:

Angie Chang: Welcome to Girl Geek X Podcast, connecting you with insight from women in tech. This is Angie, founder of Girl Geek X and Women 2.0.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: This is Sukrutha, by day I’m an engineering manager.

Gretchen DeKnikker: This is Gretchen and I’ve been working in tech for over 20 years.

Rachel Jones: This is Rachel, the producer of this podcast, and we’re the team behind Girl Geek X. This podcast brings you the best of Girl Geek X events, dinners, and conferences; where we’ve been elevating women in tech for over 10 years.

Angie Chang: And today we’ll be discussing software security.

Rachel Jones: So this is a lot more technical than our general, more career advice episodes. Why is this still relevant to our audience?

Angie Chang: We noticed in the news that there was a huge hack exposed, with Capital One being hacked with 100 million, I think, identities stolen. So it’s definitely always made the news that these types of data breaches are happening consistently and it’s always a software problem at the end of the day or potentially a human problem, but definitely always in the news.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yeah, real lives are on the line and we’re paying for everything that we do. Whether it’s a car service or it’s a delivery of groceries, we have all of that, all our credit card details and our bank account details all set up. So it’s even more important for our information to stay secure and it’s just one click. It’s very easy for us to have all of our information stolen and replicated.

Gretchen DeKnikker: I think from a company standpoint, there’s this idea of, particularly when you’re an early stage startup, that there’s, you’re sort of trading off things and you know, things aren’t as secure as they should be and those are generally known things. But I think why this topic is interesting to dive in deeper is that this happens to much bigger companies, too. And there are kind of known vulnerabilities or things and patterns that are repeated from company to company that sort of leave them wide open for something like this to happen.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yeah. And generally we tend to forget about making our software secure when we need to be doing that from the first design of it. It’s so easy to go in and gain access of one’s database and just like you said, Gretchen, it’s been happening. There’s a lot of stories of it happening to bigger companies where they hold more data, and those are the ones that are usually under attack because there’s more that you get for the energy, for the effort of hacking into the database of whatever company is easy.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Yeah, and I think there’s a common saying, at least among founders, of well, if your company hasn’t been hacked into, it’s just because you’re not important enough yet, and not because you don’t have vulnerabilities.

Angie Chang: We hear at Girl Geek dinners from security engineers and companies with a security mindset that building with a security first mindset is really important and I really enjoy hearing, at various Girl Geek dinners, people talk about security issues.

Gretchen DeKnikker: It is always one of our top topics too. People get really excited to show up for this content too.

Rachel Jones: I think it is really exciting getting to see the back end of this because, yeah, as a consumer, it feels kind of mysterious. The ways that your information is vulnerable and seeing all these stories come out in the news. Getting an understanding of what these attacks look like and how, what approaches companies are taking to protect against this… Having that kind of information that isn’t always included in these stories. It’s definitely interesting to know.

Angie Chang: Angie Song is a staff software engineer on the sync team at Okta. Here’s what she said at the Okta Girl Geek dinner.

Angie Song: At Okta, we always ask questions about security in the beginning stages of development because… And this is because it is much more difficult to retrofit security into an existing system. A great example of this is actually the internet. In the early days of the internet, the only people who had access to internet were researchers from trusted organizations like government organizations or universities. Because of this, a lot of the networking protocols that were designed during this era were built on the assumption that everyone on the internet was trustworthy and cooperative. Now that we have 4 billion users on the internet, we are now suffering from the consequences of this early naivety. This is exactly why Okta is pushing zero trust. But it doesn’t matter how secure your system is, if your users are not using it or, even worse, if they’re using it improperly. So let’s say your company decides to be secure and they decide to start using Okta, but at the same time they also decide to implement this password policy.

Angie Song: Your password needs to be a automatically generated 17 character-long password that would upper case, lower case, all the numbers and hyphen and everything, and it needs to be changed every month. What is going to happen is people are going to start writing down their passwords on Post-It Notes and then start sticking it out on their monitors because they can’t remember it. So human factors matter and security systems must be usable by non-technical ordinary people because it will be used by ordinary people. An average person is not going to remember a 17-character long password with upper case, lower case, numbers, hyphens, everything that changes every month. So when you’re building a security system, you have to make sure that you have to take into account the roles the humans will play when they are interacting with your secure system.

Angie Chang: That was a hilarious talk. You can check it out at our YouTube channel at youtube.com/girlgeekX. So look for the Okta Girl Geek dinner talk and find the Angie Song segment. But she said some good things about enforcing least privilege, which is the really excellent way of thinking about it. I really like using my One Password manager to have those incredibly long 17 characters alpha-numeric passwords for ultimate protection, but at the same time, you have a lot of normal people who don’t use One Password, or say your parents forgetting their iTunes password, and you need to figure out as the designer of that system, what’s the trade offs for having, requiring such long passwords or not?

Gretchen DeKnikker: I mean, I think designing security is like product design, right? You have to think about what the human’s going to do and the human isn’t going–frequently going to do the rational thing, right? They’re going to do the easiest thing. So I mean I think her point is that you need to make it as easy as possible for them to do something secure. Right. Which I think is why you use One Password. I use One Password, also. I finally became a convert when I got locked out of like trying to pay my mortgage for like the 10th month in a row and I had to call them every month to get unlocked because they just had some crazy password I couldn’t remember and I’m not one to write it down on a Post-It, but it did after like so many months of friction. It finally did draw me to One Password.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: So I think like when you were starting software design, it should be just as important when you’re learning how to program and design systems that you should be like a compulsory part of that or a prereq to call that program complete is to be exposed to security and design. So I really like her and she talks about implementing it from the get go and like she says, it is definitely very, very hard to go back and you know, update your product to be more secure later because there’s just so many different things that you could miss along the way. So you want to probably like weave it into the design.

Angie Chang: I remember you started as a software engineer in test and then you did a lot of like testing.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yeah, so I did a lot of security in addition to writing test frameworks and such. I did a lot of–what I got exposed to was performance testing and security testing as well. So that’s why it was important to be involved from the early start, early stages of the architecture and design.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Senior software security engineer, Nicole Grinstead shared how Netflix approaches security during our 2018 Elevate conference.

Nicole Grinstead: The first thing we do is we enhance our data and make sure that we have everything that tells the full story about what user action, what action a user has taken. So then we start to take those actions and model what their normal behavior is like. So just to give you kind of an example of a few of the things that we think are interesting. If you think about what a user typically does, their agent is a really common thing that you can see in a log where you know, we can tell what kind of machine they’re coming in from and that usually doesn’t differ. You know, sometimes people get new machines, sometimes they upgrade their browsers, like we have some logic to kind of dampen those kind of upgrades or things like that. But if all of a sudden that changes, it might be a signal or an interesting thing to look at.

Nicole Grinstead: So, as you can imagine then just generating anomalies and figuring out where things are different doesn’t necessarily give us a full picture of when something is malicious or if something might be going wrong. So that’s where the next step is on top of these kind of raw anomalies that we’re generating. We apply some business logic to be a little bit smarter about what, what we think is important to investigate. Because just seeing raw anomalies it could be interesting, but it also can be a little bit noisy because as you can imagine, people do deviate from their normal behaviors sometimes. So this is then kind of the step where we try to figure out is that actually risky to our business if this action is occurring.

Nicole Grinstead: So you think about accessing really sensitive financial data. That’s something that’s higher risk than maybe accessing our lunch menus. If I never access lunch menus for Netflix and then all of a sudden I do, well, yes that was anomalous, but does the security team care if somebody’s looking at lunch menus? No, we don’t care. There’s no sensitive data to be gleaned there and it’s not something that we want to spend our resources investigating. So that’s one aspect. We also kind of look at what type of user it is and if it’s a certain type of user they might be a little more or less risky. And so these are the types of things that we apply after the fact to kind of weed out the noise a little bit and see what are the really high risk things that we should be focusing on and looking at. Then that final step is where we get information from outside of just our anomaly generation and tie that up with other interesting data sources.

Nicole Grinstead: So if we’re looking at, not just that interesting event, but then events around that. What does the user typically do? What kind of applications do they log into right before? What types of applications did they log into right after? That type of thing. Also, you know, what organization they’re in, what type of job they do. So any other extra information, that extra data that we can use to kind of enhance that and tell the whole picture of who this user is, what they typically do and why this was a weird behavior and if it’s risky.

Rachel Jones: So we basically just got a Netflix play by play of threat detection. Is there anything that stood out to you all?

Sukrutha Bhadouria: In 2018, a lot of companies had to make a lot of changes in how they design their systems and how they logged the user actions and user information simply because when the GDPR regulation was enforced it was meant to be for the European Unions, individual citizens, but it also had enforcement around how that personal data was transferred outside of the European Union. And so what Nicole talks about is a bit about logging customer behavior and you know, being able to see details like what machine they’re coming from and such, which usually is–was originally meant to sort of track usage and be able to troubleshoot when customers have issues.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: But what software designers didn’t think of along the way is that how much information is okay to log? And so there was a lot of like rushing to the finish line, sort of scrambling situation was going on to adhere to the rules of the European Union at that point. So that whole reaction to it really that spoke to how security does end up becoming an afterthought. And so when Nicole talks about how they do it at Netflix, it’s really interesting to see how they’re trying to weave it into their process. But you know, you will always, if you don’t keep a constant eye on it, you’re always going to find something that slipped through the cracks. And so it’s really important to have regulations like these to protect people and their data.

Gretchen DeKnikker: You know, a tangential topic to this is we’ve been pulling all of this data for so many years and I think there’s a lot of questions coming up now around like, do we even need that? We just do it because we can, right? Thinking about like something going–it started off like send a bug report to Microsoft, like after it crashed or something, right? Or even within Apple apps, but now it’s become, when you look at something like OAuth and how much information that pulls, and how unaware people are of what they’re giving up just so that they don’t have to remember a user ID and password, right?

Angie Chang: And it’s true that it is unfortunate over time that our trust has eroded in these big tech companies, but even like Apple and Google are like, wait, do they even, should we give, are making them, are they really doing something useful? They need it. Maybe we need our own GDPR here in the United States.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yeah. I know a lot of people who unplugged their voice assistance systems that they have at home because they feel so uncomfortable about the fact that it’s constantly listening and just waiting for those wake up words to actually respond. In other words, they’re constantly listening. So it’s almost like the more we learn about the data that that is being collected and stored, while it does make life a lot easier, it does get more scary and dangerous.

Rachel Jones: I think that’s interesting, thinking about also who these security measures serve and who this data collection serves. ‘Cause this quote from Nicole, it’s really about how Netflix protects themselves. It’s interesting how much data they collect on their users in order to protect their own system. But how does having all of that user data actually put the users at risk?

Gretchen DeKnikker: Yeah, I think that perfectly summarizes, sort of, the issue that we’re kind of looking at right now of do we actually need to get all of this information? Are we just getting it because we can? And then at what point does this become… When you’re not using it to improve the product, then what are you going to use it for? And I mean, and the answer of a lot of these, it’s to sell more ads, right? So that shouldn’t be a surprise that they’re a company and they’re putting their economic interest ahead of an individual, right? That’s the part that I’m not sure how people get surprised about.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Oh, when I was traveling last year, I noticed that every time I had to pay for the service, they would ask me for my phone number and it occurred to me midway through, I’m like, why do you need my phone number? And then they said, Oh, it’s just about a process that don’t mean that I should ask it every season. Why do you need this information from me?

Sukrutha Bhadouria: And like, a lot of times we just wanna connect to that lock down wifi so we can get stuff done or you know, look up the next place we want to go to. And they ask us some information that we don’t need to share. Just like you said, Gretchen. And I think is just like how much information can we gather just cause we can and we’re not–we aren’t also questioning it as consumers when we should.

Rachel Jones: We aren’t always able to question as consumers what’s being collected. Like even everything that Nicole references Netflix collecting, these are not things that we like click a button knowingly to opt into. It’s stuff that they just automatically know. So do we just have to like read every fine print piece of terms agreement with a magnifying glass to be able to protect ourselves or, yeah, where can we expect to be able to do?

Gretchen DeKnikker: I think the practical thing is to think about what data would this company collect on me, right? And then keeping an eye out for things that sort of go past that. Like if you’re doing a Facebook OAuth to save time, you are absolutely 100% giving away like a tremendous amount of information that they don’t need. Whoever it is, they don’t need it. So it’s a little of understanding how those things work. Like OAuth in with Twitter. Like they know practically nothing about you, right? If you have a choice or just don’t. Like use One Password and have an email account like that sort of stuff where you’re really… Where people get like really upset about it. You gave it away. So I think you know, where we started was talking about how we as individuals have a responsibility to be a little bit less human maybe. This last quote that we have coming up is awesome because she’s talking about security within your QA environment, which I think is probably a huge vulnerability for a lot of companies. So at our dinner with Palo Alto Networks, Meghana Dwarakanath spoke about her solution to this common vulnerability.

Meghana Dwarakanath: When it comes to production environments, we are very thoughtful about protecting them and we should be, because it has our customer data, it has our reputations, and it needs the protection. By the time we come to our QA environment it kind of tapers a bit. Right? Why? Because you’re thinking it’s QA, we don’t have customer data in there. Hopefully. And you know, it’s an afterthought, we really don’t think about it. But if you really think about the challenges we have and the kind of products we are testing today, we need to think about why we need to secure QA environments. Because when somebody gets to your QA environment, there are a lot more things they can get out of it apart from customer data. For example, they can get an insight into your system internals. They can figure out how your systems and services are talking to each other and you’re literally helping them make a blueprint to attack your production environment.

Meghana Dwarakanath: You have proprietary code, of course, that is running in your QA and staging environments and so there’s a potential loss of intellectual property there. This is just your test environment. What is the other aspect of testing? Test automation, right, and now anybody who is testing the SaaS service will tell you they test against production. Every time you release, you want to make sure that your production is doing okay. All the features are doing okay. So what do you do? You run your test automation against production, which means your test automation now has credentials that can access your production environment. You probably have privileged access because you want to see better what you’re testing and now you’re co-located next to customer data. Which is a very–potentially, a very unsafe mix. So how do you do the security? One of the ways we have been able to do this successfully here is to consider test as yet another microservice that is running in your production.

Meghana Dwarakanath: So all those production microservices that you deploy. Test is just another one of them. How do you microservices store credentials? That is exactly how your test automation will store credentials, the same SDLC process that Citlalli talked about where security is not an afterthought. The same thing applies to your test automation code as well. You are deploying monitoring for your test automation services just like you would do for your production services. And then whatever deployment automation you have, your IS automation code, you first test deployment into the same very architecture and now you have all the added protections that your production microservices are getting.

Gretchen DeKnikker: I’m sure there’s a lot more controls in a larger company, but in a smaller company, this is like 100% of vulnerability that most people aren’t even thinking about it. It’s one of those ones that goes a little off the rails when a company starts scaling and there are these things that haven’t been… Systems that haven’t been put in place to prevent that sort of thing, but, you know, having… like she was talking about a blueprint for your backend system too. It seems like a really good entry point in thinking about it at the developer level of you’ve got these guys here and they’re building things and they’re taking bits and pieces of code. Like whenever you create a friction point for a developer, they’re going to create a work around to make their job easier. And so making sure that the security that’s built into your QA isn’t making friction that they are going to work around.

Rachel Jones: I think it’s an interesting example of the kind of blind spots that can exist with security. There are so many vulnerabilities that you have no idea that you’re opening yourself up to even through all of these different stages of the process. Cause I know we talked about folding in security during development, but yeah, once you think that stuff is done and you’re just testing it and getting it ready to go, yes. Why would you even think about security as much at that point? How do you prepare for these kind of blind spots?

Angie Chang: I guess that’s why companies like Palo Alto Networks exist. To be a leading provider of security.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yeah, and it’s definitely a really important point to not save your customer information. Even when you’re trying to test your system, you don’t want to save that information to replicate your vulnerabilities to test them out. You want to do it with customer-like data. So that was really important to call out as well.

Angie Chang: Yeah, that’ll be super embarrassing if you got an email later, like we’re sorry we just sent you that by accident because we were doing some testing with your data.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yeah.

Rachel Jones: Does anyone have final thoughts on this topic of security?

Gretchen DeKnikker: Think about humans and humans will find the fastest path to anything, whether it’s in their own best interest or not.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Well, we think about security throughout your development life cycle. It gets harder if you don’t pay attention at the start to make adjustments along the way.

Angie Chang: At the Palo Alto Networks Girl Geek dinner, we learned about having a security first mindset versus security as an afterthought.

Rachel Jones: Anything else to say about that? I can’t just pop that in.

Angie Chang: So if this is interesting to you, you can check out Women in Security and Privacy, which is a 501C3 group helping people get into the field of security engineering. OWASP also has a lot of knowledge and a top 10 list and you can also check out conferences like the Diana Initiative.

Rachel Jones: I think it’s challenging and also really exciting to get to do an episode like this, that advice and more specific women talking about the cool stuff that they’re doing at their companies. But I think that’s so much of what happens at these dinners is just women sharing. Like this is what I’m doing and it’s cool and here’s why. So yeah, being able to put that on the podcast, even if it’s not as universally relevant of a topic as like mentorship, I think. Yes, it still really highlights just what’s great about Girl Geek.

Angie Chang: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Girl Geek X podcast. We’ll be back soon with more advice from women in tech.

Rachel Jones: This podcast is produced by me, Rachel Jones, with event recording by Eric Brown and music by Diana Chow. To learn more about Girl Geek X or buy tickets to one of our dinners, visit girlgeek.io, where you can also find full transcripts and videos from all our events.

Angie Chang: This podcast was sponsored by Okta, the leading independent provider of identity for the enterprise. The Okta Identity Cloud enables organizations to both secure and manage their extended enterprise and transform their customers [inaudible 00:28:52] This podcast is also sponsored by Netflix. Netflix has been leading the way for digital content since 1997 and is the world’s leading internet entertainment service. This podcast is also sponsored by Palo Alto Networks, a global cyber security leader known for always challenging the status quo insecurity.

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Girl Geek X LiveRamp Lightning Talks (Video + Transcript)

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Akshaya Aradhya, Angie Chang speaking

Angie Chang, founder of Girl Geek X, welcomes sold-out crowd to LiveRamp Girl Geek Dinner in San Francisco, California.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Transcript of LiveRamp Girl Geek Dinner – Lightning Talks:

Angie Chang: Thank you for coming out to the Girl Geek X Dinner at LiveRamp. My name is Angie Chang. I’m the founder of Girl Geek X. We’ve been hosting dinners like this for 10 years up and down San Francisco, San Jose. And I’m really excited to be here tonight to hear from these amazing women and to meet each other over dinner, drinks, and conversation.

Gretchen DeKnikker: So, we also have a podcast, if you guys want to check it out. Check it out, read it, give us feedback. Let us know, we have mentorship, intersectionality, finding career transitions, all of these things. So, definitely go and check it out. And this is Sukrutha.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hi, that was Gretchen. She didn’t introduce herself. Yeah, so we started off with dinners, we talked about podcast, and then we made it happen. In the meantime, we started to do virtual conferences, which we’ve had now one every year in the last two years. And fun fact, we now have what is…a Zazzle store with our amazing branded, cool swag, I don’t fit into the T-shirt that I ordered.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: But you could get tote bags, you could get cell phone covers, so it’s really cute. Or somewhere in the back, maybe, you’ll see what our pixie characters look like that up. But if you go to the invite for tonight, you’ll see these little characters that we have represented and we try to be as inclusive as well possible. So, all of our branding is very inclusive. Please share on social media, everything that you hear tonight from our amazing speakers. Use the hashtag Girl Geek X LiveRamp. And we will follow you and retweet and re share, so thank you so much for coming and thank you to LiveRamp.

Allison Metcalf speaking

GM of TV Allison Metcalf gives a talk on how LiveRamp got into the TV game at LiiveRamp Girl Geek Dinner.   Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Allison Metcalfe: Hi guys, I get to go first. So my name is Allison Metcalfe. I am the GM of LiveRamp’s TV business. So just for context, what that means, LiveRamp, a couple years ago, we moved away from functional leadership 100%, where I was actually previously the VP of Customer Success. I’ve been here almost six years. I started customer success, I was patient zero A long time ago, and I will never do that again.

Allison Metcalfe: So a couple years ago–LiveRamp has historically been really, we really focus on the digital ecosystem and the cookie ecosystem. And there’s been a lot of changes in the industry that suddenly made TV a very, very compelling opportunity. And so, we launched a TV business that I run. And so, what I’m going to talk to you about now is kind of why we’re in this business and what the opportunity is and why it’s super cool. It’s really fun to be working in TV right now. And hopefully, we’ll get a couple converters from it.

Allison Metcalfe: So, TV is so crazy. Nothing has changed in the world of television in terms of how it was bought, measured, I need a timer here, sorry, in 70 years. So, literally like the way people measured TV and bought TV and demonstrated the success of TV up until a couple years ago was the same as it was 70 years ago, which is a little bit insane.

Allison Metcalfe: As you probably know, you think about yourselves, you are not watching Seinfeld at seven o’clock on NBC anymore. It’s not appointment viewing anymore, you’re streaming it, you’re watching TV really whenever and wherever you want, every single screen that you have, is a TV today, which is really great for us as consumers. Like TV has become very, very consumer friendly. But it’s caused a lot of problems for the industry.

Allison Metcalfe: So number one, is the way we’re measuring it, ratings is really hard to track now, right. Nielsen is the incumbent measure that would say this is how many people watched Seinfeld last night. They were able to do that because of a pretty archaic panel that they had and pretty archaic methodology. But it was accepted. And it worked for a long time. But now, the network–so it’s like NBC is, they’re putting all their money on This Is Us, right? And Nielsen is saying, “This is how many people watched This Is Us last night.” And NBC doesn’t believe them. Because they’re like, “What about all the people that watched it on video on demand? And what about the people that watched it on Hulu and Roku and all these other places where they could be streaming that versus just on appointment viewing, linear television?”

Allison Metcalfe: So, the audience fragmentation is making the networks feel like they are not getting enough credit for the viewership that they are actually driving that translate to they are losing money. And they don’t like that, right. The device fragmentation is also causing problems for brands, because the brands, all they want to do is reach you, right? If they are trying to reach young parents who are in the market for a minivan, they don’t really care where you are. They just want to make sure they’re reaching you.

Allison Metcalfe: TV used to be the easiest way to get phenomenal reach within one buy, right, because everybody was watching Seinfeld at seven o’clock and we knew who they were. Now, we’re all over the place, this creates a big problem. If you’re a brand. You’re like, “Oh my gosh, how much money do I spend on Hulu versus Roku? How much do I put on linear television? How much do I, what other devices,” there’s so many I can’t even think of them all. So, it’s a really big problem for the industry. But it’s good, right? Because change is good. And again, it’s very consumer friendly.

Allison Metcalfe: So what we call advanced TV, is the process of anytime we are using data and automation to buy and sell TV, which again, really was not done before, that sits under the umbrella of advanced TV. This is a roughly $80 billion industry–that’s the TAM in the United States. Historically, for LiveRamp, we made zero dollars from the television industry up until about two years ago.

Allison Metcalfe: So it was a whole new TAM for us, which is very, very exciting. Of that $80 billion that used to be bought and sold in the traditional way up until advanced TV came, now, we’re seeing projections of $3 billion being spent in addressable, which I will explain, close to 8 billion in OTT which is anytime you are watching television, due to your internet connection. It doesn’t matter if it’s on your phone, or your computer or your Smart TV. But if you’re watching it, because of the Internet, and not because of your set top box, right, that’s OTT.

Allison Metcalfe: And then, we’re also seeing a lot of companies like a really interesting trend is a lot of the direct to consumer. Companies like Stitch Fix or Peloton that are 100% digital companies are starting to spend a lot of dollars on television as more advanced strategies are becoming available to them. The other thing that’s happening here, guys, it’s really, really important. Facebook and Google are coming after TV hard, right. They’re like, “We want to keep growing at the rate we’re growing. But we already have like 80 or 90% of the entire digital ecosystem. So how do we keep growing, we’re going to steal money from TV, that’s what we need to do. And we’re going to do that by saying we have all the eyeballs that TV has anyways.”

Allison Metcalfe: And so, that’s another reason that the industry has to change to combat, Facebook and Google. And I think the demise of television is very overblown, as you can see by these numbers here. So, we power the future of advanced TV, when we talk about advanced TV, we’re talking about all of these things. So, addressable TV is literally the idea that you are getting a different ad, than your neighbor, right, Rachel here is big camper, I am not. You shouldn’t waste your dollars showing me commercials for camping equipment, but you should show it to Rachel. So addressable TV is meaning Rachel’s going to get the camping commercial, I’m not, based on my set top box, we power that.

Allison Metcalfe: Data driven linear TV is the idea of, if you have a target audience of say young families in the market for a minivan, we will match that against a viewership data asset so that the buyer can understand that young families in a market for minivans are over indexing to This Is Us and what’s another TV show? Modern Family, and they’re really not watching The Voice, or whatever it may be. So you’re still buying TV in the traditional way, you’re not targeting a household, you are still buying based on content, but you’re buying that content, because you are much more data informed.

Allison Metcalfe: I talked about OTT, digital video, this is clips, this is, Jimmy Kimmel had a great show last night, and there’s a clip of him and his funny joke and we might want to see, you’re all being forced to watch an ad. Before you can see that clip, as you probably all know. And then, probably the most important exciting thing is measurement. So historically, the way TV has been measured has been brand lift awareness, surveys, and reach.

Allison Metcalfe: Now, given the fact that LiveRamp and we have a couple other companies that can do this, too. We recently made an acquisition of a company called Data Plus Math, we can marry viewership data that’s ad exposure data to outcomes. So now Peloton, for example, can say, “Aha, my investment on This Is Us drove this many people to my website, that was a good investment for me. And I’m going to crank it up on This Is Us,” for example. LiveRamp plays in all of these places, a lot of companies that are getting into the TV game usually are only in one or two of these areas.

Allison Metcalfe: So it’s really exciting. I’m going to wrap it up there because we are a little bit crunched for time. And I’m not going to bore you with this. But I hope that was somewhat valuable and interesting to you. And thanks for coming. Thanks.

Tina Arantes speaking

Product Leader of Global Data Partnerships Tina Arantes gives a talk on finding product/market fit at LiveRamp Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Tina Arantes: Okay, Hey, everybody, my name is Tina Arantes, and I’m on the product team at LiveRamp. Been here about five years, so not as long as Allison, but enough to see us go from like 70 people in a little office in the mission to like, mission on mission to three floors here and like over 800 people. So it’s been a crazy ride and on products, we’ve learned a lot.

Tina Arantes: So I’m here to share with you some of the learnings from my product experience here. And primarily, the learning that listening to your customers is the first step in creating awesome products. So this may sound very obvious, like everyone’s probably like, “Duh, how else would you do it?” But when I’m out there like talking to other product managers through interviews, and other ways, it turns out a lot of people aren’t talking to their customers. And it’s actually super important because especially in the B2B business, like I’m selling into marketers, and I’m not a marketer.

Tina Arantes: So if I don’t know, if I’m not my own customer, the only way to figure out and empathize with them is to actually get out there and listen to them. So, I’m also a big fan of design thinking, right? So the only way you can create a product that your customer is going to want to buy is if you first empathize with them, define the problem you want to tackle, ideate to come up with solutions on how to solve it, and then prototype and test. So, the empathize part is actually like the part I’ll focus on first, which is like, how do you get out there and discover what are the problems your customers are actually facing?

Tina Arantes: So let’s jump right into it. How do you actually listen to your customers? The first step is actually just showing up. It sounds simple, but you’d be surprised how many times like you’ll have someone on Allison’s customer success team reached out and be like, “Hey, can you answer this question for this customer about this thing?” And the first thought most teams have is like, “I could, but how about that person does it because I have other important things to do with my engineers.” But actually, a lot of the times, it’s sometimes useful to take advantage of the opportunity to get out there and just meet the user, and start to establish trust with them. So you can ask them your own questions and get to know them better later on.

Tina Arantes: So step one is like just show up, make time in your calendar to find customers that are representative of your user base, and get to know them. So once you’re there, and you’re in the conversation, you can’t just jump right in with the hard hitting questions, right, you have to establish like base of trust. So warm them up, buy them a cup of coffee, introduce yourself, ask them about them a little bit. The way we do this, actually on a larger scale at LiveRamp is through customer advisory boards, where we actually organize getting some of our best customers together into a room, take them off site, somewhere that they can actually spend a few days with us, give us feedback on the roadmap and tell us about some of the biggest problems they’re facing.

Tina Arantes: And that’s been actually one of the really big sources of customer input and feedback that we’ve gotten. So you can do it on a small scale with a cup of coffee or organize like a whole event to get out there and start talking to your users. Okay, so once you have the customer, you warm them up. Don’t again, just jump in there with what you want to say, start listening to what they have to say, I don’t know how many times I’ve just been blown away by like being like, “Okay, what’s keeping you up at night? Like, what are your biggest goals? What can you not solve? Like, how can, how can we help you?” And they come up with all kinds of ideas I would never think of, sitting at my desk trying to imagine what they might want to do.

Tina Arantes: So be an active listener, listen to what they have to say. And don’t try to lead them to the solution you have in your mind. Because you know, you’re so smart, and you know how to solve their problem. But you also should ask juicy questions as well. So once you’ve given them a chance to talk, then you should have done your research and know who you’re talking to and know what kind of questions you can ask to really get at the heart of what you’re trying to solve.

Tina Arantes: So these could be like discovery questions, asking about what areas of problems they’re having to like, help you come up with solutions later on, that could be products. Or if you’re in a stage where maybe you’ve talked to a lot of customers, and you have an idea of a problem you can solve is like throwing it, putting it in front of them and seeing how they react to it. Do they get excited and be like, “Where do I sign? And can I buy this tomorrow?” Or they’re like, “Okay, that’s interesting, like, not that important to me right now.” So yes, you can ask your questions as well, after you’ve done your share of listening.

Tina Arantes: Okay, and after the interview, or after you talk to your customers, what happens next. Now the hard part happens where you have to map it back to everything you’ve heard from every other customer you’ve ever talked to. So definitely write these things down, keep them somewhere, like, I sometimes find notes from customers from five years ago, and I’m like, “Okay, that problem still exists, maybe we should solve it.” And then you start to look for trends, right? You want to see, is it a problem multiple customers are having, like, can I identify 20 customers that are having the same problem? How urgent is it for them?”

Tina Arantes: So people have all kinds of problems, but is it in the top three? Or is it like number 20? And they’re like, “You can solve it for me, but it’s not really going to matter.” And then the important part, like what are they willing to pay for it? You can ask like, “Hey, I have this next month, would you buy it?” And people will let you know, yes or no, there.

Tina Arantes: But let’s get real too, so earlier, I said like a lot of people don’t actually end up talking to their customers for various reasons. Of course, like time is always an issue as a product manager, because you’re running around crazy with your engineering team, like trying to keep sales happy, lots of internal squeaky wheels to keep from driving you crazy. But like you do need to make time to talk to customers. And even once you have the time, like I know, as a PM, all of these thoughts popped into my head, right? Like, what if they don’t want to talk to me? Who am I to like, go knock on the door of a Fortune 500 company and be like, “Can I have an hour of your time?”

Tina Arantes: But like, it turns out, most of the customers really do love talking to product and love providing their input in hopes that it will impact the roadmap and asking their questions to you as well. You can turn it into like a value exchange, like offer your thoughts on the vision of the product in exchange for their input as well. This one’s one of my favorite, like, what if they say bad things about my product? I know like, you get very attached to your work, right, and you don’t want to show up to a customer and they’re just like, “Yeah, no, I hate it. Your baby is really ugly.” Like, no one wants to hear that. Right? It’s terrible.

Tina Arantes: But it’s better to hear it so that you don’t walk around thinking your product is like, the best thing ever, when really like, there are some things you can improve. So, it will happen, like people will say bad things, you just have to deal with it and take the feedback as a gift. And then this one also comes up. I know a lot of product managers are like, “I don’t really want to get on the call. What if they asked me something, that I don’t know the answer to?” It’s like, that will also happen, like every single call, but it’s okay. You just have to be like, “I will find you the answer to that and pull in someone who does know the answer for the next call.”

Tina Arantes: So there’s a lot of resistance to getting out there and talking to your customers, but you got to do it. So what does it actually, what does success look like when you do this right? And when you don’t do this right? So maybe starting with like when you don’t do this right. Definitely over the past few years, I’ve made tons of mistakes, not vetting things carefully enough with customers. One standout in particular where we had a project and we’re like, “Oh, we’ll just make this product go much faster.” Because we had a few customers who were like, “Yeah, that would be great.” Jeff’s laughing back there, because he’s the engineer who built it.

Tina Arantes: So we built it, we launched it, and then no one wanted to buy it. And we were like, “What?” And it turns out, it was a problem for people, but it wasn’t something they were willing to pay for. So now, we always check like, “Oh, great, is the problem like how much would you pay for it at the end?” And it does work sometimes as well. So like we’re working on another product now that we actually got the idea from talking to our customers, different customer advisory boards, they’re like, “How can you help us share data between two partners? And we’re like, “Well, that’s an interesting idea, maybe we could help you there.”

Tina Arantes: And it’s turning out to be more successful and more people are willing to pay for it. Because of the hard work we put in, checking with a really large client base that this is going to be interesting or an urgent problem to solve and something they’re willing to pay for. So that is why I think listening to your customers, as a product manager is one of the most valuable things you can do. And the first step in creating products like people actually want to buy. So yeah. And we’re also hiring on our product team here. Definitely engineering team here. So if you want to chat later about any of this, I’m happy to talk more.

Eloise Dietz speaking

Software Enginere Eloise Dietz gives a talk on lessons learned from becoming CCPA compliant at LiveRamp Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Eloise Dietz: Hi, everyone. My name is Eloise Dietz, and I’m a software engineer here at LiveRamp. I’ve worked here for about two years. And I’m currently on the data stewardship team. Our team is responsible for ensuring that LiveRamp systems use personal and company data ethically. And right now that means working to make sure our systems are privacy compliant. If your company works in personal data, you’ve probably heard of them, GDPR, CCPA. So I’m going to talk a little bit about what this privacy compliance looks like and why it’s relevant to software engineers.

Eloise Dietz: So first, a little bit of background. LiveRamp takes data privacy very seriously, partly because we think it can be a competitive advantage. We work in data onboarding, which means that we help companies advertise to their users online, which means that they can better personalize their ads online. Studies show that consumers actually really prefer this ad personalization and a more of a customized experience. And it can be a guarantee, or it has a higher likelihood of a higher return on investment. However, there’s also losing, people are losing trust in technology companies. And research shows a majority of people worry about how tech companies are using their personal data.

Eloise Dietz: In fact, one study found that 80% of people will leave a brand if they think that they are using their data without their knowledge. So companies in ad tech, like LiveRamp have to deal with this dichotomy. And they need a way to resolve this problem and gain trust back in their users. And I think that GDPR is a really important step in this direction. So, GDPR is a data privacy law that aims to regulate data in the EU, and it took place on May 25th of this year. So CCPA is kind of the California equivalent to this GDPR. And though it has many differences, it also incorporates a lot of the same ideas. It will take effect January 1st of next year.

Eloise Dietz: So a lot of other states are following California’s example, and also have privacy bills in the process. A lot of other countries are also inspired by GDPR around the world and are going through the process of introducing their own privacy laws. More are expected to follow. So as you can see, GDPR is kind of inspiring an overall shift in regulation of data privacy. And in the US alone, 68% of multinational companies have spent between 1 million and 10 million getting ready for GDPR. As CCPA approaches, only 14% of US companies say they are fully compliant despite its similarities to GDPR. They plan to spend another 100000 to $1 million becoming compliant.

Eloise Dietz: So we can see that these laws are really causing a big shift in how companies think about data. And the reason that is, or we can look into why that is by looking at some of the key GDPR requirements. Obviously, GDPR incorporates a lot more than this, but I thought that these were some of the most relevant to software engineers. So, the first is data minimization. Or the idea that we should only collect the data on users that we need to solve a certain task and then delete that data as soon as the task is accomplished.

Eloise Dietz: The next is that data subjects or individuals have certain rights to interact with their data. So they have the right to access the data or retrieve all the data a company has on them, they have the right to restrict processing of that data or opt out, they have the right to delete that data. And they even have the right to rectify the data if they think it is incorrect. Then finally, users have the right to be notified of data collection and the use, that data is going to serve. And if you got a ton of updated privacy policies this year, it was probably from this part of GDPR.

Eloise Dietz: So you seem kind of like standard practices. But they fundamentally change how a lot of companies think about data, the companies in a data graph mode, they might not even realize what personal data they have on people, nonetheless, what it’s useless for and how to collect it and return it to an individual if they asked for it. So this is what data privacy does not look like and what data privacy actually looks like is constantly asking yourself these questions as you build systems.

Eloise Dietz: So the first step is understanding what personal information that you have, and that your system processes. Or associating with that data, why it was collected, where it was collected, and what use it’s going to serve. Data minimization is probably one of the most relevant to software engineers. It means reviewing your data and deleting it, when it is no longer needed. But this also means not logging, personally identifiable information, it means when you store it, not storing it raw, storing it pseudo anonymized, means restricting access to that data to only those who are required to use it.

Eloise Dietz: And it means not using real data in your dev and staging environments. And finally, also automating user rights for deletion, restriction, processing and access. And so at LiveRamp, as we kind of went through this checklist of how to make our systems privacy compliant, we realized that there are some cases where we even need to go beyond the law, beyond GDPR and CCPA, in order to design for the privacy of the end user, not just designed to make our systems compliant by these privacy laws.

Eloise Dietz: So the first one of those instances was reading a privacy vision to hedge against the many data privacy laws that are expected to come out. So, for example, these laws are going to differ. CCPA and GDPR differ in many ways, and sometimes, even completely contradict each other. One example of when they differ, is this right to opt out. So CCPA says people have a right to opt out of data processing, whereas GDPR says people need to actually give their consent and opt in before data is allowed to be collected.

Eloise Dietz: I think that for users, understanding the way that you can opt out. So many different privacy laws is an undue burden on the users. So, LiveRamp decided to have a global opt out repository, where we, if someone wants to opt out an identifier, say a mobile ID, cookie, or email, we pseudo anonymize that information and store it in a global repository. This means that deployments in the EU as well as nationally in the US can check to ensure that they’re not processing data over any identifier that is in this global repository. So going beyond the laws and having a clear privacy vision that opt outs will apply globally not only made our LiveRamp systems more straightforward, but also ensures that the end user is actually receiving the privacy that they’re expecting.

Eloise Dietz: Second, never let privacy come at the expense of security. So in the effort to make users be able to better understand what data companies have on them, laws like CCPA and GDPR may actually be opening up this data to bad actors and more vulnerabilities. For example, the right to access their own data means that someone could make a fake this request and maybe receive another person’s data. So I think users may not understand that this security is at the risk of privacy. And it’s up to the, this privacy comes with the risk of security and it’s up to companies to make sure that this does not happen.

Eloise Dietz: So finally, embedding privacy into the user experience I think is an important place companies can improve on. So especially the ad tech ecosystem is incredibly complicated. This infographic shows the number of ad tech players has increased significantly over the years. Users shouldn’t have to understand how all 7000 players interact in order to understand their data privacy rights. A survey went out after GDPR that asked users what their biggest complaints were and the study found that most people’s biggest complaint was the long overcomplicated privacy regulations.

Eloise Dietz: And though these may be required, sorry, privacy policies. And then though these policies may be required by law, I think that the system should be designed to incorporate the end users privacy in mind, and make it easier to work with the systems in order to find the best privacy policy. So this doesn’t necessarily mean having a accept all or opt out of all policy that often doesn’t work with like most people’s privacy. And it also doesn’t mean having so many different privacy settings where you really have to understand the privacy law in order to understand what you want. It means designing for the end user and creating a concise, intelligible, transparent and easily accessible way of working with the privacy, working with your own privacy settings for that company.

Eloise Dietz: So my end takeaway is to take GDPR and CCPA as a way to rethink your data usage, but also looking beyond these privacy laws and consider the end user when designing your systems in order to truly protect their data privacy.

LiveRamp Girl Geek Dinner

After bites and drinks, girl geeks enjoyed lightning talks from women in various parts of the org at LiveRamp Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Akshaya Aradhya: Now, that the first half of our session is over, does anybody have any questions for the speakers?

Audience Member: Quick question for you. I actually didn’t realize data minimization [inaudible] example because [inaudible] users [inaudible] out [inaudible] that even an option [inaudible] data minimization?

Eloise Dietz: A user opts out, as in the fact that we’re still maybe storing like a pseudo anonymized identifier?

Audience Member: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Eloise Dietz: So the idea is that personally identifiable information, I think this is right. The idea is personally identifiable information needs to be minimized. But when you pseudo anonymize an identifier, it no longer counts as personally identifiable. So by storing that anonymized version, it no longer kind of counts as the process, I believe, is for opt outs.

Erin Friesen speaking

Software Engineer Erin Friesen gives a talk on destroying an entire build ecosystem to leading the engineering wide initiative to protect and improve that very same system.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Erin Friesen: Hello, I’m Erin. I’m a software engineer on the infrastructure Platoon, I’m working [inaudible] DevOps. And I have an obsession with making builds easy. It’s absurd. All the engineers here can say that I’ve authored them with everything. So I’m going to talk about how I got to that point, and a lot of the mistakes I made along the way. So next time, you have to do a migration, you don’t have to do them.

Erin Friesen: First off, I’m going to be talking about Jenkins. Jenkins is my best friend. If you don’t–anyone here know what Jenkins is. Yeah. So Jenkins is basically a tool to get servers to do what you want them to do. If you’re like, “I want to deploy this, send it here. I want you to set a cron job, do this, I want you to build this do this.” That’s what it should be. So we start our journey with a horrible Slack message. I snapshoted the wrong thing. And I don’t have a backup, and we don’t have our configurations. We’ve lost our builds.

Erin Friesen: As you can see, Jenkins is on fire there. And our last backup had been 10 months previously, record everything on the master server. And we had just demolished that. So we panicked, we figured it out, we got our builds back, but realizing that we are storing our configurations, the core thing that we need to do to deploy on the thing that if it goes down, it breaks it, not the best situation. So, we came up with a solution, Jenkins files. So basically, it’s codified builds, you put a Jenkins file into your git repository, it lives there, you can take Jenkins down in a heartbeat. I almost did that as a demo. But I didn’t want all those users to panic.

Erin Friesen: And instead of storing your configs in a UI like this, you get seven to eight lines of code. And that’s your entire build configuration, which is pretty awesome. And it’s very replicable. You can version your code, you can pick a library, it’s so much more control over your environment. So previously, these are my steps to get there. Let me say this was one of my first larger, like known visible projects that I’ve ever lead. Here are my steps. I create a product, I just have the teams do it themselves. And then I’m done. Easy, right? Not quite.

Erin Friesen: So first off, I skipped over scoping out the size of the migration. I didn’t realize how large the project was and how different it was. I’ll give you a scope. We have over 250 Java repositories, you have over 150 Ruby on Rails builds. All of these builds have PRs and master builds. So if you do the math, that roughly puts the 700 things that you have to migrate, that you can’t break because if production breaks, you can’t deploy a fix, you’re in trouble. So I didn’t scope out the size of the project. It led to some very troubling times.

Erin Friesen: And the second was, I did not ask for input from engineering team until I was well into development, a lot of about listening to your stakeholders. I didn’t know what they needed, or what they actually wanted from their builds. But I was like, I know better. I’ve seen a Java build. You’ve seen one Java build, you seen them all, right? No, that’s definitely not the case. And lastly, I didn’t ask anyone for help about their experiences with it, what they’d done to actually build it, other people had experienced Jenkins, but I sort of ventured on my own thinking I could plow my own path.

Erin Friesen: That didn’t work out too well, either. And so, a lot of this boils down to I didn’t communicate with people. I didn’t ask them, and I broke a lot of things. And I’m still very sorry, you guys are watching this later. And I think lastly, I assumed that the teams would do the work. Like, I assumed that if I presented the seven lines that I needed to do, everyone would adopt it, everything would work, and everyone would go in the same direction at the same time, and it would be fine. That’s not it. Because guess what, everyone’s builds are different. They’re unique. And they’re just different and unique.

Erin Friesen: And I assumed they would do that. I also didn’t assume that they didn’t want what they had, they wanted something better. Like, you want to build your own solution. And you want to have power over how you deploy and where you deploy. And I didn’t listen to any of that. I mean, I didn’t listen. I also pushed changes without telling people because I didn’t version at first, it was, I didn’t listen, and I didn’t communicate with the team. So that was like the biggest thing if you to take away anything from migration over communicate and like, talk to everyone, and I mean everyone.

Erin Friesen: So these are my steps to a new successful migration. Do your research. I didn’t. So, I didn’t break down my problem. I didn’t even figure out where my share was like, what? Where should I be living? Like, what needs to get done, and what’s broken? What can stay broken? And talking to everyone, I just didn’t think about it. Didn’t break down the problem into injectable sizes. And I couldn’t get the iterative feedback because I didn’t check. I was like, “I’m going to roll into this. And it’ll work.” Which leads into break up the project into bite size. Because if you know what you’re getting into, believe it or not, you can break it up into smaller parts.

Erin Friesen: I’m a rock climber. And so, whenever I go outdoors, I go, and I look at the mountain. I’m like, “Cool, what do I need? I need to be able to solve this section of the climb and the section of the climb.” And this is how I get to every single portion. And I always break it down into bite sized steps because you’re like, “Oh, it’s only one reach, or two reaches or I don’t know, a high knee, like pick a move.” And it works a lot better to get to the top.

Erin Friesen: And if I haven’t said it enough, communicate, just communicate with everyone. I didn’t get feedback early enough. I didn’t iterate on feedback. And I created a doc, a roadmap for it. When I’d already been working on the project for four months, like that wasn’t the efficient way to do it. I got excellent feedback from stakeholders. But it took me too long to get to that point of starting a feedback cycle.

Erin Friesen: The next two come hand in hand. Rollout gradually. And at one point in time, I had 355 PRs open, various repositories, so I created a script to create a PR to inject my one size fits all Jenkins file. And there was no back out, like it’s hard to rewrite those. And it was broken, it was hard because I didn’t version it, I didn’t have an interface. And so, if I had to make a change to a function, I had to make 355 individual commits to everything, they’re starting to get customized. So I didn’t have a rollout plan, which means I also didn’t have a backup plan. If I needed to roll back what I was doing.

Erin Friesen: So, successfully, you need to have backup, you need to be able to bail if a rollout goes bad. And finally, you just iterate and repeat over and over and over and over again. And if you keep these steps in mind, the best thing is, everyone wins. Everyone gets the product they want. You don’t waste cycles on trying to build something that they don’t want. And you actually get help along the way and it speeds it up. So that was me about how to migrate way better than me.

Akshaya Aradhya: Questions for Erin?

Erin Friesen: Part of it, the story, oh, it didn’t have the date on it. It was 2018. November, 2000–no, November, 2017, it was right at the end.

Akshaya Aradhya: Before Thanksgiving, okay. Any other questions? All right.

Rachel Wolan speaking

VP of Product Rachel Wolan gives a talk on the evolution of privacy, discuss what it means to build products intended to protect consumer privacy globally, and the design decisions we make along the way.   Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X 

Rachel Wolan: Hey, everyone, my name is Rachel Wolan. And I’m the VP of Applications for product. And I’ll echo what Tina says, we’re hiring. I’ve been here about five months. And I think Eloise did a great job of kind of helping everyone understand a lot about the regulations of privacy. Today, I’m going to talk a little bit about, like the history of privacy. So I will kick this off by telling you a very private story.

Rachel Wolan: So maybe over Christmas, I got engaged. And before I asked my partner to marry me, said yes, I had to get through her parents. And I was way, way more nervous about this stuff than talking to her. I’ll tell you a little bit about her parents. They’re from Singapore, they’re native Chinese. And I’d met them twice. I had a lot of things going for me. So, I sit down with her parents. And I’ve managed to, it’s Christmas. And I got all the kids out of the house, like they went to the bathroom, is great. I had like 15 minute window.

Rachel Wolan: And I was really looking for, not permission, but their blessing. So I sit down with them. And I say, “Hey, I’d really like to ask your daughter to marry me.” And mom’s like, “Hey, I’m going to sharpen my pencil.” She like, basically pulls out a list of like, 20 questions that she wants to ask me. Just asking me what were your past relationships like, what, like, do you have kids? I’m like, “No, no kids,” “Do you want kids? When are you going to have kids?” Like, all these questions.

Rachel Wolan: And like I think I’m doing a really good job. And this whole time, she’s actually translating in Cantonese to Mr. Chia. And I think, okay, I’m like, her mom’s like holding my hand, things are going really well. And I’m like, “Okay, this is over. She’s about to give me a blessing.” And then all of a sudden, Mr. Chia’s English gets really good. He looks at me, and he says, “What do you do for a living? How much money do you make?” And this is not something that like even I talk to my parents about. And it kind of struck me that privacy is really contextual.

Rachel Wolan: And I tell this story because privacy isn’t like one thing. It’s not something that is just regulated by one country or a group of countries, it’s something that is very meaningful to each individual. It’s different based on your race, your age, your gender, your socioeconomic status, your sexual orientation, where you live, where you’re from, like what religion you grew up in, really everything. And privacy is, each person’s privacy might even change over time.

Rachel Wolan: And, what I think is also, like, an important context about privacy is it’s a relatively new concept. So I’m going to show you guys some really cool technology that has helped evolve privacy. So the first is the printing press. The silent reading was really, one of the first forms of privacy, where people kind of had like, internal thoughts that they weren’t there, maybe they were writing them down, maybe they weren’t writing them down. And that really took like, 500 years to evolve.

Rachel Wolan: Internal walls were huge for privacy. Previously, it had been like, kind of that one room house where people lived, and they kind of all slept in the same bed for a long time in the entire house, and, like, fast forward to the 1900s. And the camera came around. And the concept of the right to privacy actually came to being. And what I think is interesting about this is that we didn’t really even put laws into place around privacy until post Watergate, right, like 1974.

Rachel Wolan: And then fast forward to today, AT&T, is, like, you can pay AT&T 30 bucks to opt out of ad tracking, but most people don’t do that. It’s really, the concept of privacy has evolved. And, I think, really, you have to think about privacy from like the standpoint that there’s a value associated with privacy and people are willing to trade privacy, there is a currency. And how many Millennials are in the room. If I offered you a pizza for three of your friends’ email addresses, would you… That’s what I thought.

Rachel Wolan: And so, I just spent a couple of weeks in China. And if you go to almost any street corner in China, you will see these cameras. And what they’re basically doing is tracking, what do citizens do? Did they walk across the street, did they jaywalk? I jaywalked, like this morning. So my social score will go down. Did they go through a red light, and all of these characteristics are being collected as part of a social privacy score, right, a social credit score. And so, really, in this case, one of the reasons why China introduced a social credit score is because in 2011, I think I saw some stat, two out of three people were unbanked in China, they really wanted to accelerate, people getting credit and being able to buy houses.

Rachel Wolan: And so in 2015, they actually made their data, their privacy data available to eight companies, including like Ant Financial, which is owned by Alibaba. And so today, I was talking to one of my co workers about his social credit score, and he was saying, “Well, I definitely don’t yell at my neighbors, I don’t park in a parking spot that’s not mine. Because that’s going to ding me and I want to, use the whatever the version of TSA Pre check is, right, if you have a high social credit score, you get a better line at the airport, there’s a different car on the train, there’s even a different–you can like skip the line at the hospital.” So there’s a lot of benefits. And, really like privacy can be traded for societal value.

Rachel Wolan: So, then the question is, I did a lot about design in our product org. How many people here have designed apps for Android or products for Android? So you know it’s really freaking hard. And I would say designing privacy is a 10X problem of them. And so, this is actually was a pizza study, where people were, there are 3000 people that were asked to trade their friends’ email addresses for pizza. Like 95% of them did. And that’s kind of like what I think is interesting here, because Tina aptly said, like, ask your customers what they want.

Rachel Wolan: But the most interesting thing about the study is customers actually said, “Oh, no, I would never do that.” Like the people in the study said, “I would never get my private information.” And then they target those same people. And they all did. So, this is one of those situations where you really have to actually think–was anybody in here familiar with privacy by design? Cool. So privacy by design is, it is a framework that you can use in order to start thinking about, does my product really protect the privacy of… So you can think about it at the very beginning and discovery and start asking questions, to try to understand the needs of your users. And look at it as kind of like a review process. We have a data ethics team at LiveRamp. We have what’s called a cake process where you can actually start to think about like, a probe through right before you even start building. Does this match our privacy standards?

Rachel Wolan: And then, I think a lot of the government laws that have been put into place, right, from the perspective that it raised our awareness of–around privacy, but it’s really our responsibility. And so, I’ll leave you with one final thought. So, this is actually privacy. Our phones are just like spraying our private information at all times. And so, like, try this, like brief experiment, turn off location services on Google. Does it still work? So I did this for like two weeks, and it kind of drove me crazy. And what’s interesting about this is, I actually had to go into a separate set of settings to completely turn off location services.

Rachel Wolan: And the cynics may say, “Oh, it’s because Google wants to track you. They want like all your data so they can sell your data, blah, blah.” And I actually think that this was really a design decision. Because they knew that you actually want that blue dot. And you want that blue dot, because you get value from it. You’re willing to trade your value, and maybe even go and kind of look and see. Like maybe you don’t want to trade all of your location data, but maybe some of it, for that value exchange. So, in conclusion, treat data like it’s your own, and make privacy happen by design. Thank you.

Akshaya Aradhya speaking

Senior Engineering Manager Akshaya Aradhya gives a talk on managing a geographically distributed engineering team at LiveRamp Girl Geek Dinner.   Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Akshaya Aradhya: Hello, everyone. My name is Akshaya. I’m the IT manager for the integrations group. And I work with people like Jeff, Sean or head of engineering, Andrew, who’s our biggest women ally, here. He has three daughters. And when I told him we are hosting a Girl Geek X event, he’s like, “Woo-hoo.” So, that’s Andrew right there. And Jacob, who’s in my team, he’s awesome. And he’s supporting all of us. And I work with all these people every day. And I want to talk about how I manage distributed teams. And my of champagne.

Akshaya Aradhya: That I want to give a glimpse of how many offices we have globally. So these are camping experience. We have social, there’s a doctor in the office. We have a lot of fun [inaudible]. Our New York office, we’re on Fifth Avenue where all the shopping malls are. Philadelphia. Seattle. Burlington. Arkansas. Erin Bodkins was supposed to be here. But she had another commitment. Paris. There is a lot of French people in my team. London. Asia, Pacific, China [inaudible].

Akshaya Aradhya: Because I knew how loud they were. So, let’s talk about all these teams that you just saw, right? So I manage two teams, I’ll soon be managing four teams. And most of the, like both the teams that I manage are currently in within United States right now, but may spread out to China. So this is the headquarters where most of my team sits, but not all of them. There are some people out there in the New York office. And there’s one in Philadelphia, and, I also talk to the people in Arkansas, because I like them, you saw how fun they were.

Akshaya Aradhya: Some of my team members, like I said, are French and they like going back to France to meet their family and sometimes work out of their homes. And is that normal for LiveRamp? Yes. But you don’t necessarily need to be French to work out of your home. So what do I do first thing as a manager, whenever I, start managing any team, I do it inside, listen first, so I kind of ask them, what are their preferences? Do they have any time commitments? Some people have kids, they need to leave at certain times, some people have soccer practice, some people need to work out for health reasons or for any other reasons.

Akshaya Aradhya: And some people, like not having meetings at a certain time, and we chat a lot during our one on ones. Jacob is nodding his head. He knows why. And so, we have all these preferences. And East Coast people have their preferences. So, how do I manage the priorities? Like how do we all deliver against this shared vision? So, I can go back and make notes. And I’m like, so if we have dedicated set of meetings for the team to talk to each other, that’s number one. You’re all one team. You all need to get along, whether you like it or not. And you need to talk. And how do you establish that, right?

Akshaya Aradhya: Before I started working for LiveRamp, I was working for a company called McKinsey right across the street. And before that, Intuit, and it’s like, each company has its own culture. 

Akshaya Aradhya: At that time, I was married, but I didn’t have kids. So just a piece of cake, right. And then I got pregnant, and then they flew me to Canada, ask me that went. My feet swelled so badly, I couldn’t fit in my shoe. And not that… And I sent a picture to my husband, once I, or two different shoes. And I couldn’t even see it. You know? And I was like, “Yeah, yeah, sure, right. The time difference, just wake up when you’re pregnant, you love waking up when you’re, like then and you like everyone you meet when you wake up. Right?”

Akshaya Aradhya: So that’s how that went. 

Akshaya Aradhya: The culture doesn’t mandate you to go and sit with someone to be productive. You could as well be on blue jeans. You can, like I made my son’s appointment after joining LiveRamp. And then I could come back can take meetings, take knowledge transfers, talk to people, be productive.

Akshaya Aradhya: You’re not judged based on where you work from. Okay, that’s number one. Second thing, as a woman who went through all of this, I kind of make sure that I don’t step on other people’s toes or schedule meetings when somebody has an important thing, okay. And if you’re working with East Coast people, I tell all my teams, you better have those meetings, before 2:00 p.m., Pacific, otherwise don’t have shared meetings. And if you do want to have shared meetings, ask that person, if it’s okay, get the Slack message saying yes, and then you’re going to have that meeting. And, make sure that you don’t keep it as a recurring one. So that’s one thing, coordination.

Akshaya Aradhya: And following the right tools, I mean, you need to, whether you follow Agile or [inaudible], whatever it is, or whatever form of Agile your company follows. I know, Agile means different things for different people. But you need to get your message across to the team, everybody needs to talk, at least for like 10 minutes a day, and share what they’re doing. And, like, after sharing work related things, you want to share anything personal, or any, anything that you want our team to know, like you are engaged or you have a baby or whatever it is right, you can now share it.

Akshaya Aradhya: And, in one of my teams, I tell people, right, just because you’re working out of San Francisco doesn’t mean that you need to sit here till I leave, or sit here till 6:00 to make a point. You’re going to work on flexible time. And I need to see what progress you made. And you’re not blocking anyone and you’re out, right. It’s value to your personal space and time while being productive and accountable. That’s what you need.

Akshaya Aradhya: Again, I’m going to share my version of what works and what doesn’t. So you can as will be micromanaging, go to each person’s desk. Or like you could start off by not asking questions, or over communicating, assuming things and get the wrong thing. And then pass it on to your team, you lose that trust, you lose that trust with, it’s so easy to lose trust when you’re managing distributed teams, then micromanaging. Who loves these people in this room? That’s what I thought. And then people start leaving, and you wonder why and the cycle repeats, if you’re not listening, if you’re not watching your team, the cycle repeats. What works?

Akshaya Aradhya: Get the wrong thing. But you learn and adapt. People make mistakes. It’s okay, as long as you’re not consistently making them, you’re okay, you’re going to learn. And you’re going to share what you learn. Sharing is not on the screen because I run out of space, but you got to share what you learn with your teams, and communicate closer. Talk to them drop. Messages on Slack or whatever messaging service you use, add any relevant process. Relevant process, not process for the sake of process. And relevant process that works for you and whoever you’re working with. Are you peer programming? Are you a software engineer? Does this process work for you? Fine. If you’re in product, maybe you’re talking to customers, there’s a different process that Tina or Rachel may use, I don’t know.

Akshaya Aradhya: But as engineers, especially here in the valley, or New York or all the places that you work, whatever works for you is the best process. That’s what I tell teams and effective collaboration, effective collaboration. Destructive feedback is not effective collaboration. Rambling is not effective collaboration. Putting down others, sarcasm, you’re maybe the best, most intelligent person. But if you’re not nice, you’re out, that’s good as that. So play nice. And teamwork. Teamwork is success according to me. If you don’t work as a team, you work in silo, you may be the best person in the world. But if your team doesn’t see what you do, or if your team doesn’t find value in what you do, you don’t have any business value with the work you’re doing or you don’t grow, you don’t let others grow, you don’t help anybody or mentor people. That’s all contributing to bad culture.

Akshaya Aradhya: One of the things that I really like at LiveRamp when somebody spoke, during my onboarding, was that if somebody sends you an email, you respond quite quickly. It’s–in other companies that I worked at, response right away meant that you’re supposed to work or respond back at some time, right? So now studying at Wharton, Sean, our head of engineering. At his level, or Andrew or even Jacob or who, or Jeff, if you send a message to them, and I work from 1:00 a.m. to 4:00 a.m. because I need to study when my son is sleeping. Some of you may resonate with that. So if you don’t, you can judge and I’m crazy, partly.

Akshaya Aradhya: But that’s my time when both my dogs are asleep, and my son is asleep. That’s my time. Okay, so what do I do? I catch up on all the emails and I told my team, “If I send you a message on Slack, or an email, do not respond to me outside office hours, unless it’s really urgent.” There have been nothing really urgent that needs a response. And I was surprised when I sent a message to Sean one day, and he just responded at 2:00 a.m., I’m like, “What did I see? Did I a response?” And I’m like, “Thank you for messaging.”

Akshaya Aradhya: And it’s like, you may choose to do that. But it’s such your own volition, you’re not forced. And I think I tell all my teams that, “If you see it, ignore it. If you don’t want to, like if you’re sleeping do not wake up, because of me. Snooze your notifications.” Yeah. And basically, there’s a saying, right, you don’t go to work when, something you really like, then you enjoy what you’re doing. It’s not really work or something like that.

Akshaya Aradhya: And I think when you join a company that values your personal space, your ambitions and offers you opportunity to grow. And you love what you’re doing. There was recently a job satisfaction survey at Wharton, where I’m studying, part-time. It’s like, in my group, and when I say group, it’s about seventy people in one section. People did a job satisfaction survey based on so many different metrics. And they were talking about organizational stuff, and how do you grow your teams? What is effective, what’s not, somewhere on this, but in a more lectury fashion.

Akshaya Aradhya: And I took a survey of my past job and this job. And it was one among the top five. And I’m thinking, “Huh, I did that, I think, right?” When you love what you do, your stress goes down, you’re happier, your kid kind of sees you really happy, right? You don’t go crazy. And you can actually do what you want to do, study, pick up a hobby, rock climbing, or do a side project on Android, I don’t know, on whatever you want to do. Don’t do that. So yeah, it’s like, the last thing I want to leave this room with, is like this.

Akshaya Aradhya: Professionally, you set an example for your team. You don’t need to be a manager, each person can be an individual. You set an example for your team. And if you overburden yourself or you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, your team can see it and your productivity goes down. So make sure wherever you choose to work or whoever you choose to work with. Hopefully at LiveRamp, because we have opening, you should choose something that will allow you to grow and be happy at the same time. And that’s what the whole talk was about and what all the speakers and organizers want. And hopefully, after this presentation, you come by and say hi to all of us and hang out with us, ask us questions, learn about us and connect with us. We would love to keep in touch, any case. Thank you.

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Girl Geek X Aurora Lightning Talks & Panel (Video + Transcript)

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Aurora garage girl geeks

A self-driving car remains in the garage as the Aurora Girl Geek Dinner kicks off with drinks and networking after hours in San Francisco, California.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Speakers:
Jessica Smith / Software Engineer / Aurora
Haley Sherwood-Coombs / Technical Operations Specialist / Aurora
Elizabeth Dreimiller / Mapping Operations Lead / Aurora
Khobi Brooklyn / VP of Communications / Aurora
Chethana Bhasham / Technical Program Manager / Aurora
Lia Theodosiou-Pisanelli / Head of Partnerships Products and Programs / Aurora
Catherine Tornabene / Head of Intellectual Property / Aurora
Angie Chang / CEO & Founder / Girl Geek X
Gretchen DeKnikker / COO / Girl Geek X

Transcript of Aurora Girl Geek Dinner – Lightning Talks & Panel:

Angie Chang: Okay. Thank you all for coming out tonight to Aurora. My name is Angie Chang, I’m the founder of Girl Geek X. We’ve been hosting these events in the San Francisco Bay area from San Francisco to San Jose for the last 11-plus years, and every week we really love coming out and meeting other girl geeks at different tech companies and hearing them give tech talks that we’re going to be hearing tonight, as well as hearing from them on how they’ve accelerated their careers.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Hey, I’m Gretchen, also with Girl Geek. So, whose first time at a Girl Geek Dinner? Oh. A lot. Cool. Well you should keep coming because they’re awesome. Like Angie said, we do them every week. We also have a podcast that we’d love your feedback on, and we’d love for you to rate it and all sorts of things. We cover mentorship, career transitions, imposter syndrome, getting the definition of intersectionality right, a whole bunch of stuff. So check it out and let us know.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Okay, and then we also just opened a swag store, and it’s a bittersweet story. So we have some really, really cute awesome stuff, and then we have this stuff, which is kind of cute, but poorly printed, so we’re going to find a different place. But in the interim, you can check out these really cool things. Okay, Angie, hold them up. Man, one-armed.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Okay. Water bottle. Cute, right? The little pixie girls? Okay. Notebook. That’s me on the notebook, by the way. That’s my pixie, so if you want to put me in your pocket, that’s the way you take me with you everywhere. And then the fanny pack, which I’m way too old for, but it is so cute. Everybody needs this fanny pack. Oh, and then there’s a little zipper bag. That’s my favorite thing, that’s why we have to show it to them. Look at the little zipper pouch for your pencils and you Sharpies and your Post-Its. Oh, we have Post-Its.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Okay, and iPhone cases. All this crap. Anyway, check it out because we put a whole bunch of work into it and we would love for people to have the stuff that they said they wanted. Okay. So without further ado, so we have got the CEO, his name is Chris Urmson, you can also call him Dr. Chris or Mr. Woke AF, so please join me in welcoming him.

Angie Chang: Oh, and really quickly, this is … okay, really quickly, this is a sold out event, so if you are liking this event, please help us tweet. The hashtag is Girl Geek X Aurora. If there’s something great that he says or any of the girl geek speakers to follow, please help us tweet and share the word that this amazing company is doing really interesting things. Okay do that thing again.

Chris Urmson: Thank you. After that introduction, I feel like I can only fall on my face. So first, thank you for Girl Geek partnering with us to pull this off tonight. Thank you all for coming tonight. This is my first Girl Geek event, and we’re just thrilled to have you here. We’re building something exciting in Aurora, we have this mission of delivering the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly. We’d love to share that with you.

Chris Urmson: What I’m really excited about is, a lot of time in the press, what you hear about around our company is our founders and about the technology, and I’m proud as hell that we get to show off some of our awesome people today. And I was told I’m allowed to be just blunt about this, we are hiring like crazy, and we are looking for awesome people. So if you enjoy talking to these people and hearing from them, and seeing the work that they’re doing, please come join us. I think you’d love it here, and we would love to have you.

Chris Urmson: So without further ado, I’m going to invite Jessie to come talk about cool stuff.

Jessica Smith speaking simulation

Software Engineer Jessica Smith gives a talk on what her simulation team is working on at Aurora Girl Geek Dinner. Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Jessica Smith: I have a mic. So I don’t think I need that mic. Is my other mic on? All right. Sorry. Hi, I am Jessie Smith. I am on the simulation team at Aurora. And we’re going to find out if my clicker works.

Jessica Smith: So a little bit about me is my background is, I’m from Nevada, I’m from Reno, Nevada. I got a master’s degree from UNR in high-performance computing, that weird animation thing is a forest fire simulation, which is what I did my thesis in. I have some other experience in autonomous systems, mainly autonomous drones in grad school, and then on to Uber’s advanced technology group working on simulation, and now at Aurora working on simulation.

Jessica Smith: So I’m going to talk a little bit about what is simulation, and we have three main things that we do on the sim team. We are a developer tool, we do regression testing, and we do problem space exploration. So for developer tool, we build custom tests for developers to help enhance what they do on a day-to-day basis and make them faster at developing the self-driving car software.

Jessica Smith: And then as soon as they land these new features, we go out to make sure, just like every other regression test, that when you land a new one, you don’t break all the old ones. So we also do regression testing. And what I’ll talk about today is problem space exploration, which I think is one of the most interesting things that we get to do at Aurora on the sim team.

Jessica Smith: So, this video here is going to be an example of a log video, and you can see this pedestrian kind of walks into a car, opens the car door, and disappears inside of the car. And so what we’ve done in simulation is extracted the information about the spirit of the scene, and what we can do in sim, which is really, really powerful, is take this interesting encounter, where a man walked in front of the car, and instead say, “What if it’s a mother and a stroller?” And, “What if it’s a person with a bicycle?” And you can actually explore the problem space and make sure that the self-driving car does the right thing, given the insane variation of the inputs to the system.

Jessica Smith: So another example is, we can vary the behavior of the other actors in the scene just based on things like velocity or position, and so you can make sure that the car is capable of making a lane change, when it should lane change in front of another car, between two cars, or behind them, given the state of the other vehicles and what is the safest thing to do.

Jessica Smith: We can also do some sensor simulation, which helps us determine what are the capabilities that our sensors need to have, and what is the fidelity that we need to have of those sensors? Like, do we need to be able to detect … you can’t really see it in this picture because it’s tiny, but you can detect the tiny individual bike spokes on this bicyclist in this sensor simulation. So what we get to build moving forward, and what my team is hiring for, is scaling out simulation. We need thousands and thousands of these tests, and we want to build realistic world modeling, and that’s better act of behaviors in the scene, but also better 3D representation of the world.

Jessica Smith: And then we want to crank the fidelity way up and do really interesting high-fidelity camera simulation. And this image on the far left here is purely synthetic, but I certainly can’t tell the difference.

Jessica Smith: So now I’m going to hand it over to Haley to learn a little bit more.

Haley Sherwood-Coombs speaking

Technical Operations Specialist Haley Sherwood-Coombs talks about machine learning datasets and the perception platform at Aurora Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Haley Sherwood-Coombs: Hey there, I’m Haley, I’m going to talk about machine learning datasets, and our tricks here at Aurora. A bit about me, so I’m in technical operations here and I work under perception platform. I have a background in operations management and information systems from Santa Clara University, and I’ve been here at Aurora since April of 2018.

Haley Sherwood-Coombs: So our team mission is to provide abundant, high quality machine learning datasets to fuel machine learning. And I want to pause on the word fuel. At Aurora, we talk a lot about fueling rockets, which [inaudible] off the saying, “Don’t try to build a ladder to the moon.” What this is getting at is that building a ladder makes very small progress. Small progress which is gratifying to see, but will never practically reach the goal.

Haley Sherwood-Coombs: At Aurora, we believe the way to actually get there is to build a rocket. It will initially appear to make little visible progress, but once carefully built and tested, it will cross the quarter million miles in a matter of days.

Haley Sherwood-Coombs: So how does this fit into the scheme of perception platform, and where I do most of my work in machine learning datasets? So the machine learning datasets are the rocket fuel for our rocket. The metrics are the launch pad, and the models are the engine. So in the machine learning datasets, it’s the creation of meaningful data. So what can we do to input the best data into our models? Metrics is the offline assessment of perception, so making sure and double-checking that the machine learning datasets are going to be great for our models, and accurately assessing these models and having value identification on these.

Haley Sherwood-Coombs: And the models is real time. It’s our Aurora driver. It’s real time action machine learning. So jumping into machine learning datasets. In order to get this data, we have to look at cameras, radar, and LIDAR, and this is where we get the returns for these labels. Our sensors are strategically placed all around our cars to eliminate blind spots and optimize our field of view. Most of the times, we put these so that we never have any blind spots.

Haley Sherwood-Coombs: So looking into data curation a bit more. Our tools allow us to collect high quality annotations, and we care more about high quality and fewer, within a larger amount of lower quality annotations. To curate the best data, we align across our organization. We look across teams, and also organization-wide to see what is feasible, and what will provide the most impact.

Haley Sherwood-Coombs: Diving into a bit of the models here. So here are two examples of our Aurora perception system. Right here on the left, you can see our car. Well when it rolls again, it will then yield to a pedestrian right here. It’s able to track it, stop, and yield, and wait until it passes, and safely drive again. You can also see that it then starts picking up all these other cars that a normal human driver wouldn’t be able to see until it was like mid-way.

Haley Sherwood-Coombs: On the right here, our perception system is tracking cyclists 360 degrees around the car. Normally if you were driving, you would have blind spots and wouldn’t be able to see your cyclist here or here, but having an autonomous system, it’s able to do that.

Haley Sherwood-Coombs: Metrics. This is the quantitative language that binds everything together. So we have our models, we have our data, now we need to make sure that these are doing the best they can. So we look at the impact that every single piece of data has on these models in the machine learning, and identify confusion and what changes need to be made. If something’s right, if something’s wrong, we go back and run another model on it.

Haley Sherwood-Coombs: So finally, where we culminate is the Aurora Driver. As you guys know, it’s our goal to put self-driving cars on the road safely, quickly. Here we go. Thank you. Next up is Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Dreimiller speaking

Mapping Operations Lead Elizabeth Dreimiller talks about the work of the mapping teams at Aurora Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Elizabeth Dreimiller: Hey everyone. So I’m going to be talking a little … pretty briefly about Aurora’s work with high-definition mapping. So a little bit of background around me. I grew up in Ohio, and as a kid, I absolutely loved maps. So whenever I got the opportunity to go to a park or go to a different state, I would just grab a paper map and literally would go home and put it on my wall. And the funny thing about this is, I actually never had a map of Ohio, because it’s so flat and boring, there’s no reason to.

Elizabeth Dreimiller: So that kind of led me on my career trajectory today. I went to school for GIS, geographic information systems in Pennsylvania. And then after school, I went and worked with the mapping team over at Uber before moving on to Aurora.

Elizabeth Dreimiller: So here, you can actually see our mapping software in work. You can see the operator is placing down points, and they’re going to be drawing lines that show the curve placement, where are the paint lines that we need to be paying attention to? So that’s the yellow center divider down the middle. And you’ll see as this image goes on, they’ll be placing lanes that our car pays attention to.

Elizabeth Dreimiller: And a lot of people, when they think about maps, they simply think of how to get from point A to point B. Our maps are that, but also a lot more. Our Aurora Driver needs our maps to understand how it works, or how it relates to the world around it, what it needs to pay attention to. So we’re placing traffic lights and a ton of rich information.

Elizabeth Dreimiller: So a little bit of breakdown about our team. Our mapping team is broken down into two different core teams. We have our engineering team, and they kind of work on making sure the logic is in place, that the Aurora Driver can understand and actually create the tooling that we use. So in the image to the right, you can see an operator moving a lane around to make sure that the trajectory of the lane is appropriate for the vehicle.

Elizabeth Dreimiller: On the other side is our operations team. And operations team is pretty neat. A lot of people think that it’s just creating the map content you see. And you can see all the different rich layers that we have. So we have the ground data, that’s actually LIDAR-processed data. And then we go into traffic lights and all the different lanes and paths. And then finishing off with remissions logic. A lot of rich information.

Elizabeth Dreimiller: But not only are we producing that, but we’re also coordinating all of the collection of this data. We’re making sure we’re running through quality assurance as well as maintaining hundreds of miles of map, and making sure they never go stale.

Elizabeth Dreimiller: So a brief overview of the challenges we face. I’m not going to over all of these, there’s a lot. I’m going to focus on three. So the first one is safety. So we’re producing all of these miles, how do we know that what we’re producing is of quality? And that’s when automatic validation comes into play. So our engineering team and our operations team is working on making sure we have a very good set of validations in place, both automatic and human in the loop, to make sure we’re catching everything.

Elizabeth Dreimiller: So second is quality, and with that comes speed. We want to make sure these hundreds of miles, obviously, are the highest quality, if possible. But also with that, we want to make sure we’re not sacrificing speed. So we want to make sure we’re creating tools and processes that allow us to speed up while maintaining that bar of quality.

Elizabeth Dreimiller: And lastly, policy. As you know if you’ve driven outside the state of California, every state kind of requires a little bit different interaction from their drivers. There’s laws. So we focus on trying to understand how we can create a broad policy on a highway map to fit a large geographic region. And at the essence of it, safely, safely, quickly, and broadly, is all about Aurora. We work on [inaudible] maps.

Khobi Brooklyn: How about now? Oh great. I’m Khobi Brooklyn, I’m on the communications team here at Aurora, so now in the technical part of the business, but in the part of the business that does a lot of work to reach out to folks like you and make sure that you know all the good work we’re doing here at Aurora.

Khobi Brooklyn: So I’m going to bring up a panel of Aurora women who come from all parts of the business, and we’re going to talk a little bit about brand, which is something I know a lot about. That’s what I think a lot about. But the reality is, every single one of us has a brand, and it has a huge impact on our career and how we show up at work.

Khobi Brooklyn: So I’d like to bring on some Aurora folks. We’re getting mic’d up, so it might take just a minute.

Khobi Brooklyn: Okay. All right.

Chethana Bhasha: I can get you … oh, yeah. I’m on.

Khobi Brooklyn: Is that pretty good?

Chethana Bhasha: I think so.

Khobi Brooklyn speaking

VP of Communications Khobi Brooklyn talks about personal brands, citing examples like Beyonce, Alexandria Cortez-Ocasio, and Nancy Pelosi, at Aurora Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Khobi Brooklyn: Okay, cool. So we’re going to talk a little bit about brand and building a personal brand, and what that means, and how that can have an impact on your career. And I think what’s interesting is, a lot of us have a brand, but maybe we don’t think about it because what is a brand? Right? We often think about companies and what a brand is at a company, but the reality is is that we all show up in some way, and so really, when it comes down to it, it’s how you show up.

Khobi Brooklyn: So here are three women that have incredibly strong brands, right? Beyonce is perfection, many would say. Alexandria Cortez-Ocasio, I think, is really real, right? She tells us all that she makes mistakes, but she also is unapologetic. And Nancy Pelosi is a great example of, I’d say, in the last year, she’s done a lot of work to reshape her brand. To be a boss, I would say.

Khobi Brooklyn: But we’re not here to talk about them, we’re here to talk about them. So we’re going to start with … well, and then a woman is really anything she wants to be. So at the end of the day, your brand is whatever you want it to be, and I thought that we could start by talking to these four women, and hear about who they are, and how they think about their brand. And ultimately how, as they’ve shaped their brand through their career, it’s helped them end up at Aurora, and helped them end up in the careers that they’ve had. All of them have really interesting work experience, and have taken very different paths to get to Aurora. So Chethana, we’ll start with you.

Chethana Bhasha: Sounds good. Thanks Khobi. Hello everyone, and welcome to our Aurora space, and then into this space where exciting things happen, as you can see one of the products right there.

Chethana Bhasha: Me, my brand, I should say, if you see me, I’m walking around the whole office talking with cross-functional people, interacting and then building things. I’ve been always curious, I wanted to know where, when I’m building some items, where it ends. So I want to see the end product. So that said, being a controls background engineer, I have worked on many products. And building those products, so I’ve been in the auto industry for the last … or a decade, I should say. And I’ve seen different transformations in the technology, and it’s still transforming, and this is right here. Like me here at Aurora, because we are building the self-driving technology, the Aurora Driver.

Chethana Bhasha: So here, the company, the best part is it’s sort of like an institution, as I’m passionate about learning more and more new things, exploring new spaces, and then be part of the technology, that is what Aurora has provided me. And I’m so excited to be here because, as I said, you can see me everywhere. I’m in packing, and then I have got so many opportunities in my role as a TPM or assistant engineer, or call me anything, I wear different hats every day, every hour, and it’s pretty good to learn things, be challenged, and then make it happen safely, quickly, and broadly. So thanks for that.

Khobi Brooklyn: Cool. Jessie, what’s your brand?

Jessica Smith: So you all heard a little bit about my background. I love simulation. I was kind of bitten by the bug, if you will, in grad school, and I work a lot in a semi-social role at Aurora and in my professional life. But when I go home at night, I usually have to decompress and not talk to another human being, because I’m pretty introverted in general. And so I wear a much more social hat at work, and I do a lot of work in trying to make sure that my team is communicating effectively with our customers who are the motion planning or the perception team. And that isn’t necessarily something that comes incredibly naturally to me, but it’s a role that I fill really well at work.

Jessica Smith: And then I do have to go home and only talk to my dog for a couple hours. So I think that what drew me to Aurora was that we have a lot of opportunity for people to really be themselves and to thrive in whatever environment that they thrive in. And you can find a niche here no matter what your personal brand is or your strengths are.

Khobi Brooklyn: Thank you. And Lia, you had an interesting career. Maybe we could even say you’ve reinvented your brand throughout your career? It’s a leading question.

Lia Theodosiou-Pisanelli: Sure. Oh boy. I don’t know if I’m prepared for that one. Yeah. So I … let’s see, what is my brand? I think one thing that I’ve always been really fixated on is making sure that I am authentic, and true to who I am. And in some cases, that can be a bit serious in the workplace, and I hold myself and everybody to a pretty high standard. But I also make sure that we don’t take ourselves too seriously.

Lia Theodosiou-Pisanelli: And another piece of that is also, I think that it’s really important throughout your career to focus on getting to know people as people. And a big way of doing that is … or, a big benefit of being able to do that is ending, is being in multiple roles where you kind of straddle a line between very different organizations, between very different sort of jurisdictions in some cases in my career between very different countries or political parties. And it’s really kind of evolved over time from when I was in government to when I’ve been doing product and a variety of different companies and scenarios. But the thing that’s tied it together is really being able to connect with people and translating between different worlds. And so that’s what led me here. I had an incredible opportunity to sit at the nexus between, between business and product and technology and to be able to build out a team and a function to really kind of bring all of those pieces together. And so even though I’ve had a lot of different pieces of my career and experiences, all of that has kind of come together to be able to really deliver, I think, something pretty effective here at work.

Khobi Brooklyn: Thank you. And Catherine, you have a very interesting career in spending some time on the engineering side and now on the legal side. And how have you thought about your brand as you’ve changed and evolved?

Khobi Brooklyn, Chethana Bhasha, Jessica Smith, Lia Theodosiou-Pisanelli, Catherine Tornabene speaking

Aurora girl geeks: Khobi Brooklyn, Chethana Bhasha, Jessica Smith, Lia Theodosiou-Pisanelli and Catherine Tornabene speaking on “How to Accelerate Your Career and Increase Your Impact” at Aurora Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Catherine Tornabene: So, hi, I’m Catherine, my role here is head of intellectual property and the legal team, but it should be mentioned the, I started my career in engineering. In fact, I was a software engineer back at Netscape back in the day and then went to law school and also obviously worked as a lawyer. And you know, when Khobi asked me this question, my first thought was, well I don’t even remember my Twitter handle. Like I don’t have a brand. And, but you know, thanks to talking with Khobi and her team, I realized, well actually I do. And that there’s really not a lot of people who have, it’s out of a niche expertise. There’s not a lot of people who have the background I do. And so my brand really is that I have a background in engineering and in law and I use both of them really every day in my job. And so it was very interesting. I appreciate Khobi even bringing the question forward cause I think it’s a very interesting question to think about. You know, I encourage you all to think about it. I thought it was a good thought exercise.

Khobi Brooklyn: Well I think building on that often, you know, part of what a brand is, is an emotional connection, right? So it’s how you’re perceived. It’s how we’re perceived in the workplace. And I would say as a woman in business and as a woman and often at tech companies, a lot of, we get conventional methods, right? We get [inaudible] whoa, sorry about that. You know, you’re either too nice or you’re too aggressive or you’re too mean or you’re too sloppy or you’re too proper or whatever, right? The list can go on and on. And I think for me at least, and I think for a lot of us up here throughout our career, we’ve found a way to find that balance of how can we show up at work in a way to to be super effective and so that people listen and we can do really good work. And how do we stay true to who we are? Right. I think, I’ll give you one personal example. I spent the first part of my life being an athlete and every coach I ever had said, you need to be really serious. You’re here to win, put your head down and win. And I literally was told not to smile because it would waste too much energy and I needed to be putting that energy into winning the race.

Khobi Brooklyn: And so that’s how I shaped my brand in the beginning. You know, I was very serious. I never smiled. I was heads down. I was there to win. And then I got into communications and I ended up in meetings with other people and I got feedback that I was way too serious and then I needed to smile. In fact, I was literally told I needed to be a ray of sunshine in every meeting. And I thought to myself like, I’m not a ray of sunshine, that’s not who I am. Like of course I don’t want to be bitchy, but I’m also like, I’m not the sunshine at the table. And it was conflicting. Right? It was super challenging for me to find out how can I be true to who I am, but clearly I need to smile more if I’m going to be effective in the workplace.

Khobi Brooklyn: And I think that’s just one example. I’m sure everybody in this room has some anecdote of a time where they felt they got conflicting messages or they weren’t quite sure like how do I show up in this meeting? Everybody else in this meeting is in sweatshirts, but I love to wear floral prints or you know, seriously or you know, everybody else in this meeting is, is super serious and I like to crack a joke every so often. Is that okay? And so I think that’s something that we all think about. Have any of you ever had conflicting messages and how you work through that?

Chethana Bhasha: I think I can just speak as Khobi just said, I mean she, I’m too serious. Like, and for me like it’s quite opposite. It always worked. I mean keep laughing maybe and get things done. That’s my mantra. But if it needs to be done, I mean it needs to be done. And it’s sometimes like I’m in in the workplace, being like a person. I mean I feel like I need to be straightforward and open, communicate, but the opposite person might not perceive it in a good way probably. But so I have been given an advice from my superiors at my previous company that “Hey, you’re doing a very good job, you get things done but make sure you are a little bit peaceful when talking with people.” And get, okay. So I’ve tried to balance that and then try to balance those emotions and then tried to read and then get at the end, make everyone happy and then work at that same place where you see each other, talk to each other. And that’s that. That has been working so far.

Lia Theodosiou-Pisanelli: Yeah, I’ve definitely gotten that conflicting advice as well. It’s interesting. So I started out my career as a negotiator for the government and I made the mistake of sending an email to a foreign negotiating counterpart that had an exclamation mark in it. And immediately my boss came into my office and said, never put an exclamation mark in an email, you will not be taken seriously. Do not show emotion. You should never have emotion on your face unless it is intentional for the objective you’re trying to get across. Right. And so that was very different from then coming out here to tech. And it’s funny. So I was kind of chiseled into this very aggressive and intense negotiator, which I’m sure none of you can imagine given how effervescent I am right now. But all of the people who work with me, you probably definitely know that I have that in me. But it’s so funny because then I started in tech and one of my first bosses in tech, maybe a month in, sat me down and said, hey, you should really think about like smiley faces, exclamation points, just to soften your tone a little bit because it kind of overwhelms people.

Lia Theodosiou-Pisanelli: And so it’s this funny like, Oh, okay, that is what success is here. And so I think what I keep kind of going back to is what is true to myself as, yeah, I’ll say different days, there’s, there’s a lot of balance that we all have to strike. But I just try to keep coming back to being authentic and being okay with the fact that that version of myself might not be what people expect of me and definitely might not be what people expect of a woman. And so it’s really important to just be OK with the fact that you’re different and not necessarily try to blend in. And so that’s what I’ve tried to hold, hold true to.

Khobi Brooklyn: And speaking of attributes, all of you are building teams and so as you build a team and you meet new people and new candidates, what do you look for? Like what kind of brand are you looking for? Catherine?

Catherine Tornabene: You know, I think, Oh, a lot of my personal career has been driven by that. That sounds really cool. And I look for that. I think intellectual curiosity is wonderful. I love when I get people who are really interested in the world around them and who are interested in how they can have an impact on the world. You know, one of the things I love about Aurora is that we are very mission driven here and that’s something that I look for and that’s some, a lot of people who care about the world around them, it is part of a personal brand and that is something I personally look for and that I enjoy very much in my teammates. We’re lucky to have that here.

Lia Theodosiou-Pisanelli: Yeah. Similar on a similar note, I would say really people who have a growth mindset, you’re not always going to find somebody who has the exact experience and fit for the tasks that you plan to have. But really having somebody who wants to grow and to learn and is willing to challenge themselves, not just in work but who also kind of shows that they want to be better. And it’s okay that maybe some things haven’t done, they haven’t done well in the past. And it’s not that they haven’t done them well, it’s just that things didn’t work out. But they learned from that. I think that’s a really important trait in somebody on the team.

Khobi Brooklyn: Jessie?

Jessica Smith: Yeah, I think, I mean for software we focus a lot on can you program, can you program, can you program? But I also really appreciate it when I ask a candidate something and they don’t know the answer if they’re just honest about like, I don’t know what that is. And then I think it provides an interesting opportunity in an interview to work through a problem together and you get to see a little bit more about is this person teachable and can we actually have a good back and forth? And if I give you a, like a hint or put you on the right path, can you actually go and ask for enough guidance to get to the right answer? So I think I really appreciate honesty in, in the interview environment.

Khobi Brooklyn: And maybe just generally.

Jessica Smith: And generally, yeah.

Khobi Brooklyn: Cool. Chethana?

Chethana Bhasha: So on the same lines, it’s person’s willingness to learn and then also at the same time contribute because it’s on both sides, right? Like you bring your own expertise. Yes you are not expert in all but you are trying to learn more but at the same time you are trying to contribute. So that that’s what most of the time we as a team look forward for like, hey the candidate is willing to learn, have the confidence, but at the same time I mean can contribute what they have learned in their past. Bring those lessons learned. So that’s what we are looking for more to build this awesome product. Yeah.

Khobi Brooklyn: Great. I’ll just add in one for myself. You know, not working in the kind of tech space. Sometimes it’s a little different what we look for, but I would say presence is really important. It’s something that I definitely try to pick up when I meet somebody new. Presence and self awareness. And I think in the tech industry broadly, we’re all doing something new, right? We don’t know the answers to everything. And so there’s a lot of mistakes. So there’s a lot of like, Ooh, we need to rethink that. And I think that takes incredible presence to have the confidence to say “I didn’t do that quite right and I need to do it better.” Or “I think I can do it differently.” And, and I think that that can be a hard skill to build because, it’s intimidating, right? It’s, it sucks to be wrong, but the more that you can get comfortable with it and use it in a positive way, I think makes us even more valuable. We’re gonna open this up to you all, but one more thing before we do is I wanted to ask each of you to share a piece of advice, either a great piece of advice that you’ve received in your career that’s really helped you along the way, or a piece of advice that you’d love to share with this group. Who wants to start? Chethana, go ahead.

Chethana Bhasha: I think what I’ve learned from like in the past was like the, or the mantra. What I usually follow is do the things, do the things in the right way, do it takes time or you face some failures, but at the end you know every single detail of it because if so if you are building a new product then you know, oh it’s the similar lines what I did in the past, this could come up and then there is mistake but that’s fine. I can do it. So that’s one thing which I would like to just as a my, my piece of advice is whatever you are doing, be confident and do it in the right way. Do I take some amount of time and failures.

Khobi Brooklyn: Yeah. Jessie.

Jessica Smith: I think the best piece of advice that someone gave me when I was thinking about a career transition was I was trying to decide should I, what should my next thing be? And it’s really hard to look at where you should go next. And a product manager that I worked with told me you shouldn’t think about your next job. You should think about your next, next job and what jobs do you need to get your next, next job. So you look a little bit further ahead and it’s actually easier to build a roadmap to where you want to be. You know, when your next next job. And so that’s really helped me build out a much more clear picture of where I want to go.

Khobi Brooklyn: Lia.

Lia Theodosiou-Pisanelli: Now I’m going to change [inaudible] ripping it. In terms of kind of looking for next jobs actually and this was, good advice for me as I was thinking about coming here. You know, you can think about is the work interesting and can I make an impact and what will this look like on my resume and all of these things. And all of those are important. But one big thing that is really important is thinking about who are you spending the majority of your waking hours with, right? We’re spending a lot of time together and so think about the people and the culture and the environment and are you going to learn from these people? Are these people going to let you be that authentic self? Are you going to be better? And when things don’t go well, do you feel like these people are going to support you and find the right solution? And so I hadn’t always focused on that. It was important, but I was always kind of blinded by the what is the most interesting, best stuff. Good news is Aurora has all of those things. So it just so happens that the people piece was like the cherry on top. But, no, really, I think, I think the people pieces is really, is really important and that, that was good advice that I received before coming here.

Khobi Brooklyn: Catherine.

Catherine Tornabene: So I think that, I think in this one, one of the most important pieces of career advice I received was once you start down a path, that doesn’t mean you’re fixed on it forever. And sometimes those meanderings that you take along the way actually turned out to be very valuable. So if you want to, if you’re debating a choice in your career or your job, you can always give yourself the choice of saying, you know, I’ll try this and if it doesn’t work out, I’ll try something else. Because I think a lot of the times we feel often like, oh my gosh, if I do this I am down this path and I am never stopping and I’m never off that route. But that’s actually not really how things generally work out. There are very few career paths that are absolutely fixed and you can generally take another route and sometimes you might find that the meandering part is the best fit.

Khobi Brooklyn: Thank you. So we’d love to hear from you all. So if anybody has any questions, please raise your hand. We’ve got mikes I believe around, so maybe you could stand up and just introduce yourself. You want to? Hi.

Aurora Girl Geek Dinner in Aurora garage

Claudia in the Aurora Girl Geek Dinner audience asks for book recommendations for women looking to accelerate their careers.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Claudia: Hi, I’m Claudia. Claudia [inaudible] and I have a question related to books that you guys have have read in the past that are really impactful. I’m a sucker to to learn more about what you guys have in mind around books that will help career growth.

Khobi Brooklyn: Anybody? Top of your head?

Lia Theodosiou-Pisanelli: I just read a book called The Growth Mindset, which might influence the fact that I look for people with a growth mindset. I found it to be really interesting. Actually. I’m going to be honest, I didn’t read it. I listened to it at a very fast rate. But I found that to be really interesting because it was kind of a way of describing different frames of mind of different people, which helped me to think about how I interact with others. What is my way of approaching things and being open to the fact that I can change that, so that’s a good one.

Khobi Brooklyn: Cool. Anybody else?

Catherine Tornabene: I read a ton, but very few career books.

Chethana Bhasha: That’s what I was going to say too.

Catherine Tornabene: I actually, in a sense. My answer, quite frankly, my answer is that the books that I often finance inspiration from are stories of fiction or I actually pretty much read everything, except I really don’t like brutal murder mystery. But beyond that, and so stories that I’ve read recently have been like for instance stories about, I’ve read a series of stories about Vietnamese immigrants who come to the United States or I actually read recently a story about you know, a mom who gave her child up for adoption. I like just getting in someone else’s mind for a while, I think actually is very good for teaching you mental flexibility in general. So my general advice is not actually a specific book but that the exercise of reading something that describes and gets you into someone else’s life experience is very good.

Khobi Brooklyn: Great.

Shavani: Hi, my name’s Shavani. I just had a quick question about, we talked a bit about all of your brands and what your brands are today, but you know, as you guys mentioned, you come from various backgrounds. How do you guys continue to build your brand? ‘Cause as we all know, it keeps changing every day. So if you guys like, you know, networking or any tips or bits of advice for that?

Chethana Bhasha: Yep. Yep. So, good question. So it’s again as we said, right? Like it’s you who you are. Like I’m in the more, you know, over the years that’s how you know, you get to know yourself like, Hey, who am I or what, what finds yourself like I mean, have your happy. So that kind of, I mean it’s sort of exploration and at one stage you find that Hey, this is me and this is where I have to do. Like for my example, like I started my career, as I graduated from a controls background, I started in the auto industry working on the diesel engines on a small center. But now I’m building the whole vehicle by itself. So because that tended like, I mean, Hey, who am I? Because I’m curious. I want to learn more and then I want to pick, put things together. I want to know where the end product is. So I got to know who I am. So say I’m a system architect or an engineer, now I know like that’s my basis. So that’s what I do, I interact with and collaborate with different stakeholders too because I like it. And then I want to build a product so now I know who I am and what is my passionate. So over time that gets you right there on your path like you know you’ll be happy in what you would be doing.

Khobi Brooklyn: Yep. I think go ahead.

Jessica Smith: That also helps. One of the things that I always find is that if I’m, if I’m too comfortable, I don’t really, I stagnate a little bit and I get, not bored, but I get too used to everything and I have to find something that pushes me out of my comfort zone. And so I will usually target something that I am kind of interested in but like really scares the crap out of me. And then I will go for it and add something to my plate that is completely outside of my comfort zone. And that really has forced me into a lot of situations I never thought I would be in. And it’s made me find out things about myself in terms of what do I want from my career. And the answer has surprised me quite a few times.

Khobi Brooklyn: Yep, absolutely.

Xantha Bruso speaking

Xantha Bruso asks the Aurora Girl Geek Dinner panel a forward-thinking question about the future of jobs.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Xantha Bruso: Hi, my name is Xantha Bruso. The autonomous vehicle industry didn’t exist that much longer before. And some of you have experience in other autonomous vehicle companies, but some of you didn’t. So how did you leverage the experience you had to enter this industry when in the future? You also know that the jobs in the future that you may have may also not exist currently. And how can you also stay relevant with what you’re doing now for those future jobs?

Catherine Tornabene: Well, I think that, I think that at the end of the day, being able to be comfortable learning things that are outside your comfort zone is really important. And when I look at my career spanned a lot of, I was at Google, I was at Netscape, there’s a lot of, I was often in situations where I didn’t actually know the, I didn’t have an expertise necessarily. And so I think that my general answer to that is that you just have to be comfortable with learning and being comfortable with saying like, you know, I don’t know the answer here, but I can figure it out. And that, you know.

Catherine Tornabene: I think the thing is in the AV space is there’s a great opportunity to learn and it’s developing very quickly. So I think that my answer to that is that I think taking a step back and looking less at the oh, the specific thing is not something you know. And more at, well, you know what? This is a thing I think I can learn. Is how I would approach it at least.

Khobi Brooklyn: Yeah. I think to build on that, I think part of what’s exciting about being in an industry that’s just shaping up and being at a company that is young and growing and shaping is that it’s less about saying, I know exactly how to do this one thing and I do it this way and I’m on this line doing this one thing. But these are my strengths. Here’s what I’m really good at. Here’s the value I can bring and different perspectives that I can bring. And together all of these different experiences and perspectives are shaping a company and helping to shape an industry. And I think that it will continue to evolve. Which one, keeps it super interesting for all of us or anybody in the industry. But also you find new ways to apply your strengths, right? And I think that that’s what’s super exciting about this industry is that you get to think differently all the time.

Chethana Bhasha: Yeah. And just to add, I think I can give my example clearly because I’m coming from a conventional automotive industry. I’ve worked on trucks and on highway and off highway which is completely a conventional [inaudible] was part of it now interspace where we are building the technology to do integrate in those platforms. So I get to see both the sides because I know how it works in the [inaudible] space and which is the technology we are building and how we integrate. So I get my own strength from the industry. At the same time I’m learning like what this technology does and how can we integrate together to have a great product. Yeah.

Audience Member: Oh, social media. Do you do that? What do you do? How cognizant of it are you? What’s your kind of strategy on developing your brand on social media? Thank you.

Khobi Brooklyn: This may sound weird coming from the comms person, but I don’t think you need social media to build a brand. I mean, I think if you want to build a big public presence brand, yeah, you should have a voice and you should find some channels to get your voice out there. But I think you can do a lot of really important work around building your reputation and being known in lots of different ways. I think it’s everything from how you show up to a meeting to what’s your tone over email to going to networking events and meeting people and sharing your thoughts and hearing new people’s thoughts.

Khobi Brooklyn: I think social media is really cool and a whole other conversation, but I think when we think about building our brand, that’s one way to share your brand, but it’s not necessarily fundamental to having a strong brand is my perspective. I don’t know if any of you have big social media presences.

Lia Theodosiou-Pisanelli: I think I tweeted this.

Audience Member: Thank you.

Khobi Brooklyn: And there we have… yeah.

Audience Member: I guess I have more of a practical question. How do you get feedback on if you’re presenting the right brand? Because I found out I’m like a very nice person, but I’m introverted so when people meet me they’re like, she doesn’t like me.

Khobi Brooklyn: I think that’s a great question. I would love to hear how any of you have received feedback. I think, yeah. Let’s hear from you guys first.

Lia Theodosiou-Pisanelli: Trial and error. This is really where it is. It’s like something’s not going well here and I think just really trying very hard to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes and to be aware of how different people are reacting to you. Right? And trying to kind of read the room or read the reaction and realize that, okay, that didn’t feel like it went well. Either I can ask why it didn’t go well or I can just try it a little bit differently this time. Right? So it depends on kind of what your comfort level is. But I think there is no silver bullet here. We all just learn as we go and, you know, that’s my take.

Khobi Brooklyn: Yeah, just to build on that. Kind of paraphrasing what you said, but a lot of it is self awareness, right? And being intentional, right? If you’re like, I’m going to think about how I show up, this matters to me. You start to realize that and pay attention. The way I acted with this person, is it resonating? Am I bringing them along in the way I wanted them to or what have you? I think is a really important thing to pay attention to. I’m sure we’ve all received advice. I know I’ve received tons of feedback on my brand and some of it has been great and some of it I’ve completely disagreed with, right? And so I’ve always had to come back with like, well, what’s true to who I am? What feels right?

Catherine Tornabene: I think the build on that, the piece of that I think is listen to people’s feedback but also have the confidence to say like, no that’s not for me. Because there’s a lot of people who will give feedback that you know, not right for you. I have an example. I remember being told, this is years ago, well you should never as a woman have a picture of your kids on your desk. I remember I took that and I listened… I had a picture of my kids on my desk. I took that and then later I was like, you know, no. That doesn’t work for me. That’s not who I am. I’m not going to do that. So I think be open to it, hear it, but also be true to yourself and say like, no, that’s not who I am. And I’m not going to listen to that.

Lia Theodosiou-Pisanelli: And don’t apologize for who you are.

Khobi Brooklyn: I think we had a question right over here…

Chico: Oh, hi. I’m Chico. And I think my question’s more about like have you ever had imposter syndrome or things like when you get disillusioned with your job because there’s some stressful scenario going on, something like that. So how do you deal with those scenarios and just get over that realize like, okay no I’m actually good at this thing and I can do the thing. So just trying to get over that big hump.

Lia Theodosiou-Pisanelli: What’s imposter syndrome? I’ve never heard that. I don’t think any of us have had that.

Lia Theodosiou-Pisanelli: I think like best advice there for me is assume everybody around you is holding kittens. No, I’m just kidding. Actually somebody did give me that advice and it was great. So I imagine that of you guys sometimes. What I would say is nobody knows everything and you know who you are and you know your experience and what you’ve learned throughout your life better than anybody else and that has made you into who you are. Right? So if I think of everything that’s happened in any of our lives, good or bad, failures, like sometimes we just do things really wrong, right? But that chisels you into who you are and you’re better for it. Right? So think of yourself as like this combination of all the experiences that you’ve had that only you know what those are, right? So nobody gets to say what you’re good at and what you’re not good at and just go for it.

Jessica Smith: I think it also takes a single catastrophic breaking of everything to realize that like, Oh, they didn’t fire me, it’s okay. I’m still breathing, the world still turns. I ruined everything for everybody for a little while, but it’s still all right. And it’s like a learning experience and… not that that ever happened to me in my early, early career, but it made me realize that like it’s going to be okay. Like even if something terrible happens and if you mess up and fall on your face, it’s really going to be okay and it’s okay to make mistakes because everyone does.

Chethana Bhasha: And as Catherine and Jessica and Lia mentioned it’s getting out of your comfort zone, right? Like if you don’t know yourself, like what you are good at or what you can do more. You have to do that. Like, I mean like as, yeah, sure, you didn’t get fired, but like you had to be like present a report in front of the upper management. Own it and then fix it so that builds your confidence.

Khobi Brooklyn: I think also somebody once told me, if you’re in the room, you belong in the room, you know? And I think it’s important to remember. If you’re sitting at the table, if you’re part of that project, you’re there for a reason. So own it and you belong there and somebody else thought you belonged there too. And so it’s just about kind of having that confidence again and just saying like, yeah, I’m here and I belong here. And being there.

Audience Member: I have a question. I guess sort of referring back to the question before this one, which is parsing through feedback, right? You get all sorts of feedback. Someone told Lia to put smiley faces in her email, things like that.

Audience Member: And this is kind of, I guess a tough subject because I think about this a lot. But as a woman, right? We’ve all heard that women get the whole, you’re aggressive feedback or you’re this way. You need to smile more. That type of feedback way, way more like the statistics show that that’s what happens. But sometimes there may be some validity to it. Right? It’s possible. And I think in my head I have that question a lot. If I’m getting the feedback that I’m too aggressive, is that real? Do I actually need to change my behavior? How do I think about this? How do I actually take that advice because it’s showed up in my performance review, so clearly I got to do something there, right? What do I do? And if I suspect that maybe it’s gendered, what do I do about that? Like how do I navigate that? That’s something that I would love to hear how you guys handle.

Jessica Smith: I have also received, “You’re really mean in code reviews.”

Chethana Bhasha: Yeah I think all of us. Yeah, yeah.

Jessica Smith: So I think my strategy for dealing with it is look at the people that I really respect in the company and who I would like to emulate and how do they give feedback and how do I maybe model my feedback on what they do in code review or in any of the communication that you’ve received feedback on and try and find ways to understand that your impact on other people might not be perceived in the way you expect it to be. And whether that’s from you know, a gender reason or you know, an experience level reason. I think that I’ve found success in changing the way that I speak to people by modeling it off of really successful communicators elsewhere in the company and it’s definitely helped me with this exact same problem. And you know, maybe giving like a little bit of positive feedback where you see… if you’re only ever writing like this is broken, this is broken, fix this thing. But you’re never saying like, wow, that was a really clever bit of code. If you have those thoughts, you can also share those thoughts and share the positivity, which helps make it so that you’re not being aggressive all the time.

Khobi Brooklyn: And I would say adding onto that is digging in a little bit. You know, like if you get feedback that you’re too aggressive, then ask why. Like, why? What’s happening or what’s not happening because of that? I think because at the end of the day, to be a good team player, to be a good part of your company and your team is to be effective. And if you’re doing something that’s not effective and maybe people like to call it being too aggressive, there is still something to fix, right? So maybe it’s the wrong label, maybe it’s sort of an offensive label because we women who sort of hear it all the time and it gets annoying. But at the end of the day, if there’s something that’s not working with the people you’re working with, then that’s fair. And that’s probably something to work on, you know? And so I think it’s a little bit of self awareness and ego and being like, okay, something’s not working I need to improve. But maybe pushing whoever you’re getting that feedback from on, well let’s talk more about that. Like let’s talk more about what it is that you’re really saying. I don’t know. That’s something that I have done.

Catherine Tornabene: I think that the other thing I would say is that I think it never hurts to assume positive intent when people are giving you feedback and assume that they actually really are trying to help you and maybe the words aren’t coming out right and maybe someone’s not really skilled at saying it or writing it or whatever. You know, nobody’s a perfect communicator and nobody can always say the right thing at the right time all the time. So sometimes, and of course there’s more career, you do wonder occasionally, you wonder, do you get feedback as a gender? But I think taking a step past and saying like, okay, well what’s the intent here? I’m assuming it’s positive and maybe there’s something here I can grow from and maybe it’s not the thing that was said to me. I mean it’s entirely possible that I’ll go in an entirely different direction.

Catherine Tornabene: But there is something there. And I mean, I don’t know, maybe I think I’m an optimist at heart, but mostly I think people want to help and they mean well and I think thinking in those terms can help you identify the thing that perhaps you want to take from it.

Lia Theodosiou-Pisanelli: One other thing I’d add is collect data, right? So similarly it’s like understand more where that person’s coming from, but then think, okay, if this is in my performance review, then maybe this came from multiple people. Maybe I should talk to a few people and not say, “Hey somebody wrote I was aggressive. Can you tell me if you agree or disagree?” But more along the lines of, “Hey, how do you feel like our dynamic is and are there ways that we could interact better?” Or things like that. And I think by having that with a few people and particularly people who you respect a lot, that will give you more context on something that’s more actionable than just kind of reading into what does this one sentence mean for me? Right?

Khobi Brooklyn: Yeah. Thank you. I think we have time for one more question, but then we have time for lots of questions just over drinks. So I think yes, you, go ahead.

Audience Member: First of all, thank you very much for all of your sharing, your experience and your perspective. It was really great to hear. Several of you here came from really different backgrounds and then transitioned into a new role and you talked a little bit about making those transitions and how your skills carried over and how you brought your backgrounds to your new roles. And I think it’s really great that Aurora is a company that values that and that sees that.

Audience Member: But I was wondering kind of from a branding perspective, if you guys could talk a little bit more about how you repositioned yourself when you made that transition. Because, as you said, you know your skills and your experience, but how do you reposition yourself to reframe that in a way, with your new role.

Khobi Brooklyn: I feel like you two should start.

Lia Theodosiou-Pisanelli: What? I think one way to go about it is to try to understand, okay, where do you want to go and what are the things that you want to do? Right? And then from there it’s trying to understand, okay, well what types of roles are interesting to you in that world.

Lia Theodosiou-Pisanelli: And then the next step, this is my thought process… And then the next step is, okay, well what makes somebody really successful in that role? And that’s usually how I start a lot of conversations because that way you can understand, okay, what are the attributes of a person? What are the things that they can do that mean success for either somebody who’s hiring or even just somebody generally who works at a company that’s interesting or in an industry that’s interesting. And then I think, okay, do I do things like that or do I have experience that can contribute to that? And how can I provide examples of things I’ve done in my past that translate into that. Right?

Lia Theodosiou-Pisanelli: And so I think one of the things about being in the self-driving space, is it hasn’t existed for that long. Right? And there is a finite number of people who have done this before. We have a lot of them here. But what I will say is there really is that openness to finding others because you… But finding people who have experiences that will help us to think about it in a different way. So that’s something Chris focuses on a lot is, how do we have a diversity of viewpoints? And so if you can think about, okay, yes, my perspective is different, but it adds value to whatever problem they’re trying to solve. Think about kind of explaining it in that way. That’s how I’ve thought about it.

Catherine Tornabene: You know, I think in some ways I would pivot it. And I think that the skills, obviously as I switched from engineering into law they’re sort of a different practical skillset.

Catherine Tornabene: But a lot of who I am is still the same. I mean, as a lawyer I’m not really all that different than as I was as a software engineer. And I think that rather than sort of focus on the external concept of necessarily rebranding, I think that I would view all of your collective experiences as you grow as part of your brand. And it’s just additive and it just adds onto your experience and who you are.

Catherine Tornabene: But who you are is you know, core to you and it kind of in a sense like which job you have. It’s just one facet of that. So I think that for me, I can’t say I thought all that much about necessarily repackaging myself as a lawyer. I just actually thought it was kind of interesting, which is how I ended up in law school. Then I thought that like this particular law job was kind of interesting. But in the end, like it’s always been like, oh, this is pretty interesting, but I’m still really the same person. And I think that the idea of brand is quite core to identity and who you are and your job is a big part of that, but there’s a lot more to you. So focusing necessarily, focusing on that will tell your story, I think.

Khobi Brooklyn: Well, thank you so much for coming. It’s been really great to have you and we would love to talk to you more. So stick around for another drink and maybe there’s even some desserts. I’m not sure. But thanks again for coming. We loved having you. And we will talk to you soon.

Khobi Brooklyn at Aurora Girl Geek Dinner

VP of Communications Khobi Brooklyn stays to mingle after the panel discussion at Aurora Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

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Episode 15: Managing Up

Transcript:

Angie Chang: Welcome to Girl Geek X Podcast, connecting you with insights from women in tech. This is Angie, founder of Girl Geek X and Women 2.0.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: This is Sukrutha. By day I’m an engineering manager.

Gretchen DeKnikker: This is Gretchen. I’ve been working in tech for over 20 years.

Rachel Jones: This Rachel, the producer of this podcast and we are the team behind Girl Geek X. This podcast brings you the best of Girl Geek X events, dinners, and conferences, where we’ve been elevating women in tech for over 10 years.

Angie Chang: And today we’ll be discussing working with your manager.

Rachel Jones: So I think this topic of working with managers comes up a lot regardless of the topic that we’re thinking about. Just ways to work with your manager kind of weave into the conversation. So, what do you think it is about this relationship that can be so hard to navigate at times?

Sukrutha Bhadouria: I think managing up is so hard that no one really taught me or it didn’t even come to my attention that I needed to focus on it until, I don’t know, maybe at least five or six years into my career. It’s really hard to know what’s expected of you, how you’re being evaluated if you just don’t know how to manage up. And the best way, I think, is to get on the same page and understand a bit more about what your manager… Or how your manager thinks, what your manager wants to see, what their goals are and how you can help them reach their goals. But it’s not the easiest process to get onto the same page as your manager, for sure. What do you think, Gretchen?

Gretchen DeKnikker: I think what may make it hard is that if you’re very early in your career and you’re figuring out your way in the world and how you work and how you work with other people and how you work with a manager and then your manager might be only a year or two into managing. And so they haven’t really figured out how to be a manager rather than an individual contributor to help you learn how to manage up, right? So there’s this sort of… Everyone’s sort of figuring it out as they go along and I think that might create a lot of frustration and confusion.

Angie Chang: Just generally speaking, it’s one of the very popular topics of conversation from a career advancement perspective. But when you’re in the trenches, it feels very differently, right? You’re like, as Gretchen said, you’re doing the things and your manager’s probably also building the plan on the way down. There is oftentimes just too many things going on to really consider the management side.

Angie Chang: But that’s because we come from startups where people are often just kind of learning about the rules as they’re in it. I think definitely having a lot of conversations around what the expectations are and making sure that you have regular meetings that more people will show up to, to discuss how your goals are going to align.

Gretchen DeKnikker: I think it’s super important, like Angie said, but to be really direct with this stuff, there’s sort of two ways to think about it, right? Like if you want to just kind of be a better employee thinking about what is my manager measured on, what would make them look good to their boss? What are the metrics, what are the things that they really care about? And when you’re sort of prioritizing your time, definitely prioritize and think about your decisions in the context of like, “How can I get my manager promoted?”

Gretchen DeKnikker: Because you can get your manager promoted, you can make everybody look good, right? Not that you have the ability to do that directly, but just sort of as a way of looking at it. But the other thing is, have direct conversations. Do not guess. Do not try to guess. My example is, I was hired for a job and two weeks in, my boss was fired. My brand new boss was fired and he’s really, him and a few other people who were brand new to the company and brand new to the team – we were opening a San Francisco office – they were all I had to turn to.

Gretchen DeKnikker: And so we had a trip planned to go to New York and my colleague who’d only been there a few months longer, he’s like, “Well, I don’t know if we should go.” And I was like, “I’m going, and I’m going to sit down with the CEO while I’m in New York and I’m going to ask him, ‘what were your expectations for my role? What were the goals? What are the things I could do in the first 90 days?’ Because I don’t have a manager anymore and I need to know.” It was a brand new role. And if I hadn’t asked those questions, I would have worked on the wrong things. I wouldn’t have prioritized my time in a way that my substitute manager for the time being, what his expectations were going to be.

Gretchen DeKnikker: And my colleague’s first response was this idea that you shouldn’t go meet and you shouldn’t go ask and that you should just sort of like sit back and wait to see what happens. And I’m so glad that that wasn’t my first instinct and that I went in and I had the conversation.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yeah, that’s a good example. I think for me, I have asked questions like, “What is–” to my manager, I’ve asked questions like, “What is the thing that’s worrying you the most, work-wise? Or what is your biggest goal? What do you want your org to be known for?” And through that I get a sense of where I can insert myself and make my manager successful because that is the main thing. When you’re managing up, you want to make your manager a success in their job by basically managing them. And if I take myself and how I’m doing out of the conversation to start with and focus on what their needs are, then I put myself in that and say, “Okay, which of these align with what my goals are and how can I step in and take ownership of this particular area that’s going to make my manager successful as well as me successful and excited?” Then I’m starting to align our goals together.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Our first quote is from Sandhya Hegde who is the VP of Marketing at Amplitude and she shares her own advice on building relationships with your manager.

Sandhya Hegde: One of the challenges that I had to figure out was this idea of what builds a relationship with your manager and depending on your manager, it can be very different. So like over-simplifying, I would say there are two types. People who find it really easy to build relationships so that you don’t have to do the work. And then there are people who are just like less open, more private people that you can’t tell, “What’s this person thinking? Does she like me? Does she like the work I’m doing? She’s not, I can’t really tell what’s going on.” And so I’ve been in that situation often where I am the over-sharer – I can talk about my feelings for like three days – but I’m working for someone who does considers like, “hi” a conversation. So now, I’m like, “I don’t really know what’s happening here.”

Sandhya Hegde: And that was kind… I think the first time I had a job with a manager, it was like that. Like I really couldn’t tell what was going on. And at first I was just frustrated for a while and then actually just started talking about feeling confused. So I said, “Hey, you’re kind of hard to read and you don’t really talk about like what’s going on in your head, how you’re thinking. And I’m not really looking for like affirmation for like, ‘oh good job, Sandhya.’ Like that’s not the point. It’s not about the work. I can tell when my work is good or bad, like that’s very obvious. But I want to know do you feel like I’m making the right kind of progress?”

Sandhya Hegde: These are the things I would like to know and it wasn’t easy to do this because you have to be vulnerable. You have to say stuff like, “Hey, I care about how you feel about me,” which is a vulnerable place to be. But when I worked up the courage to say it, it made a huge difference. Because you are vulnerable, the other person starts being more vulnerable. So yeah, if you feel like you’re with someone who’s not opening up, honestly the best thing to do is just be vulnerable with them and create that space for them to reciprocate.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: I like how she is… when she gave an example of being pretty direct about trying to get on the same page as her manager. How you do that is really up to you and your personality and how you feel comfortable. But just, I think, the essence of it is trying to understand, what about your manager? Do they like going for walks in their one-on-ones or do they prefer it to be a coffee? Or do they prefer it to be in a conference room? Trying to understand more about what their working style is will help you get on the same page for sure. It will break the ice initially and then you can get to the real stuff. Like what is important to them.

Rachel Jones: I think that comes back to even episodes that we’ve had about personality and communication and just knowing how to relate to individuals specifically. Because if you’re writing your manager these emails that are like, “How’s your weekend?” And all this extra stuff and they are only really reading it for that one bit of information. Knowing that is important. So yeah, just how this person relates. How do they like to show up in the office and how can that kind of inform the way that I’m building a relationship with them and aligning with them on the goals that we’re working towards? I think, yeah, getting to know them and their personality as a manager is really important.

Angie Chang: We’re hearing about this, as Sukrutha said, the personalities definitely shine through and being someone who’s always told that it’s hard to read my expression. I was like, “Oh yes.” So like having a person who is able to tell you, “Hey, you’re a little hard to read. Can you give me a little more? Or like how are you feeling?” And someone who like works with it instead of just getting offended and not asking the hard questions.

Gretchen DeKnikker: I really love that she brings up the concept of vulnerability. That’s in any relationship, right? The willingness to be vulnerable generally is going to bring out a different side in the person that you’re willing to sort of show that softer side to.

Angie Chang: It’s also like the willingness to do a little bit of work and ask more questions instead of just being like, “Well, my manager is not giving me what I want and I’m just going to be resentful.” And just actually like asking more questions to figure out what’s the working relationship going to be with this type of person. I’m sure there’s like professional tests that will then name this personality and give you hints on how to best interact with this type of person that you can investigate.

Gretchen DeKnikker: It’s also making me think about there’s this piece of software if you’re using Gmail for work – I think it’s called Crystal Knows – but you can go in and it’ll tell you actually how to communicate with that person through email. Like if you read mine it would be like, “Use short concise sentences, make your point quickly, don’t use a bunch of flowery language.” That sort of thing. And I thought it was pretty accurate, but it’s super interesting, and I think you can get it like an initial thing for free and then you have to pay, but it’s pretty amazing. Even if you just run it on your own inbox to see, “Oh yeah, that is like how I like to get emails.”

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yeah, it looks really good. I just Googled it, and I think I’d use it. One more thing that I’ve done, actually, is when I’ve gotten a new manager or I’ve been assigned to someone new or moved to a new org, I talk to people who reported to them for a long time to get a sense of what it’s like to report to them, what their managing style is. Just so that I’m better prepared. And that’s helped me so much to know what kind of things do they focus on from someone else’s perspective instead of just relying on how they represent to me.

Rachel Jones: So it’s nice having ideas for ways that you can build a relationship with your manager, but what do you do if you’re having a little more trouble navigating that relationship? Like how do you tell your manager that you need more from them?

Angie Chang: That’s a hard one because sometimes you realize that your manager has technically done it before but is not necessarily a good manager. So I am actually really interested to hear what Gretchen and Sukrutha have to say about working with your manager.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: I personally don’t think anyone is a perfect manager, so you know, how good that person is as a manager to you, I feel a lot of that is in your control. I also have had some good managers in the recent past, but I’ve also seen other people struggle to report to them. So just taking into my own hands and really, really focusing on the relationship and managing up. Like I said, doing my homework to get a sense of what it’s like from other people to report to them, what they like and what they don’t like. And whatever they don’t like, if that resonates with something I wouldn’t like, then I would figure out how I would work around it or improve that scenario. I haven’t had a situation in a really long time where things just aren’t working because I invest a lot very early on into the relationship. So, Gretchen, have you had a situation where despite investing energy and time into the relationship, it’s still wasn’t working?

Gretchen DeKnikker: Yeah, I think, I mean, my advice on that is don’t try to read somebody’s mind, but also when you’re trying to have this conversation of going in and if they’re like, “Yeah, that’s fine,” or whatever, and it feels like there’s something else going on, saying like, “I feel like this isn’t quite what you were looking for.” Or saying, okay–Or they’re like, “Yeah, that’s good.” But you don’t feel like they mean it. You know? It’s like, “Oh well, for next time, how could this be better?”

Gretchen DeKnikker: And really opening those things because sometimes your manager isn’t going to take the time, but you can obviously tell that they’re not happy with what you’re doing. I definitely had managers where I can just tell it’s time to over-communicate and to keep them updated on every step of the way that there’s something going on that maybe they don’t even know how to articulate themselves.

Gretchen DeKnikker: But then there are people that are just not people that you enjoy working with and that’s managers or colleagues or subordinates and at some point, there’s only so much you can do to kind of try to smooth that over and then you just either take that person at face value and accept that there are just times where things aren’t gonna work, or you, particularly if it’s a manager, going somewhere else where you just feel like… If you have a manager and you know that they are never going to lift you up. They are never going to put you center stage. They are always going to keep you in their shadow, and I’ve had those, and you have to move on. You absolutely have to move on. You cannot let someone steal your spotlight. Not on your career path.

Angie Chang: I think there’s things people could do if they’re in a bigger company to find a new manager or team or project to work on, hopefully. Being on a smaller startup, it’s nice to imagine, like what Sukrutha mentioned, finding other people that this person has like managed before. I was like thinking back on my tiny startups and like there was nobody that I can ask those questions to, so…

Gretchen DeKnikker: Well maybe not in that company, but definitely people… It’s not like they’ve never worked with anyone before. Right? So you definitely can go back. I’ve done that with a new person at a small company, and seeing if there was someone I could reach out to that they’d worked with before that could give me advice. You just have to approach it from a really positive angle of like, “Hey, I’m just trying to do really great. Like if you could give me three pieces of advice on how to be successful, what would you say?”

Sukrutha Bhadouria: That’s an interesting way of asking for constructive feedback about the person.

Angie Chang: So Sandy Lao, Head of Talent, Culture, and People Operations gave some tips on working with your manager during our dinner with HomeLight.

Sandy Liao: For us as a company, we started doing performance review on an annual basis and then we also do a year-end check-in. We want to understand, hey, even if it’s not a measurable bullet point percentage that we’re looking at, at least on a regular quarterly basis that you are speaking with your manager to talk about like, “Hey, I want to be able to achieve these five goals for the for the quarter. And are you able to do that?” At the end of the quarter, you guys should be sitting down, looking back at all the goals that you have set in this initially. And if you find out that hey, I’ve been able to achieve three out of those five goals, what can the company provide you? With what type of training or what are some of the resources for you to be able to hit the two bullet points in order for you to fulfill all of the achievement and goals that you had set initially.

Sandy Liao: So incorporating performance data is just crucial to the business, as well as yourself. So for any of you guys sitting here, if your manager has not spoken with you for the past quarter or past six months about how you’re doing from a performance standpoint, it’s just super, super important to like hold that in your hands and make that calendar invite and make them have that conversation. Right? Because especially working in a startup, these things kind of get out of hand when we’re trying to do like 100 things at once. But before any of us sitting here analyzing whether or not we’re excited to look for new opportunity or whatnot, it is just necessary to take that step to have that conversation with people that is mentoring you and that are working with you directly.

Angie Chang: I think she [inaudible 00:20:11] put that onus on people to come and tell their company what they need to succeed on the things they could improve on.

Rachel Jones: And using the data as the way to ask for it. Yeah. It’s like, “Okay, we set these goals and I didn’t meet two of them, so like, here’s what I need to meet the rest.” It’s an easier… If you’re able to kind of frame these conversations with your manager objectively, then that’s the way to navigate… If you just have a manager who has a troubling personality or communication style or other people have had difficulty working with them, really taking it back to this objective place of like, “We’re here to do this job. These are the goals along those lines and can you just tell me the extent to whether or not I’m fulfilling that”? I think being able to bring the conversation back to that is a way to navigate a more challenging relationship.

Angie Chang: It’s a good point. So, yeah, finding those, in this case she named five points every quarter, but whatever the companies set up is for those metrics that they’re trying to ask people to indicate in their performance reviews, of the self-performance reviews and using that as a way to advocate for things that you can get from your employer. Like more education, a conference ticket to go learn this thing or maybe you want to go to some kind of training group. There was some excellent t-groups for startups that I went to. Session where you can be with other startup leaders and talking through some of your management or other professional difficulties in a safer setting than your tiny startup.

Gretchen DeKnikker: I think that probably the hardest part of this bit of advice if you’re earlier in your career is you just may not know exactly what you need to hit those. And being able to articulate to your manager, this is exactly why. “If I had XYZ, then I feel like ABC would…” Right? Because I think the danger is you’re like, “Oh well if I had this one piece of software, right, that I could do this better. Or if I had an extra person I could do this better.” And those are hard cases to make to your manager, particularly if there’s an impression that you’re not hitting your goals already. And so you do want to be very specific on what it is that you’re asking for and what you think the ROI will be. Because a fuzzy ROI is a hard argument to make to a manager to get additional resources. Sukrutha, does this come up in a larger company context?

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Out of what Sandy said, I think the aspect about making sure that if your boss doesn’t bring up how you’re doing, it’s just as important… It’s equally your job to bring up how you’re doing. And Gretchen, like you said, all in your career, maybe you just don’t know how to identify what these goals are and where your goals can align with the larger organization goals. But I think that’s when you need to seek out people who are a year or two ahead of you in their career and talk to them. Try to build your resource group that way.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: And definitely I don’t think that your career growth is just fully your manager’s responsibility. It is just as much yours. And so if you don’t see those conversations coming up, you need to be bringing it up because I’m… As a manager, I can say I’m super excited and motivated to help people who seem like they want to be helped and who are motivated as well. It’s really difficult to grow someone’s career when they’re just not as motivated to do it. And that’s fine too. Sometimes people want to just stay at their level. That’s totally cool. But if you really want to grow, you want to be bringing it up a lot with your manager.

Gretchen DeKnikker: You know, I think what struck me in her comment was also if you haven’t talked to your manager in X number of months and you definitely want to be having more time with someone and making sure that you have those meetings. And like for me, advice I give to managers is that those one-on-ones are sacred and don’t move them and let the other person set the agenda. And not every manager shares that same philosophy. And you may have a manager that doesn’t look at it that way. But I always felt like I had a lot less fires and a lot less just random unexpected things happen if I kept my one-on-ones. And that also whoever knew that they had this time, my undivided attention, no one was allowed to interrupt and that I wasn’t going to move that meeting unless there was literally no other option.

Gretchen DeKnikker: And that they always had that time with me. And a lot of managers don’t do it that way. And if you have a manager like that, but if you can never get their time… This person has control of your career. And on some level, right? At least your advancement and of your visibility within the company. And if this person, if it seems like they’re investing in other people and not investing in you, rather than just being a manager who doesn’t really invest in anyone in their team, definitely think about, “Is this the right place for me? Is this the right path for me?” Because a manager can have a huge impact on your career and you don’t want to be begging for attention from someone who’s just really never going to give it to you.

Rachel Jones: Yeah. So Gretchen, you mentioned just how important that manager relationship can be for your career. How does that change as you progress in your career?

Gretchen DeKnikker: I think it changes because you start, you know, managing up and managing down as you progress in your career and you have to… I think you become a much better employee. I think someone said this on one of the dinners, you just become a much better employee once you become a manager because you realize like, “Oh, this is what a manager actually needs from me. And you become your manager’s best employee after you kind of figure that part out.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Vidya Setlur is a staff research scientist at Tableau Software. She spoke about this during an elevate conference last year.

Vidya Setlur: I have found personally that some of the best mentors that I’ve come across have been people who were my managers in the past, maybe at a different company or in a different line whom I have respected and trusted, but because they are not my manager anymore there is a different type of relationship where it can be more mentoring as opposed to managing. There’s a lovely inflection there that happens. So kind of seeking out into your network and finding those canonical examples of people that you’ve worked closely with or that managed you maybe directly or indirectly. And seeing if they can help mentor you in your next path or next effort.

Rachel Jones: Have any of you seen this happen during your career? Managers becoming mentors?

Angie Chang: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve definitely seen former, previous managers serving in mentorship capabilities. Our favorite, I feel like in Girl Geek’s dinners we hear about micro-mentorship quite often and getting really great pieces of actionable feedback or suggestions for future projects or career paths and potential career paths from former managers.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yeah, most of my former managers have turned into mentors. I reach out to them for various… With various questions about my career or just like… I’m sure, Gretchen, you have as well.

Gretchen DeKnikker: I keep really strong relationships with managers and they kind of do go on to be my mentor, as in they’re people that I go back to when I’m looking for a new job because… Not necessarily for them to hire me, but they know me so well and when I’m kind of trying to figure out what am I good at and what do I like doing and what direction might I go in. It’s someone who knows you really well to be able to kind of give their two cents, even if they haven’t been working with you recently. I mean, not all of your managers are like people that you want to necessarily keep taking advice from, but I think I’ve been really fortunate that most of my previous managers are people that I would want to, that I still do go back and be like, “I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up, help me.” And they do.

Angie Chang: That’s great.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: That’s really awesome.

Angie Chang: This is a great reminder of the importance of continuing to always try to find ways to do more. Like the woman from Amplitude said in figuring out the way to work with your manager, regardless of whether your personality is completely different, which is often the case in the world. Finding ways to ask more questions and figure out how to make your relationship work and benefit your career in the long run because it is your career that you need to own.

Gretchen DeKnikker: And I think it’s like any other relationship where you need to invest. You need to have candid conversations and to not think that somehow this relationship, because of the dynamic, isn’t something that should be managed like your others. With communication and understanding and clarifying questions. And that it’s not, like Sukrutha said, the manager’s responsibility solely. And that you definitely are half of the equation of the relationship.

Rachel Jones: Just knowing how awkward that transition into management can be for people. That’s definitely something to keep in mind when you’re working with your manager. Like a lot of people are put into this role without getting any kind of specific training or support on what it means to be a manager. And so keeping that in mind when you’re interacting with your managers or setting expectations for what that relationship should look like. I think, yeah. Definitely just focusing on the work that you have to do to maintain that relationship and drive your career forward and involve your manager in that.

Angie Chang: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Girl Geek X podcast. We’ll be back soon with more advice from women in tech. Be sure to like and review us on your podcasting service of choice, whether it’s iTunes or Google Play, Stitcher, or Spotify.

Rachel Jones: This podcast is produced by me, Rachel Jones with event recording by Eric Brown, and music by Diana Chow. To learn more about Girl Geek X or buy tickets to one of our dinners, visit girlgeek.io where you can also find full transcripts and videos from all our events.

Gretchen DeKnikker: This podcast was sponsored by Amplitude, a leader in product analytics, Amplitude provides digital product intelligence that helps companies ship great customer experiences for business growth.

Angie Chang: This podcast was sponsored by HomeLight, a Google-backed startup with a line of data-driven real estate products that empower people to make smarter decisions during one of life’s most important moments, buying or selling their home.

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Episode 14: Advocating For Others

Transcript:

Angie Chang: Welcome to Girl Geek X Podcast. Connecting you with insights from women in tech. This is Angie, founder of Girl Geek X and Women 2.0.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: This is Sukrutha. By day I’m an engineering manager.

Gretchen DeKnikker: This Gretchen, I’ve been working in tech for over 20 years.

Rachel Jones: This is Rachel, the producer of this podcast, and we’re the team behind Girl Geek X. This podcast brings you the best of Girl Geek X events, dinners, and conferences. Where we’ve been elevating women in tech for over 10 years.

Angie Chang: And today we’ll be discussing ally-ship.

Rachel Jones: So in our last episode we talked about how to advocate for yourself in your workplace. So this time we’re kind of reversing that and talking about how to advocate for others.

Angie Chang: To be honest, mostly we hear about girl geeks looking to advocate for themselves, but I think this message of advocating for others is really important for allies in the workplace. And also a really good reminder for people who are really feeling like they’re going into the arena every day to fight for their careers, but also they should be advocating for others around them. And I think people who are managers would be especially interested in this topic.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yeah. I think when you are someone who already has a seat at the table, it’s a good idea to look around and see how you can be an ally for someone else because you’re already in the room. And so, if this topic has come up at the Girl Geek dinner, it’s usually I’m the context of how can I find an ally. But a lot of times the answer does lead to how one can be an ally.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: So that’s been interesting to hear both perspectives. What do you think, Gretchen?

Gretchen DeKnikker: I think you can hone your skills on how to advocate for yourself by advocating for others. Sort of figuring out what is it that I can do for this other person? It’s sort of that same thing. Like when you sit and you’re like, “Okay, if I were sitting down with me right now, what advice would I give myself that I’m completely not taking right now?” And then how would that work?

Gretchen DeKnikker: And I think it’s very similar to that. And I agree with you, Sukrutha. I think, once you do have a seat at the table, you really need to be looking around and outside of the room of what other voices could be added to the mix of this table and how can we bring more marginalized voices to the center.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: I think that if we want to see more diversity in the room, we need to do our part, wherever we can. And if we see people who have a tendency to want to help us out, we should engage with them and ask them, like requesting someone to be an executive sponsor of your specific ERG. Or asking another ERG that’s made more advancements in terms of recruiting and diversity efforts. Asking them to support your ERG efforts.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: And on an individual level, I do think that I’ve gotten a lot of help from a variety of people who’ve been allies to me, and I’ve found that to be super useful. Just identify those people who are in that position and ask them for advice and ask them to vouch for you. What do you think, Angie?

Angie Chang: I do think in this kind of dog eat dog world that we feel like exists today, it’s really important to reach out and advocate for others. In doing so, you are kind of checking in and making sure that you understand what other communities’ needs are, desires, ways to grow, ways to help. And really listening to them and creating that line of communication and then advocating for them when you’re able to do that correctly, in the spheres that you can operate in.

Gretchen DeKnikker: I mean, I think when we think about ally-ship, right, it’s the key to lifting everyone up and to go back to something Rachel was saying in our intersectionality podcasts, which was great, you should listen to it, is when you lift up the most marginalized, when you solve the problems of the folks at the margins, you’re lifting up everyone. You’re solving the problems for everyone. So rather than solving the easy problems for the majority, solving the harder problems is actually the way forward.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Last episode we heard from former Salesforce EVP Leyla Seka on how to ask more for yourself and today we have a quote from her about showing up for others.

Leyla Seka: The reality is for a lot of women, the generation before me, specifically, they really yanked the ladders up after them. Because in lots of ways they were forced to make decisions like not having children or not having relationships or not taking care of aging parents or not doing these things in order to have a career, which, that’s a really terrible choice to have to make. And I am truly grateful to all of them because I didn’t have to make that choice and I credit them with a lot of that. But that mentality existed a lot throughout my career, just women not helping women as much as they should.

Leyla Seka: I’m now the executive sponsor of BOLDforce at Salesforce, which is our black employee resource group, so I spend a lot of time trying to understand what it feels like to be black in technology and black in America.

Leyla Seka: I don’t understand it, but I try to be an ally. So look, for me, and I think a lot of people said it in a lot of ways, but if we don’t help each other, a lot of these things aren’t going to change. And I think that for us, making time to mentor people and help people. Man, I wanted that going up, you know? Man, I wanted someone to talk to, that was a woman that could sort of empathize with being a mother and wanting to be very professionally successful.

Leyla Seka: And you have a platform, whether you think you do or you don’t. And I would actually even challenge you further to say like, how are you using your platform to help people? Are you sponsoring a woman of color? Are you trying to mentor a woman of color? Or are you thinking, even beyond just our own plight, the most important, equal pay, all of this was super important, but the work I’ve done with BOLDforce, in many ways, is probably some of the most cutting edge and interesting stuff we’re doing because we’re really trying to tackle the notion of ally-ship inside of corporate America. And we all can be allies. There’s always someone that can use your help. So it’s important to give that forward. I think that really helps you find your path as well.

Angie Chang: That just reminds me of how we have seen ally-ship from top company executives. Executives often being the white men, sure, but the best allies to sponsor women and other under-represented groups, ERGs, efforts such as Girl Geek dinners and Salesforce’s group. The best allies don’t necessarily come and talk, and they’re not necessarily speakers getting the limelight. But I feel like, I remember back to one of our earlier Girl Geek dinners and we had the CEO of Pinterest speak. And sure, he spoke for like five minutes in the beginning, but that wasn’t the important part. The part that really, I think, resonated for all of us who were there is that he stayed and listened and talked to people in the room until the very end of the event. He was there actively listening to the Girl Geeks and talking to them and mostly just listening and just, that participation, that kinda support just, felt was like really resonating to Pinterest. And I think they made at least one hire that for their engineering team that night, from that event, as a result.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: I do resonate really well with what Leyla brought up about how sometimes we feel like it’s really hard to challenge the patriarchy. I, myself, with situations that I’ve been, I’ve heard people say things and do things that have made me uncomfortable, but I don’t feel comfortable to bring it up right away or be an ally right away because it feels like I’m ruffling too many feathers too quickly, too soon. And so I also ease into it a bit. However, sometimes when you don’t act or you don’t step in when needed and you don’t support when needed, that’s another missed opportunity.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Have you all been in situations where you’ve had to deal that problem of the discomfort of challenging patriarchy or making changes to what’s already out there?

Gretchen DeKnikker: Well, first, ally is a verb and not a noun, right? Like you can call someone an ally, but if they’re not like practicing ally-ship, then they’re just sort of a figurehead. And so I think the way Leyla was speaking about her involvement with the Black ERG, I think that she’s definitely taking that as a verb.

Angie Chang: I think one thing that I’ve been working on is to just have a … So when someone does something say, patriarchal or sexist or racist is just react quickly. And so like anyone can just open their eyes more. Just like cough or hopefully give a signal to that person that doesn’t quite yet realize what they’re doing is not really okay.

Angie Chang: And hopefully, and then there’s like a lot of studies that are starting to trend toward, I believe, that previously for the last five years, we’ve thought that diversity inclusion training was going to be the salve to solve all our problems.

Angie Chang: And then more recently, I’ve heard a lot about training coworkers and people in the workplace to step in for others and react and defend underrepresented groups when they are being … Those thousand cuts that you receive in the workplace and helping make sure that someone’s stepping in for them. So just reacting in a small way at the very least, and then not necessarily saying we’re going to go protest on the streets tomorrow, but like sure. Like, start now by letting someone know that this, giving them a signal that this is not okay.

Rachel Jones: Yeah, I definitely agree. And I think it relates to how Leyla says anyone can be an ally. We all have a platform. Because I think sometimes when people hear ally-ship they think, yeah, it means they have to be on the front lines protesting or they have to be in a position where they can give someone a promotion that elevates them in their career. But it can definitely look like smaller ways that you’re supporting the people around you. And it can be something like language like we discussed or just speaking up if someone gets interrupted or seconding someone’s idea in a meeting to make them feel supported. There are just so many different ways that you can practice ally-ship.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: The other thing Leyla brought up, which I’ve felt personally too is you know, previously women wouldn’t show up for other women like they should have. How do you feel like you face that challenge? Because I know I’ve had to deal with situations where I don’t know why that would happen, but we weren’t really supporting each other enough at work.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: And sometimes I’d look around and be like, we’re just, we’re the only two women in this room, we should be helping each other out a little bit more instead of competing against each other. Has that happened to either of you?

Rachel Jones: Yeah, that’s definitely something that I’ve seen. Not even just with women but with race also. This is a conversation that happens a lot in the black community. This idea of like crabs in a barrel, where instead of lifting each other up, people can climb over each other to get to the top. But I think what’s really behind this is a sense of scarcity. When you feel like there’s only so much space for women or only so much space for people of color, then seeing another woman or another person of color can be like a threat to your own success.

Rachel Jones: So sometimes, yeah, you don’t want to reach out and see how you can lift someone else up because there’s only so much room at the level that you’re lifting someone to. And that’s definitely a sad reality. And I think a lot of the reason why the situation looks so different now than it was at the time that Leyla was describing, is because women still chose to lift each other up. And by doing that, it created more space. But I definitely can see, just that feeling of threat that can motivate someone to not want to do that work of being an ally.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Well, I think–Leyla and I are very close in age and, what it felt like at the time that it doesn’t anymore, I mean, I totally agree with the scarcity, but it was also like we were just trying to quietly be in the room. And it felt like if there was a woman that was going to come in and she was going to act more, I don’t know what, but like be more female in some stereotypical way, that had been somehow made us feel like we couldn’t behave in that way, that she was gonna make it worse for all of us.

Gretchen DeKnikker: And then also that idea of like, every single day, I need to not be any of those things. I can’t be emotional, I can’t be whatever, because I’m also representing all women on some level, was very much what it felt like. I mean this is like over 20 years ago, but I think that’s sort of what she is alluding to.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: That’s so fascinating to hear. I mean, luckily I’ve been experiencing the positive side of things when people are a bit more comfortable to be noticed as the woman in the room. But I do see traces of what you’re talking about still linger even now.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Yeah. And I mean I think it’s almost a reaction. Like, Leyla and I are similar in many ways, but definitely I think women our age were like, “You know what, I am so sick of this.” And so we did a 180 and were like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And, once there were a few more of us that were there, it was a little bit easier to do.

Rachel Jones: I think it’s great just hearing from this discussion how important ally-ship is, but what does it actually look like in practice? Have any of you seen examples of this in your careers?

Gretchen DeKnikker: At my last company we booked–we did a really large 10,000 person event and learning how to get more women on stage, more people of color on stage was a process. But I think like the proudest moment I had was when there was this very high power panel, like very, very important people in the Valley speaking on this panel and my boss insisted that, like he said that there would be no panels that didn’t have at least one woman on them. And this panel and he, because it was such a large conference, he would task the people on the panel with finding a woman to speak on the panel. And these people were like, “Nope, we can’t find one. We can’t find one, we can’t find one.” And I could hear this guy was like very pissed on the other end of the phone and he’s like, “Well then I’m going to cancel your panel.”

Gretchen DeKnikker: And this is a couple of days before the event. But my boss held his ground and they actually did find an amazing, amazing woman to speak on this panel. But for weeks and weeks before that, “Nope, there’s no one, there’s no one,” until their own egos were on the line. And if this had gone south, if they hadn’t found it, it would have been not good for my boss. Like, it would have really hurt some critical relationships that he needed. But he was willing to do that and I was like, “I don’t think I’ve ever been prouder,” like sitting and witnessing that because he was using personal capital along with his career capital to stick by something that he felt was right.

Angie Chang: I imagined, when I was previously working at a women’s coding bootcamp and helping women get hired by companies and them celebrating that they have hired, say this woman and potentially women from an underrepresented group. And then sure they’re hired, but sometimes they don’t get cultivated. And I think something’s really lost there when you hire and you celebrate that hire, but then you fail to actually develop that woman in her career, so she stays. That’s been a huge opportunity lost, in my opinion.

Angie Chang: So a few years ago, the Kapor Center had done a study on thousands of people that have left tech, and they found that the number one reason for people leaving the workplace is a perception of unfairness. This can be that they were passed over for a promotion when they saw other people around them, probably the male counterparts, white male counterparts, getting promoted. And so, just addressing this perception of unfairness in both the promotions and pay can really help retain women and underrepresented groups in tech.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Yeah, I mean, I think if you fail to foster a sense of belonging, particularly in this phase that we’re in right now where there’s actually a phrase, diversity hire, that’s a pejorative term of, “Oh well …” and taking away from people and being, “Oh well she was promoted because she was a woman.” Or, “That person was the less qualified candidate, but they were a person of color, so they got the role.” And there’s this whole sort of backlash that, whether or not that was the case in anyone being hired or whether or not that’s even something that should exist. Once you have folks there, if you don’t foster that sense of belonging, plus they’re already fighting this idea that maybe they didn’t earn their seat at this table, you’re going to lose people.

Gretchen DeKnikker: So it can’t just be getting more underrepresented candidates through the door. It’s how long can you keep them there? How do you change your workplace in a way where everyone is comfortable and feels valued?

Angie Chang: Yeah, I think belonging is definitely not any of the things that recruiters try to sell you. Like, we have foosball tables, ping pong tables, we have, what is that game, corn hole, super popular here and I don’t understand why.

Gretchen DeKnikker: It’s the worst named game ever. So bad.

Angie Chang: Belonging is about involving and inviting people to the table, to projects, to dinners, to enjoy their lives and learn from each other. I feel like yes, we definitely need to do more, all of us, to help people feel included and that they are really rewarded and learning and contributing to what we’re working on.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Rachel, I’d love to hear your thoughts on belonging.

Rachel Jones: So we’ve talked about this in a lot of different ways, in episodes that we’ve had, like with tech leavers and with inclusion and our intersectionality episode. I think doing that work just to listen to people and find out what they need and then challenging yourself to do the work. I think that’s also the difference between yes, celebrating a hire versus celebrating someone staying. It’s easy to get people in, but making them stay takes more than just talking about it. You have to be ready to make that systemic, hard change within your institutions to be able to create a place that people want to stay in.

Angie Chang: So from the intersectionality side, I think when we talk about women and then we talk about women of color and how, as I mentioned, I’ve heard more than one story of a woman being hired to a top tech company and then just being left to sit there for years without proper management and then expecting women to just rise to the occasion or advocate for herself, I think, is an unfair expectation. And people around this woman, women actually, there’s quite a few of them, should definitely speak up and help people get out of that situation.

Angie Chang: Erica Weiss Tjader, VP of Product Design at SurveyMonkey, shared an example of a male ally she had during our dinner with SurveyMonkey.

Erica Weiss Tjader: Unlike mentors, allies are not big investments in relationships over time. They are episodic, they are based on a specific purpose at a specific place in time. And as a result, they can have a really, a much bigger impact on something you’re trying to achieve at the time.

Erica Weiss Tjader: And so a good example that I thought of is in a previous role I was the design leader of a smaller team and one of my biggest challenges that I was facing was making inroads with our engineering leadership around the notion of the importance of front end development, design systems, some of the topics that design leaders and engineering leaders often talk about. And I was having a hard time getting traction and it was one of those tough problems because it was probably the most important thing to my team, and yet the thing I had the least direct control over. This was an example, like I have to influence because I don’t own the answer to the problem.

Erica Weiss Tjader: And so this particular ally was a new engineering manager that joined the organization. And in my initial meet and greet with him, I learned that he had some expertise around developing front end teams and design systems and sort of an interest. And perhaps most importantly I learned that he had a personal relationship with our CTO, who was the person I was having the hardest time making inroads with [crosstalk 00:22:44], that they were personal friends. [crosstalk 00:22:45] It wasn’t, no, it’s a different story. I’ve got a lot of stories.

Erica Weiss Tjader: And so what I did is, like I really just started out by befriending this guy. I’m like, I’m going to make your transition into this company really easy. I’m going to introduce you to people. I’m going to tell you all the secrets. You know, we had lunches, we had coffees, we started to build a relationship and in a very short period of time, we were able to transition that relationship into finding a mutually beneficial place where he was able to leverage his expertise and his influence in the engineering organization to start a front end team. And I was able to give him disproportionately more resources and support from the design team to really prove the value and success of that.

Erica Weiss Tjader: I think it’s just a great example of an alliance that was very intentional but looked very different than a mentorship relationship, because it was really about a place and a time and a need and a relationship, right in that moment.

Rachel Jones: So I think this is interesting. This is the discussion of ally-ship is different than the rest of our conversation. What do you all think about that?

Angie Chang: I think what I got from that is thinking about things more episodically than long term. And we’ve definitely also talked about mentorship and sponsorship, well mentorship, as something that can be episodic where you are just asking questions of a person and and gaining knowledge and finding micro mentorship. So I think she’s talking about micro ally-ship, and how you can find your answers and make those relationships work for you. What do you think?

Gretchen DeKnikker: You know, she figured out a way to not only sort of leverage that, but also a lot of times in our career we find ourselves having to influence without having any authority. And particularly in the middle of your career, you’re going to spend a lot of time trying to sort of leverage the people around you, figure out what their interests are and figure out what you can do in exchange for them, so that you can sort of get them in your camp to help you with your things that you’re trying, your particular initiatives.

Gretchen DeKnikker: And I think hers is a great example, particularly where she had a weak tie to someone, the CTO, that she needed a stronger tie with, but was able to sort of offer a lot in return.

Rachel Jones: I really liked this quote because I think somewhat in our conversation and a lot of times when people think about being an ally, it gets framed and people think it’s about like making someone feel better or like feel included or feel supported. But I really like what Erin says, because it’s not just about how people feel in a space, it’s also about being strategic and getting things done.

Rachel Jones: And I think, yes, thinking about ally-ship in terms of how can I do my best work and really make what I’m doing the best it can be, you’re thinking about forming alliances not just in terms of identity but in terms of skills and roles and influence and what people can really bring to support your growth and yeah, the projects that you have going on.

Rachel Jones: So I think, yeah, that’s an interesting way to think about this topic.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: I genuinely like how she called out the importance that she saw in befriending someone who she was having the hardest time making a connection with. And I’ve found that when people start to view you as a person, not as an employee or as a team member or as head count, they are more likely to then listen to you and discuss ways where you can have a mutually beneficial relationship.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: And then you can make changes and be a better ally or get the ally-ship aspect from that other person. If they continue to view you as a number, there’s no chance of that happening. I think that regardless of whether you want someone to be an ally to you or not, or you want to be an ally to them, you have to have some sort of a common ground with them and do what she did, where she said she had lunches and coffees with the person and worked on building the relationship, and very quickly you’ll see results I bet.

Gretchen DeKnikker: I really liked that you picked this one, Rachel, because it’s sort of an example of, it doesn’t have to be a hierarchical power structure for someone to be an ally and to be able to sort of open doors, that it can be your peers from a reporting hierarchy standpoint, but that there’s still a lot that you can get, even if the power dynamic doesn’t seem to be what you would think of, in this sort of traditional ally-ship.

Rachel Jones: So what advice would you give to someone who’s trying to think of ways that they can be an ally?

Sukrutha Bhadouria: I feel like when we’re considering what our goals are at work, we should also consider in those goals what are the wins that we want to see in someone else that we influenced. And so, something like that would then, or just to look around, find people that need allies, find groups that need allies and actually help out.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: If, in your regular goals and accomplishments, you also considered how you are making other peoples’ efforts better and how you are helping someone else’s success as part of your success, I really feel like it can go a long way.

Angie Chang: I think back to when I was in the workplace, what are things that made me feel like people were being allies? It’s the little things, like who you ask to go to lunch or happy hour with. For some reason it always made me feel really butt hurt when people were inviting other people to go and I was not part of that crew. So I think just … And then now everyone goes to soul cycle together or … I just feel like there’s so many ways to leave people out and if we want to keep people in this industry for the long run, we have to be more inclusionary in who we make friendships with over time really, and kind of like involved in these little things.

Gretchen DeKnikker: That’s a great lead into our next quote from Erin Dees who’s a principal software engineer at Stitchfix. She did a talk on Dossiers of Awesome, one way to help folks get the recognition they deserve, which honestly you guys should go watch it. It’s probably one of the best Girl Geek presentations that we’ve ever had and she gave some tips on supporting others and here’s what she had to say.

Erin Dees: How many of us are in a job where we are expected to give feedback on our peers regularly? It’s exhausting. It takes forever to write and by the time you’ve done your fourth or fifth one, it’s hard to come up with something that is unique and that could only apply to that engineer. It should be something that we keep up with in little increments throughout the year, instead of having a big deadline dropped on us. And again, it should be actionable. It should give our peers information that they can use to grow their career.

Erin Dees: So one idea had been sitting right in front of me this whole time, which is an engineering journal. So in addition to what I’d worked on, I might add a couple of bullet points that a teammate worked on and tag them with a hashtag which comes in handy later.

Erin Dees: So then, if you’re in a culture that does sort of quarterly feedback cycles, when it comes time to do this, I can click on that person’s tag in my journaling software. Now then what you do with this information depends a lot about your feedback culture. If you’re in a place where you’re expected to write your own review for starters, a self review, you can give your peers the ammo, the raw material that they can use to write their self review. So here’s what that might look like. You can compose an email and if your manager is someone who is supportive, write it to them and cc your friend. And this now tells them a story. If they’ve been waiting for like a great opportunity to write a promotion pitch for this engineer, you’ve just given them all this ammo. There’s a lot of cultural pressure on us not to brag and we should fix that too. But if this is all stuff that happened, this isn’t bragging, it’s data. So it’s a good idea to share it with, again if you have a supportive manager, and with your peer.

Erin Dees: So how to make this feedback actionable so that somebody can act on it and grow their career. One way to do this is to work these data points into a story so it’s not just data, it’s a narrative. And what this looks like, for example, if you start noticing this person developing or showing an aptitude and interest in tech leadership, is to call that out and say, “Hey, maybe it’s maybe it’s time to start handing this engineer larger projects and have them run bigger initiatives. They seem to have a knack for it.”

Rachel Jones: What do you think of Erin’s advice, to use peer feedback as an opportunity to lift others up?

Angie Chang: Feedback is such a gift. I think, definitely if you are able to give actionable feedback to help people grow, it’s a great thing to do.

Gretchen DeKnikker: I think what makes it so powerful is, it’s this very simple way of keeping track of your own accomplishments and other people’s, but also being able to see that over time in this way that isn’t super cumbersome, and I love, oh, I can’t, what’s the exact quote? This isn’t bragging, it’s data, which I just think is so amazing, especially given how women sort of have a hard time … I hate making those sweeping statements, but how often women feel like talking about their accomplishments is bragging, and sort of brings this full circle back to what I was saying earlier, that it’s often easier to be an advocate for someone else than to be an advocate for yourself. But what’s so brilliant about Erin’s little system that she has going, is that it allows you to do both.

Rachel Jones: This makes me think back to our last episode where we had the quote from Arquay Harris, encouraging you to keep a record of what you’ve done, your accomplishments big and small. And I really like this idea from Erin, that it doesn’t just have to be yourself that you’re doing that for, but you can provide that for other people and that can be a tool for them to advocate for themselves. I think that’s really powerful.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yeah. So when I’ve had consultations with people to help them advocate for themselves, I’ve asked them what is it that they want to be known for? And through that, we then come up with ways in which they can, if they find that there are areas of improvement for them, they could focus on that. But if they find they’re already doing what it is that they want to be known for, how they can find various forums to advocate for themselves. Are there show and tells where they can present what they’ve worked on? Are there meetings where I can pull them in and have them speak about what it is that they worked on, instead of me representing them?

Sukrutha Bhadouria: So we come up with various ways where they can be recognized for what they want to be recognized for. Where, when someone thinks about a particular area or a particular feature, this person is who comes to mind. I don’t need to take all the credit and be the face of everything, and there’s no benefit in doing that. And so that’s how I … If I have control over it, if they’re working on a team of mine, that’s where I pull in other people to speak as opposed to me representing for the whole team. I know I learned this from my boss because he always gave me opportunities to come in and speak, no matter how senior the rest of the audience was.

Gretchen DeKnikker: I think that’s like the perfect definition of ally-ship. First listening, but then also not, if you have the mic, not speaking on someone else’s behalf, but handing the mic over and creating that opportunity for that person to speak for themselves.

Rachel Jones: Just be the advocate that you would want for yourself if you find yourself wishing you had someone to speak up for you or shout you out. Or wishing you had a little help, think about that next time that you have the opportunity to do that for someone else.

Angie Chang: Great reminder to continue to speak up and think about ways to help others in your career. Whether your title has manager in it or not.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yeah, give other people a chance to represent the work that they’ve done, help them be better at speaking for themselves about themselves.

Gretchen DeKnikker: I think keeping in mind that that ally is a verb, it’s an action, it’s listening and it’s creating opportunities. But it’s also understanding that doing nothing is doing something. That if you’re not actively trying to break down some of the patriarchal and racial and the endless list of issues that we have, that you are participating in it continuing.

Angie Chang: Yes, complicity is not great.

Angie Chang: So thanks for listening to this episode of the Girl Geek X podcast. We’ll be back soon with more advice from women in tech. Please rate and subscribe to Girl Geek X podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and Google Play.

Rachel Jones: This podcast is produced by me, Rachel Jones with event recording by Eric Brown and music by Diana Chow. To learn more about Girl Geek X or buy tickets to one of our dinners, visit girlgeek.io where you can also find full transcripts and videos from all of our events.

Angie Chang: This podcast is sponsored by SurveyMonkey. SurveyMonkey is a leading global survey software on a mission to power the curious. The company’s people powered data platform empowers over 17 million active users to measure and understand feedback from employees, customers, website and app users and the market.

Angie Chang: This podcast is also sponsored by Stitch Fix, the online personal styling service for men, women, and kids, that is blending art and science to redefine the retail industry, with a mission to change the way people find clothes they love by combining expert styling, proprietary technology and unique product to deliver a deeply personalized shopping experience.

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“Enterprise to Computer (a Star Trek Chatbot)”: Grishma Jena with IBM (Video + Transcript)

Speakers:
Grishma Jena / Cognitive Software Engineer / IBM
Sukrutha Bhadouria / CTO & Co-Founder / Girl Geek X

Transcript:

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hi everyone, I hope you’ve been having a great day so far. Hi, Grishma. Hi, so yes, we are ready for our next talk. I’m Sukrutha and Grishma is here to give the next talk. Just before we get started, the same set of housekeeping rules. First is, we’re recording. We’re gonna share in a week. Please post your questions, not in chat, but in the Q and A. So you see the Q and A button at the bottom? Click on that and post there. If for some reason we run out of time, and we can’t get to your questions, we’ll have a record of it and it’s easy for us to find later and get you your answers later.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: So please share on social media #GGXelevate and look for job postings on our website at girlgeek.io/opportunities. We’ve also been having, throughout the day, viewing parties at various companies. So shout-out to Zendesk, Strava, Guidewire, Climate, Grand Rounds, Netflix, Change.org, Blue Shield, Grio, and Salesforce Portland office.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: So now, on to Grishma. Grishma is a cognitive software engineer at IBM. She works on the data science for marketing team at IBM Watson. So today her talk is about Enterprise to Computer: a Star Trek chatbot. I’m sure there’s a lot of Star Trek fans out there because I know I am one, and I can’t wait to hear about your talk, Grishma.

Grishma Jena: Thank you, Sukrutha.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Go ahead and get started. You can share your slides.

Grishma Jena: Okay, I’m gonna minimize this. Alright, can you see my slides? Okay. Hi, everyone, I’m Grishma. As Sukrutha mentioned I work as a cognitive software engineer with IBM in San Francisco. So, a lot of my job duties involve dealing with a lot of data, trying to come up with proprietary data science or AI solutions for our Enterprise customers. My background is in machine learning and natural language processing which is why I’m talking on a chatbot today.

Grishma Jena: I’ve also recently joined this non-profit called For Her, where we’re trying deal with creating a chatbot that could act as a health center, as a resource center for people who are going through things like domestic abuse or sexual violence so I’m very interested to see you know, a totally different social application of chatbot. But for today we’ll focus on something fun. And before I begin, a very happy Women’s Day to all of you out there. So, yeah.

Grishma Jena: When was the last time you interacted with a chatbot? It could have been a few minutes before, when, you know, Akilah was talking and your Alexa probably got activated by mistake and you had to be like, “Alexa, stop.” It could be with Siri. We interact with Siri every day. It could be on a customer service chat or it could be on a customer service call.

Grishma Jena: Basically, there are so many different avenues and applications of chatbots today that sometimes it’s even hard to distinguish if are we talking to a human. Is it a chatbot in disguise of a human? And it’s quite interesting to see where chatbots have come in the past few years.

Grishma Jena: So, this was a grad school project that we did. Our idea was, okay, chatbots are amazing. We really like that they help take some of the workload off humans, but how can we make them seem a little more human, a little less mechanical? Could we give them some sort of a fun personality?

Grishma Jena: And we brainstormed for a bit and we finally came up with the idea, hey, why don’t we, I mean … Well, to be honest we weren’t that big fans of Star Trek, but we did become one during the course of this project and we were like, “Okay, let’s think of Star Trek”. It has a wide fan base and let’s try to not pick one single character from Star Trek but let’s take all of the characters and make this huge mix of references and trademark dialogues and see what kind of personality the chatbot would have.

Grishma Jena: So, like I mentioned, the motivation was to make a chatbot a little more human-like. And we wanted to have a more engaging user experience. So the application of this could be, it doesn’t have to be something related to, you know, like an entertainment industry. It could be also something like a sports lover bot so that would be very chatty and extroverted and it would support your favorite sports team. Or it could be something a little more sober like a counselor bot who is very understanding and supportive and listens to you venting out or asks you about how your day was. So yeah, we chose Star Trek infused personality.

Grishma Jena: So our objective with Star Trek was wanted it to incorporate references from the show. [inaudible 00:05:17] wanted to [inaudible 00:05:20] Spock and live long and prosper. We wanted it to be data driven model, we did not want to feed in dialogues we wanted it to just feed in a corpus and have it generate dialogues on its own. We obviously wanted it to give interesting responses and to have the user engaged because that is one of the things that a chatbot should do, right? So in really simple words, just think of a friend of yours or it could be yourself who is this, you know, absolutely big fan of Star Trek and just transfer that personality to a chatbot.

Grishma Jena: So this is what the schema of our bot look like. We had the user utterance which is basically anything that you say or that you provide as input to the chatbot. And then we had a binary classifier. I’ll delve deeper into why exactly we wanted it, but the main point is that we wanted it to be able to distinguish whether what you’re saying to the chatbot is it something related to Star Trek or is it something a little more general conversation like, “How are you feeling today?” Or “What is the weather like?” And depending on that we had on that we had two different routes which the bot would take to generate a response.

Grishma Jena: So before we begin, we obviously need some sort of data and we decided that we would take all of the data that was available for the different Star Trek movies and the TV series. You’d be surprised at how little data is available, actually. We initially thought of just doing a Spock bot, but Spock himself has very limited dialogues so we just expanded our search to the entire Star Trek universe. And that’s why we took dialogues from movies, TV series. We didn’t want to have any sort of limitations as far as the data was concerned. We ended up with about a little over 100,000 pairs of dialogues.

Grishma Jena: Then we also went and got this database, which is known as the Cornell Movie Database. This database was created by Cornell University, which has a collection of raw movie scripts. It’s just a really good data set to train your bot on, the way how humans interact and what kind of topics they talk about, what are the responses like.

Grishma Jena: And finally, we also had a Twitter data set because we wanted some topics that were related to the ongoing affairs in the world, the current news topics. Because we envisioned that if you had a chatbot then people do like to talk to the chatbot or ask for the chatbot’s opinion on something that’s happening in real time.

Grishma Jena: So the very first component of a chatbot was having a binary classifier. Like I mentioned, we had two different routes for our chatbot. One would be the Star Trek route and the other would be a general conversation route. So we had the binary classifier that would help us distinguish whether whatever the user is uttering or whatever the user is giving as an input is it related to Star Trek or is it general conversation which was getting handled by the Cornell Movie Database. So we used an 80:20, that is the training data set and the testing data set split. And the features that we used were we took the top 10,000 TF-IDF unigrams and bigrams.

Grishma Jena: TF-IDF stands for tone frequency and inwards document frequency. Tone frequency is nothing but how many times a given word occurs in your corpus and inverse document frequency,, it’s kind of a weight that is attached to a word. So think of a textbook or think of a document that you have. Words like prepositions, like the, of, and would occur multiple times. But really words that would be important that would have some sort of conceptual representation, perhaps like the topic of it. Compared to it would be a little rare in occurrence, compared to prepositions, compared to commonly used words, and that’s why they should be given more weightage. So that’s the whole idea behind TF-IDF.

Grishma Jena: Unigrams and bigrams are nothing but you divide the entire document that you have into words. An unigram would be one [bit kilo word inaudible 00:09:17] bigram would be a set of two consecutive words that occur in the document. There’s an example later on in the slide to explain it better. Stop words, when consider stop words are just filler words like I mentioned similar to the prepositions. And we were very happy with the performance of the binary classifier. We were able to get a 95% accuracy on the test set, and we decided that is good enough, let’s move on to the next one.

Grishma Jena: And finally, this is the main core of it, where deep learning comes into play. So with deep learning, we used a model called a Seq2seq which is a particular type of recurrent neural network. So if you can see the image on the right, it is a simplified version of a neural network where you give it an input and it gets an output and that output is also the input for the next cycle, so it’s kind of like a feedback looping mechanism.

Grishma Jena: First, the specific type of neural network that we use, Seq2seq. It was just two recurrent neural networks so just think of a really big component that has two smaller components, which is an encoder and a decoder.

Grishma Jena: So the encoder actually takes in the input from the user and tries to provide some sort of context. What do the words mean? What exactly is the semantics behind the sentence that the user has given? And the decoder generates the output based on the context that it has understood and also based on the previous inputs that were given to it, which is where the feedback mechanism comes into play.

Grishma Jena: So just to go a little deeper into it. This is a representation of what a Seq2seq with encoder and decoder would look like. So the input over here would be, “Are you free tomorrow?” and the encoder takes in that input and tries to understand what exactly is the context or the meaning of this sentence. And finally the decoders understands, okay, this is something someone is asking about either they want to take an appointment or someone’s availability or someone’s schedule. And that’s where the reply is something like, “Yes, I am. What’s up?”

Grishma Jena: So these are some statistics about how exactly we went on training this on AWS. We used a p2.xlarge instance with one Nvidia Accelerator GPU and then we had the Star Trek Seq2seq. So we had one Seq2seq for just Star Trek dialogues and we had another one, the Cornell Seq2seq which is on Cornell data, which is more for just a general conversation purpose.

Grishma Jena: So we went ahead, we generated some sentences, but then we realized that the ones for Star Trek were really good because you’re giving it Star Trek as input so obviously the output is also going to be Star-trekky. But for the general conversation ones, for things like, “What is the weather like?”, “How are you doing today?”, “What is the time?” it was a little difficult for us because obviously the input is not Star Trek related, right? So the output also wouldn’t be Star Trek related, but we wanted this to be a Star Trek chatbot.

Grishma Jena: So we brainstormed a bit and we thought, “Hey, why don’t we try something called a style shifting?” Which is basically like you take a normal sentence, a sentence from the general conversation, and you try to shift it into the Star Trek domain.

Grishma Jena: And the way we did this was, we went through the entire corpus, the data set for Star Trek, and we created a word graph out of it. A word graph would be, just think of it as you pass different sentences in the data set and each of the words would form a node and the edges between them would tell how they occurred in relation to one another. So if they occurred right next to each other or within the same sentence.

Grishma Jena: And along with the words in the node we also had a part of speech tag. So we indicated whether it was an adjective, or a noun, or a pronoun or a conjunction. So let’s say for example our sentence was, “Live long and prosper.” You break it down into four words which are the four different nodes and then we label them with a different part of speech tag and we connected them because they come one after the other in the sentence.

Grishma Jena: So what we did, was after we built out this really huge word graph, we looked it up to insert what could be appropriate words between two given words in the input. So once we had the sentence we would check for every two words in the sentence and see what are the words that we could insert in between to give it more of a Star Trek feel to it to just, you know, shift the domain into Star Trek.

Grishma Jena: We went ahead and we did that and these were the kind of results that we got. “I am sorry” was the input and then the word graph went ahead and inputted “Miranda” at the end. “I will go” and then it inputted “back” at the end of the sentence because “go” and “back” kind of occur very commonly with each other. And similarly for the start of the sentences, it tried to input names like “Uhura” or “Captain”. So one thing we noticed was it really good at inputting names at the start and the end of the sentence and using the character names from the show did end up giving it a slightly more Star Trek feel than before.

Grishma Jena: So we went ahead and we just randomly tried to insert words that occurred more frequently between two words but then we realized that some of the sentences were ungrammatical. So what do we do? We came up with this idea of let us use the word graph as it is and then let’s take some sort of a filter to our responses. So, like I said, we realized that the word graph was giving a few incoherent and incorrect responses. What we did was we went ahead and constructed an n-gram model.

Grishma Jena: So n over here would be unigram, bigram, trigram. You can see the example over here if n is equal to one, which is an unigram, you break down the sentence into just different words so “this” would be one unigram “is” would be another unigram. If n is two, which a bigram, you would take two words that co-occur together. So in this case the first bigram would be “This is,” second one would be “is a” and then similar for trigram it would be “This is a” and then “is a sentence”.

Grishma Jena: So we created an n-gram model which was just to understand what exactly is the kind of dataset that Star Trek has. And then finally we wanted to get a probability distribution over the sequence of words that we have had.

Grishma Jena: So once we get this, we start to filter the responses and we ran the sentences using the bigram models that we trained on the Star Trek data set. Because of this we kind of got a reference type for seeing that what structures are grammatically correct. We went ahead and we get them and the ones that were a little odd sounding or that didn’t really occur anywhere in the data set we went ahead and removed them.

Grishma Jena: Another metric that we used for this was perplexity. So just think of perplexity as some sort of an explainability metric. We went ahead and used that which would help us tell how well a probability distribution was able to predict it.

Grishma Jena: Finally, we have all of the things in place and we have to evaluate the performance of the chatbot. So we came up with two categories of evaluation metrics. The first one was quantitative metrics where we used perplexity, which was mentioned on the first slide. And the second one was we wanted to see often was it using words that were very particular to Star Trek that you don’t really use in normal day life, you know, like maybe spaceship or engage.

Grishma Jena: And the second category was human evaluations where we got a bunch of, user group and we asked them to just read the input and the output and see how good it was in terms of grammar. If the response actually made sense, if it was appropriate. And finally, on the Star Trek style. Just how Star-trekky did it sound?

Grishma Jena: And, we also came across another bot online which is called as a Fake Spock Pandora Bot which was contrary to the way we had. Our bot was data driven this was rule based so it was actually given an input of human generated responses.

Grishma Jena: We wanted to see how good would a data driven model perform as compared to a human generated one. So this is just what the Fake Spock Pandora Bot looked like. And these were the kind of responses that the Pandora Bot gave. If you said, “I’m hungry, Captain” it said, “What will you be eating?” So it’s giving really good appropriate responses because humans were the back end for this.

Grishma Jena: And then, what we did was we went ahead and evaluated the results. And we saw that our bot was performing better for Star Trek style and it also was a little more coherent. For grammar, Pandora Bot was much better and that’s not surprising because humans were the ones who actually wrote it out. For perplexity, the Star Trek perplexity started dialogues were 65, so that was our baseline number and we figured out that the kind of responses our bot was generating that are 60, 60.9 was a little closer compared to Pandora was like, way far off at 45.

Grishma Jena: So we were pretty happy with our performance. I’m just gonna give you a few examples of what the different bots generated. So the yellow ones are the Pandora Bot and the blue ones are the E2Cbot. So let’s see, if the user says, “Beam me up, Scotty” the yellow one, that is the Fake Pandora Bot, gives, “I don’t have a teleportation device” which is a good answer. And the blue one is, “Aye, Sir” which is also a good answer. A little curt, but nothing wrong with it.

Grishma Jena: In the second example if you see our bot answered, “Bones, I like you.” So the “Bones” part is actually come from the word graph which gives it a little more of a Star Trek feel. And the last one over here is the Fake Bot, the human generated one, just says, “I am just an AI chatting on the internet” which is kind of not the response that you are looking for.

Grishma Jena: A few more examples over here. The user says, “My name is Alex” and then the Fake Spock Bot says, “Yes, I know Christine.” I just told you my name was Alex, why would you call me Christine? But our bot says, “What do you want me to do, Doctor?”, which is a better response. And, yeah, these are the kind of responses.

Grishma Jena: I think some of our human focus group people said that they might be correct, appropriate responses, but they might not be factually correct, which was a challenge for us, as well as for the Fake Spock Bot. We didn’t really delve deeper into it because that would kind of dive more into having a question answering system and trying to check if it’s factually correct or not but we tried to make our focus group users understand that it’s just a bot at the end of the day.

Grishma Jena: So finally, we were able to generate Star Trek style text. We were very happy with that, we were able to use the data driven approach which meant we could automate it. And we did figure that it performed better than the human generated responses that Pandora Bot would give, at least on style and at least on the appropriateness. It still needs a little bit of improvement in grammar but we were pretty happy with it.

Grishma Jena: So that’s me. Live long and prosper. And feel free to reach out to me on Linkedin or on Twitter if you have any questions about this. Thank you.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you, Grishma. This was great. So just to close I just wanted to mention to everybody that you actually sent your speaker submission to us and that’s how we got connected. So thank you for doing that. We got a lot of comments from people who are Star Trek fans, but yeah, what inspired you to build this project?

Grishma Jena: Yes, so this was actually a grad school project. We were taking a deep learning course so all of us had to build a chatbot as an Alexa skill. We brainstormed a lot, and we actually thought that Spock because Star Trek has a really huge fan base so Spock would be a good idea to do. But Spock had very little dialogue in all of the movies and the television series and then we were like, “You know what, let’s not stick to just one character, let’s have the entire Star Trek universe.” And, the bonus was that during my semester, I could continuously binge watch Star Trek and say that, “Yeah, I’m doing research because I want to see how well my chatbot works,” but I was just binge watching to be honest.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Nice. That’s awesome. Well, thank you so much, Grishma, for your time. We really appreciate it and for your enthusiasm in signing up through our speaker submissions.

Grishma Jena: Thank you so much, Sukrutha.

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Girl Geek X Zendesk Lightning Talks & Panel (Video + Transcript)

Like what you see here? Our mission-aligned Girl Geek X partners are hiring!

Gretchen DeKnikker, Sukrutha Bhadouria

Girl Geek X team: Gretchen DeKnikker and Sukrutha Bhadouria welcome the crowd to Zendesk Girl Geek Dinner in San Francisco, California. 

Speakers:
Shawna Wolverton / SVP, Product Management / Zendesk
Swati Krishnan / Software Engineer / Zendesk
Erin McKeown / Director, Engineering Risk Management / Zendesk
Alethea Power / Staff Software Engineer, Site Reliability / Zendesk
Eleanor Stribling / Group Product Manager / Zendesk
Sukrutha Bhadouria / CTO & Co-Founder / Girl Geek X
Gretchen DeKnikker / COO / Girl Geek X

Transcript of Zendesk Girl Geek Dinner – Lightning Talks & Panel:

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Welcome to the Zendesk sponsored Girl Geek dinner tonight. I’m Sukrutha. This is Gretchen. Thanks for joining us. I love all the color around. I love your hair, lovely lady. Anyway, a little bit … you also, all of you. I quickly want to recap what Girl Geek X is. So why you see that up there, Girl Geek X is an organization with Angie, Gretchen, and I working to make it easier for women and people who identify as women or anything you want to identify yourself as, anyone, to come and network outside of work, find out more about other companies that have a great culture and have really, really innovative products, such as Zendesk. At dinners like these, you have the first and the third hour reserved for networking, so I hope you’ve been chatting away and making connections so when you actually want to work at the company or apply there, it makes it easier. It’s like you have inside information.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Zendesk has sponsored a few times before so they’ve been such a great ally and with Shawna working here now. We used to work together before. Not directly but in my head we did work directly. So when she reached out to us we were super excited that we’d have another Zendesk dinner coming up. Today, we do not just dinners. Once we hit the 10 year mark with Girl Geek X, we started doing virtual conferences, which we’ve had two so far. We also have a podcast so search for Girl Geek X and we’re looking for more ideas on topics so listen to what we have and suggest topics. Sign up for our mailing list through our website, girlgeek.io. We also launched our swag store today so–

Gretchen DeKnikker: Did you guys see it?

Sukrutha Bhadouria: You did?

Gretchen DeKnikker: That’s so cute. It’s one of these little guys.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yeah, so Gretchen’s nicknamed those characters pixies because they’re pixelated.

Gretchen DeKnikker: It’s a great name so it’s not just that I nicknamed [inaudible].

Sukrutha Bhadouria: So please share on social media tonight everything that you see here, eat, listen to, learn. The hashtag for tonight is Girl Geek X Zendesk and that’s enough from me. This is Gretchen, like I said.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Okay, Sukrutha said everything we always say except for, please join me in welcoming the amazing Shawna Wolverton.

Shawna Wolverton: Thank you. I am just so incredibly impressed with what these women have built over 10 years. I was looking at their site today. Over 200 dinners. This is an amazing organization and we’re incredibly honored to host tonight. A little food, a little networking and hopefully, maybe, you’ll even learn a few things. We have an agenda because this is what we do at Zendesk. Everything starts with an agenda. We have checked in. That’s good. We ate. We all successfully avoided the caution tape, so it’s a classy establishment here at Zendesk. And we’re going to do some lightning talks and then stick around, we’re going to do a big group picture and then, there’s a whole other hour after we talk at you for a while with dessert and some more chatting.

Shawna Wolverton speaking

SVP of Product Management Shawna Wolverton emcees Zendesk Girl Geek Dinner, stating “it’s amazing to get a seat at the table and to look around and see people who look like you.”

Shawna Wolverton: I am Shawna Wolverton. I am the SVP of Product here at Zendesk. I joined about six months ago and it has been an amazing six months. I feel sort of corny a lot. People ask me all the time, how’s the new job? How’s the new job? I feel like a little bit of a Hallmark card. Like it’s so great. But what’s been amazing and I really just sort of figured this out is that I was trusted right out of the gate, right? I was able to go out and be competent. At week 2, I was on stage. In month 3, I’m in front of investors and in front of the press. And it’s just been so amazing to be given that trust. And I was incredibly lucky to join Zendesk in a cohort of women executives. We hired a CIO, as well as our chief customer officer, onto the executive board when I joined and then I looked up and we already had women in our CFO seats as well as in the head of people.

Shawna Wolverton: And it’s amazing to get a seat at the table and to look around and see people who look like you. So you did not, though, come here to listen to me jabber around on about how much I love my job. But we have four incredibly accomplished speakers tonight and we’re going to start with Swati who’s going to talk to us about metaprogramming. At the end, we’ll have some time for Q&A so definitely stick around for that. Swati.

Swati Krishnan

Software Engineer Swati Krishnan gives a talk on “Code that writes code: Metaprogramming at Zendesk” at Zendesk Girl Geek Dinner.

Swati Krishnan: Hi, everyone. Hi, everyone. I’m Swati. And today I’m going to be talking about code that writes code or metaprogramming here at Zendesk. So first, a little bit about me. I’ve been a software engineer in the code services organization at Zendesk for around two and a half years now. In this time, I have learned and contributed to many projects. But of the cooler and fun things that I got to learn here was metaprogramming and I hope that I can share it with all of you out here.

Swati Krishnan: So first of all, what do you mean by metaprogramming? Well, most programs are built on language constructs. These language constructs could be classes, methods, objects, et cera. Metaprogramming, basically, allows you to manipulate these language constructs at run-time. So why is Ruby as a language particularly suited to metaprogramming? Well, that’s because Ruby’s a dynamically typed language. What this means is that it allows you to access and manipulate these language constructs at run-time. This is a difference from what statically typed languages would let you do normally.

Swati Krishnan: So how do we leverage metaprogramming here at Zendesk? So Zendesk is like a Rails shop. So this basically means that we have a lot of products and apps that are built on Rails. For those of you that don’t know, Rails is a Ruby based web framework. Web frameworks have to be pretty flexible so this means that a lot of modules and libraries in Rails such as Active Support, Active Record, et cera, heavily leverage metaprogramming. So by using Rails, Zendesk by proxy, uses a lot of heavy lifting that comes from metaprogramming.

Swati Krishnan: This talk is not going to be about rails. This talk is about account feature flags at Zendesk and how we use a bit of metaprogramming magic to add some more fun and color to them. So before I launch into that, what exactly do you mean by account feature flags? Here at Zendesk, when a developer ship new code, we do so behind … I don’t know why this is so … okay. So whenever developers … that’s better. I’m just going to leave it. So here at Zendesk, whenever developers ship new code, we do that behind something called feature flags. So whenever a feature flag is down to 0%, that basically means that that feature is not available on any accounts. Is this fine? Are you sure? Okay. When it’s done to 100%, that means that it’s available on all accounts.

Swati Krishnan: So this basically gives you mechanism to roll out a feature slowly so it can go from 0 to 100% and you could also roll it back quickly so that if things go wrong, if there’s a bug in the code or if customers aren’t really appreciative of the features–which doesn’t happen. It doesn’t happen, but there’s a slight possibility so you should always [inaudible]. So basically this feature flag framework allows developers to ship code in a more reliable way.

Swati Krishnan: So the way that this is built, it basically means that developers now have a method called has feature name question mark available on the account object. So that whenever they’re trying to ship this new feature, they can just basically go if your account object has … they can basically just go that if and say that if your account object has this part of the feature turned on, that means that we can now execute the new feature’s specific code. If it doesn’t have the feature turned on, that means that we can just fall back to our old non feature specific code or just execute old code.

Swati Krishnan: So how can we simplify the existing account class structure so that we can basically add this feature so that developers can by proxy enable new feature specific code? So one way to do that would be basically to just open the account class to add your has whatever your feature name is, question mark, method inside that. All that this method would be doing would just be checking the database to see if the feature flag is turned on for the specific account or not.

Swati Krishnan: So when a developer has a new feature to add, what they’ll basically do is just go into this account class, add a method called def has feature XYZ question mark and it’ll do the exact same thing, which means that it’ll basically call the database and check if the feature flag is turned on for the account.

Swati Krishnan: But there are also several problems with this sort of an approach and you should not be doing this. And that’s because it encourages repetition a lot so whenever a developer wants to add their own feature, they’d basically be like going to this class, adding their method, making that database call to check if the feature flag is turned on. In coding and in Ruby in general, we try to discourage repetition, because if there’s a way to get something done with as few lines of code and concisely as possible, then it should definitely be trying to use that.

Swati Krishnan: The other kind of obvious disadvantages that means that every developer, whenever they want to write this particular has their own feature method on an account object. But how could I get [inaudible] implementation off fetching from the database so this is just encouraging reinventing the wheel, which is something that we don’t want developers to do because that’ll just add potential for more bugs. Because if everyone gets to write their own implementation, then you can have more bugs pop up from that.

Swati Krishnan: And last but not least, why should we do it in this brute force driven way when metaprogramming gives you more cleaner, elegant ways to solve the same problem? So the metaprogramming solution to this is basically just adding list of features. So over here I added a couple of features, but you can increase this with how many ever features you want. And then in these six magical lines, we’ll just be iterating over this features list. And we’ll be calling the Ruby metaprogramming magical method … actually the Ruby magical dynamic generation spell which is basically just going to define a new method based on that item that it’s picked from the list. It’ll just interpolate that in the method name and then, voila. I don’t know if I said that correctly. And then you basically get a method which will then make that database call with what it’s picked up from the features list.

Swati Krishnan: So this basically means that all that a developer now has to do to get the has feature available method is to just add their feature name to this features list and then whenever the Ruby app will boot up and start, it’ll automatically create the has their feature name available method on the account object so they don’t have to write their own implementation. They don’t have to repeat themselves. They don’t have to do anything much.

Swati Krishnan: So this was just one of the benefits and applications of metaprogramming. There are several others, such as the open class implementation, which will basically let you add your own functionality over any method in the class. So you basically even go and open up like the [inaudible] method in the ink class which is a code Ruby library class. And you can add your own functionality, like logging or benchmarking, to it. Another kind of interesting one would be the Active Record library in Rails. So Active Record for those of that don’t know is object relation and mapping. So basically if you have something like user dot name in your code or user dot name equal to Swati in your code, Active Record will magically figure out that this call response to the user’s table in your database. If that user’s table has a column called name, then it’ll automatically create the [inaudible] methods for you so user dot name and user dot name equal to will already be created for you so you don’t have to define it yourself.

Swati Krishnan: So yeah. These [inaudible] the applications of metaprogramming. This is just a glimpse of all that it can do. But I hope that you found this informative and will probably use it in your own work. Thank you.

Erin McKeown speaking

Director of Engineering Risk Management Erin McKeown gives a talk on “Staying Cool Under Pressure – Lessons from Incident Management” at Zendesk Girl Geek Dinner.

Erin McKeown: Hello, everybody. My name is Erin McKeown. I just want to first say welcome. I’m so excited that Zendesk is hosting this event. I’m even more excited to share with you guys a couple of lessons I’ve learned through managing incidents throughout my career. To quickly introduce myself, like I said, my name is Erin McKeown. I’m the director of engineering risk management here at Zendesk. I have the great pleasure of leading a team of–a group of teams, actually, that I like to think of in three different categories, which is really our first line of defense, threat prevention, and recovery. When I say the first line of defense, we have what we call our Zendesk Network Operation Center. We actually have Kim Smith here with us who leads the ZNOC. Hello, Kim. Everybody say hi. She’s visiting from Madison. So Kim has the pleasure of running a very, very awesome team that takes–monitors and takes care of our systems 24/7 365 a year. Like I said, they do all kinds of monitoring. They put out fires. They escalate to different engineering teams when there’s something that is a little bit larger that they need help with.

Erin McKeown: In addition to our ZNOC, we also have our incident management team. They partner very closely with our ZNOC, and they’re responsible for running all of our response and coordination of any service incident that we have here at Zendesk. On the other side of that, we have our business continuity and disaster recovery. These are really the areas of which we focus on planning for training employees and testing on how we can recover from business disruptions. So that can be anything from a natural disaster that impacts one of our office facilities to a natural disaster that may actually take out an entire AWS region. Everyone cross your fingers that that does not happen.

Erin McKeown: So this is one of my favorite quotes. It’s a little nerdy, but Franklin Roosevelt said, “A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor.” Disclaimer, I’m not a sailor, but stick with me here. I think what Frank is trying to get at here is that no matter what, there’s always going to be challenges that come up and we are going to have to deal with adversity and we can plan and we can do all kinds of things to get prepared for events to take place but at the same time, we need to take these as an opportunity to continue to learn and to grow. And so, I’m just going to share with you guys two events that I’ve actually been a part of and two important lessons I’ve learned from them. I really wanted to dig in and give you guys a real technical incident type of conversation but I didn’t want you to fall asleep.

Erin McKeown: So the first event that I’m going to talk about is from 2011. Back in 2011, there was a 9.1 earthquake off the coast of Japan and it actually was a mega underwater earthquake that took place. As a result of that, there was a tsunami that then hit a nuclear power plant and caused a meltdown of the Fukushima power plant. This is considered the second biggest radioactive event accident to have happened to Chernobyl. I don’t know if you guys are watching the HBO series, but kind of along those lines.

Erin McKeown: So a very, very devastating event. We actually had an office in Tokyo with 250 employees on the 50th floor of a high rise building when the earthquake happened. You can imagine how scary that would really be. That was the first wave of it. And then the tsunami hit and there was devastation across the entire the eastern side of Japan. And then this huge threat of radioactivity that was potentially threatening Tokyo. These employees went through the ringer. I mean it took us about a week and a half to confirm where all of our employees were, make sure that they were safe, make sure that their families were safe, that they had what they needed. All the work that was going on in Tokyo completely stopped. It’s fine. There was other people that picked it up and things to do.

Erin McKeown: I think that what we learn from this type of an event is no matter what, people are our most important asset. As a company, you consider it family and I think one of the challenges that companies do have is really understanding that line between responsibility and just doing the right thing for their employees. In this particular event, we actually considered chartering planes to get our employees out. We didn’t have to do that because it turned out everything was going to be okay, but, yeah. So bottom line from this experience, to highlight that despite the fact that the office was unoperationable for weeks at that point, everything was fine business wise. All we cared about was the employees being safe and their families being safe.

Erin McKeown: So this is another event that took place in 2012. Hurricane Sandy. It actually impacted the eastern seaboard, caused over an estimated $70,000,000,000 dollars worth of damage. Another very, very human wise devastating event. I’m not going to talk about that one. Part of this in this one, a startup that became … well, I wasn’t working there but partnered with them on some things. I wasn’t responsible for their DR. They actually had their data center in downtown Manhattan. I don’t know if you guys know that there’s data centers in downtown Manhattan but from a risk standpoint, I would not be having my data center downtown Manhattan.

Erin McKeown: Anyway, they completely lost power. They lost backup generator power. They didn’t have a disaster recovery plan. They didn’t have their data backed up. So they were pretty much dead in the water. They had to sit there and wait and see if everything would come back or if it wouldn’t. So the big lesson from them here is luckily, the services came back. They were able to continue their operations, but they quickly implemented a disaster recovery and backup data … sorry. Data backup policy.

Erin McKeown: So I think one of the things from this experience is really understanding again, first and foremost, the people aspect is the most important, but when you start thinking on the business side of things. Especially for a company like Zendesk, that our data is our bread and butter, that’s where you want to be putting some focus and making sure that you’re considering that and making plans for it. So yep. Just kind of the takeaway from that is we do consider people. Again, I think about it from a Zendesk standpoint because like Shawna, I absolutely love it here. I’ve been here for four years. They’re going to have to drag me out kicking and screaming. Again, I do believe that we’re a company that … you know, people first. We do believe that also our data’s pretty important too. So thank you so much.

Staff Software Engineer, Site Reliability, Alethea Power gives a talk on “Computer, Heal Thyself: Automating Oncall, So You Can Sleep Through It” at Zendesk Girl Geek Dinner.

Alethea Power: Hi. This is my talk. Computer heal thyself: automating oncall. So you can sleep through it. My name is Alethea Power. I’ve worked in auto-remediation, which is what I’m going to cover, and I’ll explain that term in a minute. I’ve worked in auto-remediation for about 10 years. I built one of the world’s first and largest auto-remediation services. And now I’m building an auto-remediation service in conjunction with Kim and the ZNOC team here at Zendesk.

Alethea Power: So what is the purpose of auto-remediation? Well, tech companies have been finding through the dev ops revolution, not revelation. I mean I guess it’s kind of a revelation. Over the past number of years, that they can get better product quality, faster product development velocity, and higher service reliability if they give product engineering teams both the responsibility and the authority to manage the full life cycle of the software that they’re writing. So that means not just writing code but the engineers who write the code also push the code out to production. They operate the code in production. And they respond when there are outages in production.

Alethea Power: So this causes a virtuous tight loop. The engineers who are writing the code are best equipped to solve problems when they occur and when those problems occur, it gives those engineers a lot of extremely useful information about how to change that code or repair it. So quality goes up, speed goes up, et cera, et cera. But this introduces a whole new set of responsibilities for software engineers that they have not traditionally had to take care of which means we have to provide them with tools to make these jobs easier so that they can focus on the part they understand and not have to worry about lots of things that distract them from the focus of the code.

Alethea Power: So auto-remediation is meant to be a tool to help address with your mediation of outages. And I’m not talking about the Fukishimas of the world. I’m talking about much more frequent outages. The kind that happen 20 times a day. The kind that happen at 4 A.M. and at 4:45 and at 6 and at 5:30 A.M. So what does this look like in practice? Traditionally, you have a monitoring system that detects when you have outages in your infrastructure with your services. That monitoring system gives alerts to engineers. Now this could be in the form of engineers sitting in front of a dashboard of alerts 24/7 watching it. It can be in the form of alerts paging engineers in the middle of the night and waking them up. Yeah, et cera, et cera.

Alethea Power: And then engineers take their own knowledge and documentation recorded in what’s frequently called runbooks to execute various commands in the production environment to try and solve these problems. So these commands can be things like, if you have an application that’s wedged, maybe you’ll restart it. If you have a hard drive that’s full and maybe it’s full because there’s a bunch of errors spewing into a log. Then maybe you truncate that log. If you’re in the middle of being attacked. If you’re in the middle of a DDoS attack. Maybe you changed some routing rules to black hole incoming requests.

Alethea Power: So these are the kinds of things I’m talking about. So in auto-remediation service replaces these two components. The engineer gets replaced with a service and the runbooks get replaced with remediation code. So instead of having human readable documentation about what to do, you have blocks of code. And the auto-remediation service goes and executes this code in response to alerts in the monitoring system. And then engineers can sleep through the night. Their talents are better used for, for instance, instead of waking up to restart a service that has a memory leak, they can be well rested in the morning and figure out why it has a memory leak and fix that.

Alethea Power: And in general, we can take better advantage of the knowledge that we have across all of our engineers. The engineers that are being woken up and the engineers that are watching these dashboards. We’ve got a lot of really knowledgeable, talented, intelligent people. And we want them to be able to use their skills in the most sophisticated and interesting ways possible. So we’re trying to automate as much as we can.

Alethea Power: So I’m going to look at an example here. This is a configuration file for the auto-remediation service that we’re building. I tried to design the configuration language to be as simple as possible while also being flexible enough for what we’re trying to accomplish. So let’s walk through it. This file says if you have this issue on these hosts, then it should run this job in response but don’t run it more often than that. So specifically if the osquery agent is busted, web servers in us-west-1, then you want to run this block of remediation code but don’t do it more than five times per hour per cluster. Make sense?

Alethea Power: So let’s go look at this thing right here so we can understand how that looks. So we’re also building an SDK, mostly built by engineers on Kim’s team. And this SDK includes a lot of convenience objects and convenience methods so that the people writing remediations can focus just on the logic that they care about and they don’t have to worry about things like SSH authentication and properly rotating keys and how do they get authentication into AWS so they can reboot EC2 hosts and stuff like that. We abstract all that away for them and we do it in ways that make our security compliance team happy. Every remediation uses a different SSH key magically.

Alethea Power: So this remediation you can see in four lines of code. It could fix this problem. So let’s walk through these lines. First, you import our SDK so you get all of these convenience objects and methods. Then you subclass our remediation class and override the run method and inside of that, you get this convenience object. If it’s an alert on a host, you get self.host. The remediation doesn’t even have to know what host it’s working on. It can if it wants self.host.name. We’ll tell you a host name but you don’t have to. And you get this method, self.host.run, which magically does lots of SSH things in the background and can run this command to go restart that service.

Alethea Power: So it’s that straightforward. We’re trying to make it as simple as possible for our engineers. It’s pretty complicated on the backside. Here’s a pretty simplified picture of what the backside looks like. So, Swati, you did a magic thing with a dot. I don’t know how to do it so I’m just going to go point. So that thing, the alert mapper, pulls in alerts from PagerDuty. That’s who we use for monitoring or where we consolidate our alerts. And it runs those alerts through the configuration like the configuration files we were just seeing and calculates what remediation jobs to run, inserts those jobs into the database, and then that thing, the job launcher, pulls the jobs from the database, hands them as config files to Kubernetes and Kubernetes executes them inside of containers. We’re running them in containers because I’ve built this before and engineers make jobs that take 100 gigs of ram and all the CPU you can use so we don’t want any job to choke out the others. And lastly, since we have this nice infrastructure in place already with a beautiful SDK, we’re giving people the ability to launch proactive jobs using a CLI to do things like kernel upgrades and other stuff that’s not necessarily responding to alerts. All right. Thank you.

Eleanor Stribling speaking

Group Product Manager Eleanor Stribling gives a talk on “ML in Support: Infusing a flagship product with innovative new features” at Zendesk Girl Geek Dinner.

Eleanor Stribling: Hi, everyone. My name’s Eleanor Stribling. I’m a group product manager here at Zendesk. What that means is I manage other product managers. And what I wanted to tell you about today was how we’re using machine learning in Support, our largest, oldest product. A little bit about me. I would also say that Zendesk is really the best place I’ve worked in in tech. I’ve been here a year. Before that, I’ve been in all kinds of companies ranging from a company that’s like a 100,000 people all the way to a teeny, tiny social impact startup and this experience overall has been just amazing. I work with obviously lots of really smart people, so definitely encourage you to explore this if it’s of interest to you.

Eleanor Stribling: One of the reasons I really like Zendesk and I like working on this product is … well, it’s not evil. But also, it really helps people do their jobs and do them well and that’s why I’m so excited about this particular project. Putting machine learning in Support, because like I said, this is the product that a lot of our customers use. Use it a lot. They’re in it everyday. And we want to help them do their jobs better and more efficiently. So machine learning is a great way to do that.

Eleanor Stribling: I want to do a little bit of clarification of terms. So when I say Support, I might mean something different than what you imagine it to mean. So most people when they say, most normal people who don’t work here, when they say support, they mean calling support like I need to call support because I’ve got a question. That kind of usage. What I’m going to talk about is the product Support. So Support, as I mentioned, is our oldest product. Until recently, it was Zendesk. And basically it’s a system for creating tickets or issues, moving them through a system, making sure the right people see them at the right time and then resolving them. And that’s kind of the core of what we offer. So it’s a really cool place to work because we have huge impact on a lot of users.

Eleanor Stribling: So a pause here and then zoom up a little bit. When you think of machine learning as part of customer service or customer support, what do you think of? What do you sort of imagine? Chances are, you imagine something like this. So this is one of our products. This is AnswerBot. And it is exactly what the name connotes. It is a bot that answers questions for people in chat. So in this example, you’re connecting to a chat. You’re asking some basic questions. AnswerBot looks at the text and predicts a response and then serves it to you. If the prediction is strong enough and if it doesn’t, as you can see right here, it’s going to escalate it to an agent. That went by really fast but trust me, that’s what it did.

Eleanor Stribling: So that’s usually how we think about customer support with ML, right? Bot answers your questions. I think this is a great product and it does lots of great things. Among them, it means that customers don’t always have to talk to a person. So I definitely have my moments. I think we all do when we really don’t want to talk to a person and in these circumstances, it’s great. But the problem with answer bots, generally, not just ours, is that people do want human connection. So it’s great for deflecting some issues but sometimes when you call support, you just want to talk to a person. How do I get to a person, you might scream into the void.

Eleanor Stribling: So really the question that we have now as a very customer centric company building a product that’s supposed to help you build relationships, is how do we help people inject that humanity that customers want, they want to experience. How do we help them do more of that? How can we help them be more efficient? And I think we started looking at machine learning as a way to do that in Support. This is also, I think, important kind of context. We do this really cool report every year about customer experience trends. So if you’re interested in customer experience, generally, if you’re a data person, definitely check this out because I think it gives you good perspective or if you want to apply for a job, just saying, it will give you really good perspective into the landscape.

Eleanor Stribling: So there’s a lot going on here but basically people expect answers fast. They want it on every channel that you have. They expect you to be on every channel. They really want you to be proactive but you’re probably not doing that so there’s a lot of pressure right now on these customer support organizations. So in this environment of I just want a person but I also want a person with all this other stuff, how do you manage that? So when we first looked at taking this approach of we got this giant product people know and love. It’s like where they spend their whole day in a lot of cases at work. We first started with the question, how can we use machine learning to help customers manage complexity. Because we are going up market. We’ve got more and more customers who have huge agent teams. Like about 40% of our annual revenue comes from customers that have over 100 agents. So these are not small companies. There’s a lot of complexities.

Eleanor Stribling: So we kind of started there, but then realized pretty quickly as a customer centric company that really, what we were asking is how can we use machine learning to make our customers even better at their jobs? And really even beyond that, how can we help them make their jobs less stressful? If you imagine being an agent or a manager of support agents or even an administrator of a system like this, there’s a lot riding on you. There’s a ton of stress. People are calling you stressed out, saying I’ve been trying to talk to a person for however long. It’s often not pleasant and so, I think, to make jobs for these folks easier is one of the reasons I joined Zendesk, because again, it’s something that’s actually improving people’s lives and it’s definitely not evil.

Eleanor Stribling: So what we wanted to do was figure out, how do we add little things to this so that it won’t blow you away, like the machines aren’t taking your job, but we’re giving you little tools to do everything that much better, that much faster. So again, being a customer centric company, we looked at the main groups of customers that use our product, which you see across the top there. Agents, managers, administrators. And then we thought about, for each of them, as you can see down the side there, what their goals are and then we thought about what we could use ML to do for them. How could we help them do their jobs with this rich set of data that we have for each customer?

Eleanor Stribling: So first of all, agents. So they really need to get happy customers. Like if you’re finally getting that touch of humanity in your support experience, you want your customer to leave happy, right? It satisfies them. It satisfies the customer. Everyone’s incentives are aligned. So the plan here is because agents are often working in complex environments, they can be very high turnover environments, we wanted to figure out a plan to–and what we’re working now, actually–is essentially crowdsourcing agent responses. So we can start suggesting next steps for people as they’re working on a ticket. And that’s really huge. Again, in somewhere that’s really fast paced, maybe you’re working on something you’re not familiar with, we’re kind of there to lend them a helping hand and help them be a little bit faster and more efficient and give people more relevant answers.

Eleanor Stribling: For managers, so managers are leading a team of agents and they really need these agents to be efficient and make people happy and they care about CSAP. Part of that is making sure you got the right number of people, the right people and the right number, in the right place to answer questions. So here we’re looking at grouping relevant data together. So for example, if you have a ticket that comes in and it’s one of a hundred tickets about the same topic, we want to surface that in a really clear and simple way for managers so they can respond effectively. Either by getting agents with the right skills. Maybe they figured out a response they want to communicate to their team. That kind of thing so that they can get on top of it. Another thing that we’re working on managers that I think will really help is predicting surges. So we can look at the agent staffing that they’ve had at any given time. Maybe it’s a time of it’s really busy like around Christmas for example or maybe it’s just every Wednesday. What do I need? The other thing we’re working on here is figuring out how to surface that intelligence so managers can do their job better so we’re giving them a little boost.

Eleanor Stribling: And then finally, administrators. So these are the folks that set up Zendesk and maintain Zendesk. And so their main thing is that no ticket, no issue kind of gets undealt with. And I think that there’s kind of a constant stress that they have that something will not be answered because they somehow messed up the settings. So the great thing about administrators from a data science perspective is they kindly label a lot of data for us. We don’t want them to stop doing that but what we can do is learn from how they label data for us. And what that means is we can help make sure that no ticket goes unanswered. That if they don’t assign something that makes sense, we can provide suggestions, updates for them, but also for managers in real time so that they can change the routing. So there’s a lot of really cool things we can do that would really have real time impact in small ways on our customers to, again, make their job better, make it easier and less stressful. And really, that’s one of the reasons I work in tech. Because I want people’s lives to be made better through it.

Eleanor Stribling: And finally, if you follow me on Medium or Twitter, you know I’ve got kind of this weird thing about Harry Potter and I had studied language in Harry Potter. But to me, this project is kind of like that. It’s like we’re taking something that’s everyday that people are used to staring at for hours on end and we’re adding little things that are unexpected and kind of cool. And so that’s why I think that this is such a great space to be in. Because we’re having like huge impact by making little and also extremely cool changes to the experience. We are also hiring in that team. Shameless plug. We’re hiring in that team for a data science engineer and a data scientist and I’m also hiring for a product manager, so if you’re interested in any of those, definitely come see me after. Thank you.

Shawna Wolverton: All right. Thank you to our amazing speakers. Why don’t you guys actually all come back up and we can do a little Q&A. I think there’s going to be some folks out with mics wandering around. Maybe. There you go. We don’t need all the mics. So we got about ten minutes for Q&A if anyone has questions about the talks or Zendesk or you know, we know a lot of things. Trust us. It’s fun. No? Careful, we’ll ask you … oh, great. Right … oh, you’re close but then we got one up here.

Shawna Wolverton, Swati Krishnan, Erin McKeown, Alethea Power, Eleanor Stribling

Zendesk girl geeks: Shawna Wolverton, Swati Krishnan, Erin McKeown, Alethea Power and Eleanor Stribling answer audience questions at Zendesk Girl Geek Dinner.

Audience Member: Hi. Alethea, I really enjoyed yours as someone who’s been woken up so many times from PagerDuty. Like God bless you. Can you talk more about the code behind what makes all that wonderful magic run?

Alethea Power: Yes, but there’s so much of it. Maybe it’s better to go into details after the Q&A?

Audience Member: I will find you. Thank you.

Shawna Wolverton: I have a feeling–

Alethea Power: I guess I could give you like a 30 second. It’s all written in Python. We use Aurora on the backside for the database. Like I said, we put containers into Kubernetes. I don’t know. That’s a very quick, quick, quick. It looked like you frowned when I said Python.

Audience Member: Oh no.

Alethea Power: Okay, so don’t find me afterwards. No, no, seriously. Totally come ask.

Audience Member Thank you.

Shawna Wolverton: Heard one up here.

Audience Member Hi. This is a question for Swati. You mentioned metaprogramming and I’m actually really interested in dynamic programming languages, such as Python, but you mentioned you mostly work with Ruby. So I was just curious if you ever worked with other languages, such as Python, for instance?

Shawna Wolverton: Lovers and haters of Python.

Swati Krishnan: Thanks for the question. My internship project here was in Python. So yes, I’ve worked with Python before. That was dealing with, I don’t know if you’ve heard about [inaudible], but that’s like a graph database implementation in Python. So I worked in that quite a bit and yeah, Ruby and Python are very similar, interchangeable somewhat. Yeah. Any more questions about the?

Audience Member: Talk to me more about it.

Swati Krishnan: Sure, catch me and then I can talk to you about my Python work. Sure.

Shawna Wolverton: Question.

Audience Member: Hi. I have a question for Alethea. So no doubt that it’s great that you’re not woken up at 4 A.M. or on call. Agreed with that. But I’m curious, one of the philosophies of DevOps is that when engineers feel the pain of the alerts, they’re more motivated to fix it. And so do you find that maybe the engineers aren’t as motivated to fix it and if so, is that actually a problem?

Alethea Power: That is such a good question. So this service is in the process of being built right now, but like I said, I built this in the past and had years of experience running it in the past. That’s why we surface very public metrics from it. So rather than feel the pain in a way that makes them bleary eyed and less capable of doing their jobs, they feel the pain in the sense of error budgets and visible metrics and things like this. So, yeah.

Shawna Wolverton: For the record, blameless accountability.

Alethea Power: This is true. I’m actually a big fan of blameless accountability.

Audience Member: I’m also just curious as to how many engineers helped you to build this and how long it typically takes?

Alethea Power: So it’s me and two engineers on Kim’s team. We spent a while designing because there were some security compliance constraints we had to hit and also, we’ve purchased a number of companies, so we have to be able to work with a wide variety of infrastructural decisions. So it took us a few months to figure out high level, how to design the system so that it would do all of that. And once we knew roughly what we were doing, I don’t know, what would you say? We’ve got about 80% of the code written in two months. Something like that.

Audience Member: [inaudible].

Alethea Power: Yeah. We’re cranking right now.

Audience Member: Hi. I have a question for Eleanor. So, I don’t know anything about your product, Support, but I’m assuming there’s a dashboard so when the customers come to open a ticket, is there a knowledge base? I was going to ask you, are you using machine learning to help the customer before they open a ticket.

Eleanor Stribling: Yes. So we’ve got a product called Guide, which is basically a help center. It’s a really easy use, out of the box kind of help center. So yeah, we’ve got that product. We also have AnswerBot, which I mentioned, which helps people before they even reach out to a person to try and resolve their issue before that. And we also have a bunch of tools for people who administer help centers to help them figure out what to write articles about so from those three dimensions, we try to take care of them before they need to reach out.

Audience Member: Got it. Thank you.

Shawna Wolverton: Going once. Oh, one more. [inaudible].

Audience Member: I have a question for Erin McKeown. She and Kim Smith and I actually started Zendesk on the same day, a little more than four years ago. But Erin, when you started, you were the first person to work in business continuity and disaster recovery here, and now you’ve built out quite a practice. I’m just wondering if you have any sort of quick tidbits, lessons learned, insights on that experience over the last four years?

Erin McKeown: Yeah. Well, that’s a really good question. Yeah, I started out as business continuity disaster recovery program manager and that kind of scope grew quite a bit. We had a lot of activity on our intimate management so we built out an entire team that is really churning now and doing amazing work. And so, been switching focus a little bit to prioritize different things and build out different teams. I’m actually, right now, hiring a disaster recovery manager who then will hire three analysts under them so I’m really excited about the progress that’s being made there. But I think what I tried to do was focus on what I could actually manage and actually what I could take on and be honest with myself about that. Because I think I started out of the gate being like oh, I’m going to do all of these things and quickly was like, oh gosh. Got to pace it back a little bit.

Erin McKeown: Again, having very supportive upper management and with that whole perspective has really helped us get progressively down the line, but, yeah, it’s been a fun journey over the four years for sure.

Shawna Wolverton: One in the back.

Audience Member: Hi. This question’s for Eleanor. I was just curious, and it seems that the product you’re thinking about might not be as mature. How do you deal with customer questions around validation of the algorithm or you mentioned you’re going to forecast demand search. How do you deal with where they’re like, well, how is this true or how do I know you’re giving me the right guidance because I don’t trust the machine or the model?

Eleanor Stribling: Yeah, that’s a great question. I actually saw a really … this influenced me a lot. A talk by someone from PagerDuty at a conference a little while ago. And I talked to him about it after because we were thinking about doing some similar things and he was saying that really the biggest challenge was getting people to adopt the ML because they didn’t trust it. And so I think the approach that we’re taking is very much opt in, we’re going to validate all of these algorithms we’re writing. We’re going to validate them all with customers before we start and make those early validation customers EAP customers, we hope, to sign them up so they can sort of see it in action and be part of making sure it works the way they need it to. So I think that that’s one tack.

Eleanor Stribling: But I think it’s also the reason behind the strategy that we’re not going to suddenly say oh, we’re going to use ML to route all of your tickets. Like trust us, it works. We’re not going to do that. We’re going to very gradually introduce little things that help people a little bit. And they don’t even have to take the suggestion if they don’t want to. But the hope is that over time, they begin to trust it. It doesn’t replace them. It doesn’t replace necessarily even huge amounts of their workflow. It just makes it a little bit better for them and I think that that’s definitely going to have to be the first phase of how we approach this. And then we’ll see.

Shawna Wolverton: I think one more question. Yeah? But we’ll all be here afterwards. Feel free to find us.

Audience Member: Hi. I have a question for Eleanor, too.

Eleanor Stribling: Sure.

Audience Member: It’s a continuation to what she asked. So with every customer that opt ins with you, do you retrain your model and then how do you know, how good is your model?

Eleanor Stribling: Yeah, so, great question. So we are doing individual customer models. I think that that’s really because each customer’s quite different and we definitely have customers with a ton of data and we want to make sure that we customize the solution to them. I think that’s how we’re going to get the best result. In terms of validating it, I think that, again, we’re going to need to do a couple of steps. I think with some of our biggest customers, we have some customers who are already really interested in this. So I think that there’s an opportunity there to get them on board. Have them help us test it effectively. I think we will be gating some of these things, so we’ll give them options to roll it out to portions of their organization. We have a lot of customers who deploy it in multiple areas in the organization. So do that gradually. Make sure they’ve got some training around it. But I think, again, really the strategy needs to be we’re going to get some customers who we know it works for them and they can help us evangelize it, because otherwise, I don’t think people won’t necessarily trust it. [inaudible] own data. Does that answer your question?

Audience Member: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Eleanor Stribling: Great.

Shawna Wolverton: All right. Thank you lovely speakers. We fed and watered you. We educated you a little bit. And in exchange, you get to learn why it would be so amazing and awesome to work here. I want to introduce Lauren from our recruiting team.

Lauren Taft: Hi, everyone. Thanks so much for coming. I’m Lauren Taft, manager of recruiting for technical and university recruiting and Stephanie, who’s over there, who’s our senior tech recruiter. Just wanted to tell you a little bit more about Zendesk. We have 145,000 customers, 2,600 employees. Our headquarters is here in San Francisco. We have 16 global offices. Our product is in 160 countries. It touches 60 languages. And we have 1.4 billion yearly interactions processed.

Lauren Taft: So a little bit about Zendesk recruiting. We’re growing at scale. There’s tons of opportunity and with opportunity comes impact. And then a little bit more about what our values are here. We practice empathy, focus on relationships, and be humbledent, which is humble and confident together that we made as one word. Kind of a fun little spin. We thought it’d be great to show you a video. Oops. I should pause this for a second. We made this for International Women’s Day and it’s a little bit of what it feels like to be a female here at Zendesk.

Video Speaker: Oh okay, one word.

Video Speaker: One word to describe her? Badass.

Video Speaker: Oh, I would totally call her a badass.

Video Speaker: Badass.

Video Speaker: Is badass one word?

Video Speaker: Okay, two words. She’s amazing, but she is also a badass, which is pretty cool. She has a special way of like seeing things within you that you might still be trying to grasp or shore up and she’s like no, you’re there. You’re ready.

Video Speaker: Any time she gives me feedback, it’s often very direct, and sometimes a little shockingly direct, but it never upsets me because I know that it’s coming from a place in her heart where she wants to be my best self.

Video Speaker: She had a really genuine talk with me, which I really appreciated. It was kind of like a big sister talk and it was a talk that I’ve never gotten from anyone at work. She just did it in such a genuine, motherly way. The way that she approached the situation, I really respected, and I realized why she deserves to be in a leadership position.

Video Speaker: Wow. She said all that? Trying to put into words the emotions that are there around it. It’s wonderful to feel recognized. I feel like that’s something a lot of women don’t ask for or expect. I had women like that in my own life, and it is super meaningful to me in terms of just being a person in this world to be able to affect somebody like that, so.

Video Speaker: She’s really helped me to push myself outside my comfort zone. To own those aspects of being a woman that at times can appear or make us feel a little bit more limited. I think her favorite word was, use that emotion and passion for good. To help get things done. To help drive what’s important to your team and your organization and that’s the first time I’ve really looked at it that way. How do I take that crazy wild but super passionate part of me and put that in a place and use that in a way that can get good things done?

Video Speaker: I really love it when women have a conviction or a boldness to put themselves out there and say this is a thing that I want and then to go get it. And it’s been so cool to see her succeed and push herself and push others and grow Zendesk over the past couple of years.

Video Speaker: We would talk about what we’d like, what we didn’t like about our jobs and what we wanted and she took the steps to communicate, make it clear what her goals were, but she didn’t just wait for things to happen. And that’s what is mostly inspiring is that she took her destiny into her own hands. She went and took classes outside of work and was able to move her career in the direction that she wanted to.

Video Speaker: I would say that she’s helped me by demonstrating that you … it’s always easier to take responsibility for your current situation and how to get to where you want to be. She’s shown me that it’s good to not necessarily wait for opportunities to show up, but to go after them aggressively. Even if you’re not sure how they’re going to pan out and even if sometimes other people are telling you not to go after the thing, that if your gut is telling you to go after the thing, you should do it.

Video Speaker: I’m actually surprised at how many strong, powerful, motivated, intelligent women that I’ve met since I’ve been here. More than I’ve ever met in my life. It helps me to drive myself to be better, but it’s also just a really good support network.

Video Speaker: We’re hoping we can spread the joy.

Video Speaker: You are definitely spreading the joy. If there was like one moment this week that I needed this most of all, it was like right now, today.

Video Speaker: I’m so glad to hear that.

Video Speaker: So, thank you.

Lauren Taft: Uh oh. I don’t know what’s going on. There we go. So I hope you guys enjoyed that video. Just gives you a good sense of what it’s like to be here. If you’re interested, come chat with us. It was a pleasure hosting you all. We had a bit of swag snafu so check your inboxes for an Amazon gift card. We’re very appreciative that you’re here, and we are going to take a group picture.

Zendesk Girl Geek Dinner group picture

Zendesk Girl Geek Dinner group picture – thanks for coming out and joining us!

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“Coding Strong at Age 60”: Akilah Monifa with ARISE Global Media (Video + Transcript)

Speakers:
Akilah Monifa / SVP / ARISE Global Media
Gretchen DeKnikker / COO / Girl Geek X

Transcript:

Gretchen DeKnikker: I’m so, so, so excited about our next speaker, Akilah Monifa. She is the SVP at ARISE Global Media, which is a digital media platform for LGBTQ folks of color and their allies. And she made an Alexa skill called Black Media–or Black History Everyday, which I really want to just make it Black History Errryday. But not everybody’s gonna put all the Rs in it.

Gretchen DeKnikker: I’m very, very excited for this talk and you guys are gonna love it. Please, welcome Akilah. All right.

Akilah Monifa: Thank you, Gretchen.

Gretchen DeKnikker: All right, thanks.

Akilah Monifa: Welcome, everyone. It kind of reminds me, the start kind of reminds me of in eighth grade watching a science film and the film broke, but it is 2019, so we did get it together. I am Akilah. I’m gonna talk today about my Alexa Skill Black History Everyday.

Akilah Monifa: Even though you can see me, just wanted to share a little about me and the skills. This is me. This is my wonderful headshot. One of my favorite shots of myself. This is me and my children. my son Benjamin who is 15 and my daughter Izzie who turned 18. This is Raya Ross who is my intern and is a high school student, and helps me work on the skill. I just wanted to show a picture of her. This is my friend Elan and myself. We are in our Black History is Golden tshirts from the Golden State Warriors, because, obviously, black history is near and dear to my heart. Elan also helps a lot on the site, too.

Akilah Monifa: Okay. Now, this is just a brief little video that I wanted to share with you that Alexa made about my app.

Akilah Monifa: My first skill is pretty simple. It’s called Black History Everyday.

Alexa: Patricia Bath, that first black woman to serve on staff as-

Akilah Monifa: It started to work at 5:00 AM, on April 3rd, 2017, which happened to be my 60th birthday. And I cried when it worked. I cried tears of joy. I want people to know that you don’t have to know the coding to do it. I didn’t know the coding, and I actually now have three skills. I think it’s very exciting. I mean, I don’t think that I can adequately describe just the thrill that all of these skills have, but particularly the first one. And to know that so many people can hear the skill and be as enlightened through sound and knowledge, as I was, it is, I think, very, very profound.

Akilah Monifa: My children jokingly say that that’s my commercial for Alexa.

Akilah Monifa: Why did I start the skill? The first thing was that, as we all know, Black History Month in the United States is in February, and it’s the shortest month of the year, lot of people have complained about that. 28 days, 29 in leap year.

Akilah Monifa: My other big issue was that I really wasn’t learning much in Black History Month. The same facts were being regurgitated over and over. So, what do you remember about Black History Month in general? I mean, we heard facts about Martin Luther King, George Washington Carver, Rosa Parks, and that was really the extent of it. That certainly was not sufficient for me.

Akilah Monifa: The first thing that I did was to develop a website which is BlackHistoryEveryday.com. I was actually amazed that the URL was available, but it was, so I developed the website. My thought was that every day I was going to put a different black history fact on this website.

Akilah Monifa: Here are a couple of examples. The website exists. A few examples of the facts that I put on the website, and they’re very short. I wanted them to be diverse. This is Isis King who is the first transgender model to compete on America’s Next Top Model in 2011. This is the Mobile Edition. This is what it looks like. Mashama Bailey, the first black woman nominated for Best Chef at the James Beard Foundation awards 2018. Glory Edim, she’s the founder of Well-Read Black Girl, an online book club and community.

Akilah Monifa: The other thing that I wanted was the oh wow factor, “Oh wow. I didn’t know that,” or, “I was unaware of that.” So, I really tried to have really interesting things. Since today is International Women’s Day, starting today through the rest of the month all of my facts are going to be about women, about black women.

Akilah Monifa: Now we go from, I have this website. Two years ago, someone gave me an Alexa, and I had heard about it, but I had not experienced it. I got it. I saw that there were all sorts of skills on Alexa, so I thought I should be able to have my website into an Alexa skill. That was my thought. I thought how difficult can it be. Actually, I thought I don’t know anything about coding, so maybe I can’t do it. But I googled how to do an Alexa skill, and found out there was something called the Alexa skills kit, and that was online.

Akilah Monifa: So, I went to the Alexa skills kit and got information that alleged that one could build a skill in minutes with no coding required. I said, okay, I’ll develop the skill. Basically, when I went to the Alexa skills kit, there were five different entries that I could make to help develop the skill. I suppose theoretically, it could have been done in minutes…skipping ahead. It did not take me minutes. And when I tried to fill out the form or I did fill out the form and I developed my skill, it got rejected. I lost count the number of times that it got rejected. After you submit it, you submit it for certification, and it was not successful. I think I submitted it between 75 and a hundred times. I joined Alexa developers groups to try to figure out what was wrong and talked to people and tweeted…. The shorter version of it is that finally, after all of this, it did start to work. And I just wanted to show you this is just the first page. It was almost fill in the blanks. But the key thing that was missing for me in developing the skill is that I thought that simply by having the website that I could feed the website into Alexa, and Alexa would be able to read out my website, and that in fact was not the case.

Akilah Monifa: It was finally when I, through a lot of research and trial and effort, realized that one thing that I needed was to get Alexa to talk to the website. It was pretty simple. I just had to find a device, and the device that I found is called Feedburner, Feedburner.com. Once I plugged my website into that, then Alexa could understand what my website said and read out the information, which was just wonderful.

Akilah Monifa: As I described in the video, it actually started working on my 60th birthday, which was two years ago, which will be coming up two years ago, so I was very ecstatic. I can also really, if you’re trying to build an Alexa skill, really recommend Feedburner. After that, it was very simple.

Akilah Monifa: I just wanted to show–The skill, I did a definition of the skill. The skill basically says that it is Black History Everyday in about a minute from Arise 2.0. Black history is no longer relegated to the shortest month of the year. A different black history fact presented daily, seven days a week, 365 days a year, 366 in a leap year. It’s prepared. I say, “Invented by the team at Arise 2.0,” which is mainly consisting of me and Raya with some help from a few other friends who give me information. Our mission is to tell our diverse stories.

Akilah Monifa: If you have an Alexa and you go to Alexa, you can enable the skill in the app. And there it is, Black History Everyday, actually with an old logo. Or you can actually just ask it to enable it. I just wanted to at least show you–and hopefully, Alexa will work–how it works.

Akilah Monifa: Alexa, what’s my flash briefing?

Alexa: Here’s your flash briefing. From Arise 2.0 Black History Everyday, Zarifa Roberson, CEO/ Founder/ Publisher of I-D-E-A-L magazine for urban young people with disabilities 2004 to 2015.

Alexa: Toni Harris is the first woman football player at a skill position, non-kicker, to sign a letter of intent accepting a scholarship to Central Methodist University in Missouri in 2019.

Alexa: Akilah Bolden-Monifa, Alexa pioneer, developed Black History Everyday Skill for Amazon’s Alexa in the website BlackHistoryEveryday.com.

Alexa: Dr. Roselyn Payne Epps is the first black woman to serve as President of the American Medical Women’s Association in 2002.

Akilah Monifa: The only glitch was that it was my intent to have one black history fact every day. What I found out with Alexa is that through my website Alexa would read out five facts a day. I had to basically then shift gears and make sure that I had five different facts a day instead of one. That’s my skill. Thank you.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Thanks. Looks like I was still muted. Thanks, Akilah.

Akilah Monifa: You’re welcome

Gretchen DeKnikker: That is so awesome. There’s other people. It’s the same. People [inaudible 00:11:48]. That’s making their Alexas go off just listening to you.

Akilah Monifa: Yes.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Which is awesome, because that’s what happened when we did the dry run for her speaker talk too. And so, we had one question come in. She keeps getting rejected, she’s saying with Google not Alexa. Because I think they don’t want to give me the name I want. It’s frustrating for an indie developer. How many times did you say you had to keep applying?

Akilah Monifa: I lost track, but I believe that I applied for certification between 75 and a hundred times before it was accepted. And I would say that the one thing–that it passed certification, basically.

Akilah Monifa: The one thing that I didn’t do was you can test it before you submit it for certification, and I didn’t do that. I foolishly just kept certifying it and submitting it through certification thinking that it would work, and it didn’t. If I’d tested it, I would have seen that it didn’t work, so I probably wouldn’t have submitted it for certification

Gretchen DeKnikker: Another question. What was the thing that surprised you most about developing a skill?

Akilah Monifa: I think that the thing that surprised me, what most, was how easy it was that I just had the idea. Before people told me that you needed coding to do it or you needed to pay someone to code you, so I thought I can’t do it. The surprising thing was that when I googled how to build an Alexa skill, yes, if you know coding you can build it, but you can build it without knowing coding.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Amazing. I think this is great. What I’m really hoping, this will be my request to you, is that next year you can come back and tell us about building it for Apple and for Google, so that we can all have it, because I do think that American school systems don’t do a great job of giving that information out. It’s amazing that you took the time to just share it with everybody.

Akilah Monifa: Well, and the good thing is that it is available to everyone because even if you don’t have the skill, if you don’t have Alexa, you can get the information through the website. Just go to BlackHistoryEveryday.com, and all the information is on the website, which is good.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Awesome. All right, Akilah, this was great. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Akilah Monifa: Thank you.

Gretchen DeKnikker: All right.

Posted on

Episode 13: Self Advocacy

Resources mentioned in this podcast:

Getting More: How You Can Negotiate to Succeed in Work and Life by Stuart Diamond

Transcript:

Angie Chang: Welcome to Girl Geek X Podcast connecting you with insights for women in tech. This is Angie.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: This is Sukrutha.

Gretchen DeKnikker: This is Gretchen.

Rachel Jones: This is Rachel, the producer of this podcast, and we are the team behind Girl Geek X. This podcast brings you the best of Girl Geek X events, dinners, and conferences where we’ve been elevating women in tech for over 10 years.

Angie Chang: And today we’ll be discussing self advocacy.

Rachel Jones: How do you see these topics kind of come up?

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yeah, it definitely comes up like if it doesn’t come up with the speakers talking about their own personal experiences when they were growing. It does come up in the Q&A, for sure, because the attendees want to get a sense of how they can navigate through the challenges that they’re navigating at work, and it’s usually about how do I not get overlooked and how do I push myself to be more visible without being obnoxious, and so that sort of topic typically comes up, obviously, in different spots. What do you think, Angie?

Angie Chang: I find that when I am with a ladies lunch, women who brunch, group of women, you always find yourselves egging each other on to do more. Apply for the next job, or for you’re headed for some new writing residency, and so advocacy is something that we find ourselves doing to help encourage each other to self advocate.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Yeah, I mean I think it comes up even if it’s not with that language, around how do I negotiate the right salary? Should I be going for that promotion? How do I present that?

Rachel Jones: Have any of you had personal experiences where you’ve had to advocate for yourself?

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yeah, I mean not the more obvious way of advocating for myself, but when I wanted to move to management, I basically… when I would meet people that I needed to take advice from, I would ask them what they looked for in a manager, and then I would talk about myself in the context of those qualities that they brought up, and I would ask, “Okay, how would you like that to be–that to have been exhibited,” then I would give examples of when I have done it just so that the VPs would keep me in mind if they had a manager position open, and I do think it worked. It helped me get better at describing what my strengths were, and whenever I needed to actually talk more about what I’ve been doing and what my highlights have been, I definitely found the language better.

Angie Chang: When I hear about self advocacy, I think about how you get what you asked for if you ask for it. So, I self advocated when I was at a start-up when I went in as a director, and then kept asking for a higher title. Arguing that it would help me get meetings more easily, and then I asked a few times, over and over in different ways, and then I got a promotion and people would always be like, “Congratulations, you got promoted for recognize,” and I’m like, “Yeah, that’s because I asked for it. Many times.”

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Because you were already doing what defined what a VP’s role would be in that company.

Angie Chang: Right, and you’re not going to get things unless you ask for them, half the time, more than once.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Earlier in my career, the thing I would have to advocate for the most because I worked at such small companies was another resource. I was the only one doing something, and so I think I got good advice really early on of keep a good list of what things you work on, but then divide those up into things like if you could get rid of, what those things? What would those be, and then at some point, those will be another role, and then you can off-load most of the stuff you don’t like doing and you have all this stuff to make a case for the hire, which was advice I got from at my very first start-up that I’ve given again and again.

Gretchen DeKnikker: So, I don’t know if that’s self advocacy as much as self preservation. I can’t keep doing two peoples’ jobs but–

Angie Chang: That’s a really good point. I’ve had several friends over the last year tell me about their difficulty in getting the team to manage at their companies. So, make a list of things you do and the roles you need to hire for and advocate for your resources.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Yeah, and then also, an extra case for–the frosting on the cake and the way that you really get it is you’re like, “Okay, this is what this person would do, and then here’s what I would be free to do if I wasn’t doing this stuff and this is how I would be able to add a whole bunch more value.” That’s where, if you were coming to me as a manager, you would really get… instead of just, “If I could get rid of this, you could hire this person,” but if you can make that second half of the argument, then you’re sold.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: The good thing, also, about asking for whatever it is, whether it’s for another resource, or a promotion, is you end up getting feedback that you may not be getting in that context. So then, you get a sense of what is it that you need to do in order to get what you need? If you’re not yet there, which I found also useful when I would ask for whatever it was that I felt like I deserved, I would hear feedback about what it is that they needed to see, and then that would help me. If I was already doing those things, that would help me realize what I needed done, which is more of and what I wasn’t able to.

Gretchen DeKnikker: How’s this come up for you, Rachel?

Rachel Jones: I think, just coming from the non-profit world, you’re put in a position very often where you had to advocate for yourself, like, “Hey, this is too much work for a person to be doing and making this little money,” or, “These decisions that you’re making to get this type of funding don’t actually make any sense for my program.”

Rachel Jones: Yeah, it’s definitely something that I learned to do, and had some more success in some spaces than others and with some methods more than others, but I just think a lot about responsibility and where that falls and how it sucks that self advocacy is even a thing that you have to do, because you hear a lot in non-profits, and I’m assuming other work spaces, where everyone’s always like, “Oh, we really want to support you. Tell us what kind of support you need,” and even me just sitting down and listing for you all the stuff I need to do my job is extra work and I wish that you, who made this job and hired me to do it, already knew what I needed and could provide it for me, but that’s not the case.

Rachel Jones: Self advocacy is definitely a skill that you have to develop.

Angie Chang: Yeah, I also hear it in people who are in a job and like you said, Rachel, in a non-profit. I also see it in start-ups and tech companies where people go into a job and they’re like, “My manager isn’t amazing. I don’t have the resources to succeed,” and then they have to do a lot of self advocacy to get what they need, and they thought, “I graduated from a top university. I did the right thing, and then I thought I was in this kush job, and then I realize that no one’s paying attention to me and I’m just in this seemingly glamorous job at a company that a lot of people have heard of, but I’m not being supported,” and that’s where the self advocacy comes in to really digging your heels and figure out where you want to go hire because you’re not getting stuff handed to you.

Gretchen DeKnikker: So, there’s also the… if you haven’t developed your own self advocacy, who are those people that you have around you, kind of like Angie was talking about. So, our next quote is from Nupur Srivastava. She’s the VP of Product Management at Grand Rounds, and she shared her personal experience on self advocacy during our dinner with SquareTrade last year.

Nupur Srivastava: There was a time when I got promoted to director, and I was really excited about it, but we were scaling as a company, and my CEO told me that he’s looking to bring in a VP of product to consolidate different product functions that we had, and I was actually really excited. I helped interview. I was actually vouching for a couple of the candidates, and once I was in the room with him, we were discussing a candidate, and he looked me straight in the eye and said, “Why have you not asked me for this role?” And I was like, “Because I didn’t think it was an option? I didn’t know that that’s a thing you can do,” and it really was a pretty shocking and pivotal moment for me, because he saw my leadership potential way before I believed I could be a leader, or even deserved to be the VP of product.

Nupur Srivastava: I was lucky he gave me the role. Now, I lead the product team and I’ve grown the team out, but I think the biggest thing that taught me is you miss all the shots you don’t take. It really made me think about what are other opportunities where we are not raising our hand for, and what other things are passing us by, but that is a moment that has stuck with me, and I constantly think of that, even with my own team, which I certainly tend to have it be female heavy, because why not? And you’re always looking out for these instances where people are not asking for what they deserve, and I see it time and again.

Nupur Srivastava: If my CEO hadn’t said that to me, I would have been probably still happy, but reporting to another VP of product and probably not talking to you guys tonight.

Angie Chang: I love how honest Nupur was about the fact that she didn’t see herself as a VP until her boss reminded her of it. I wish I could say I have a similar appearance or something, but it was just really nice to hear her say that.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: I resonate with what she talked about. The only thing that I took objection to was when she called herself lucky that her boss gave her the role because I believe there’s no such thing. Obviously, she worked hard and she seemed deserving, which is why he even recommended it to her, but it is fascinating to me how she said something like she would have happily reported to another VP had he not brought this up. So, just being more self aware of what you bring to the table is really important. Perhaps you’re not even thinking of putting yourself in that position.

Rachel Jones: I think this relates a lot to a discussion we had a few episodes ago about imposter syndrome and just what you think that you’re capable of, because I think self advocacy is about asking for what you deserve, but you can’t do that before you actually know what you deserve, and you take time to figure that out. So, that’s definitely important work and sometimes we’re lucky enough to have people around us who will recognize what we’re doing and push forward, but I think just within ourselves, really figuring out what we do deserve is super important.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: I also want to say that if you’re a manager, or in a position where you are the one recruiting and able to spot talent or grow talent, you may not always have someone who might be great at advocating for themselves, but if you can grow someone, or nudge someone in the right direction, you should absolutely be mindful of those chances that you should take, and take them.

Gretchen DeKnikker: This has just got me thinking. I had so much support at the beginning of my career of just people who saw that I could do a lot more than I thought was even remotely possible, and it was in the late ’90s and the middle of the boom. So, it’s sort of like that whatever raw skills I had meets timing meets opportunity, and so I was able to take on so much, but I questioned them the whole time of like, “I don’t know what a 401K is. I’ve never heard of one. I can’t pick one out for the whole company,” right, because we didn’t have 401Ks, but then I think about managers I’ve had since then, and they’ve all pushed me in a different way.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Some of them, I don’t like and I don’t particularly appreciate the way that they pushed me to see that I could do more, but all of them have shown me a new part of myself where I didn’t think I was capable of something until they pushed me to do it.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: That motivation that you got a lot of support, does that make you to be more likely to then look around your team and support other people?

Gretchen DeKnikker: Oh, totally. Keep pushing something back to, especially someone who’s really junior, who’s like, “I don’t think I can do that,” and it’s like, “Okay, well let’s talk about it for a second. You need A, B, C. That feels like something you could do, doesn’t it?” And just keep pushing it back because I had that so early on that it’s… I’m really grateful for that because I think it just forces me to be like, “No, I think you really are capable of doing that. What else should I take off your plate so that you can have time to do that or whatever else?”

Rachel Jones: Do you think there was a point in your career where you transitioned out of needing people around you to point those things out?

Gretchen DeKnikker: I don’t think you ever get… I mean, what sucks when you get really senior is that you have fewer people to push you, and you’re the one doing the pushing, and so you’re providing more support and getting less, and that’s hard and you have to… I think we’ve talked about that, in the mentorship podcast, of finding those people who can still do that because I have somebody like Angie, or Sukrutha, or you around. Angie, for a decade now, has been behind me just like, “Nope, you can do that.” I was like, “First, you’re my PR person. Then you’re my life coach. Then you’re my this,” right, but she’s always, always, always pushing me to do something that I wasn’t comfortable with, and so that’s, I think, when you get more senior in your career and you don’t necessarily have a boss boss, you have that. Y’all have an Angie?

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Or go find an Angie.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Yeah, we’ve got our Angie busy, so you’re going to have to get your own.

Rachel Jones: So I hear conversations around self advocacy and even a lot of what we’re talking about with imposter syndrome being framed, specifically, around women in tech. Do you think this is something that women struggle with more?

Gretchen DeKnikker: I mean, there’s study after study shows that women don’t negotiate, and we have so many instances of it, of you get your salary offer. You’re like, “Yeah, that’s great,” and this huge percentage of men always ask for more, and so that’s the number one thing when you start thinking about the wage gap, and it’s just maybe five or ten thousand dollars in your first job out of school, but then that compounds over time and every time you get a promotion, and if you’re never negotiating at the top amount where those two things can divide where you actually have played some role in it.

Gretchen DeKnikker: I’m not saying that it’s women’s fault because I do believe that employers have a responsibility to be more responsible about this, and by the way, in California, they are not allowed to ask for your last salary. That is illegal, so definitely don’t answer that question because it has nothing to do with the job you’re about to get, and that’s another way to help in there.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: But they will ask you what salary you want.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Yes.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: I think it’s going back to what you said earlier about imposter syndrome impacting whether or not you do think you deserve something, and then if you think you deserve something, only then will you advocate for yourself.

Angie Chang: So, the topic of gender and self advocacy came up in our recent Elevate conference with Salesforce EVP Leyla Seka. She pushed for the gender wage gap at Salesforce to be closed and convinced CEO Marc Benioff that it was a really important topic. She spoke to this issue this year at Elevate.

Leyla Seka: Over time, throughout many companies and throughout my career, I’d had the sense that the men made more money. Just like shop talk in the kitchen kind of thing. Nothing super sophisticated, but just a feeling, and then I got Salesforce and I got totally… I got raised up and I got this great opportunity to run one of our divisions called Desk, and it was bonus time. When you’re the boss, you get the money and you decide who gets what money, what stock and all that, and so I really fought hard to get a lot of it for everyone, and when push came to shove, I really just thought they all deserved an equal amount.

Leyla Seka: So, I gave them all the same, but I gave them a lot. A lot more than any of them had ever gotten before. I worked hard. So, then you have the meetings with the people. So, my assistant set up the meetings that just happened to be the two women went first, right? So, I sit with the first woman. Great job, this, this, and this. Here’s your bonus. “OH, Leyla, thank you so much. It’s so amazing. Oh my gosh. I love my job. Thank you for the money. Thank you, thank you,” and then the second woman. Great job. “Oh, thank you for the money. Thank you so much. Thank you, thank you.”

Leyla Seka: And then the first man. I said it to him and he looked at me and he said, “I want more,” and I thought in my head like, “What? What? How could you want more? You’ve never gotten this much. What?” but I straight up was like, “Okay, I’ll try to ponder that,” and then the second man, who was really my COO, and really my partner in running the business, my primary partner. I told him the money, and he looked at me and said, “I want more,” and he was a close enough partner that I could say, “Okay, stop a second. What is this?”

Leyla Seka: And he started to say, “We’ve always been taught to ask for more,” and it was like someone slapped me across the face because I thought of all the times that I had gotten a bonus, or a promotion, or a job, or any of these things, and I had been like, “Thank you,” because that was the way my mother raised me.

Rachel Jones: So, I really like, actually the end of Leyla’s quote where she talks about how her mother raised her to say thank you because we’ve talked a lot, even in this conversation, just about imposter syndrome and how women struggle with it, but it’s not just like a thing, biologically, that women deal with, or some difference. It’s because of how we’re socialized and how we’re conditioned in society to be grateful for what we get when men are taught and encouraged to ask for more and push farther. These are messages that we’re given even as children. It starts super young.

Angie Chang: That was interesting to me because I’ve never heard of that.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: I haven’t heard of that, specifically, but I’m very, very aware that women don’t want to come across like they’re complaining. So, I feel like that’s what it leads to, where you want to sound grateful. You don’t want to sound like you’re complaining and not thankful because you want your boss or whomever to be like, “Oh, they’re easy to work with.”

Gretchen DeKnikker: Yeah, I mean there’s certainly the likability thing that comes in. You’re negotiating for a job and you know that you have to ask for more like, “Okay, we’ve listened to all these other women say that. I know I have to go back and ask for more,” but there’s still that part of you and you’re like, “Well, is this going to make them hate me?”

Gretchen DeKnikker: Of course, then you could have the argument with yourself and like, “Well, fuck them,” if they hate you and they didn’t really want you, but I always feel like it’s going to create some sort of friction before something even gets started, and I’m so worried about carrying that into by asking for more, but if I was giving myself the advice, it would be like, “If they came back and that was a problem, then that was not the right job anyway,” but it’s just so much easier if you go talk to another person and have them tell you that, than try to get yourself through it.

Gretchen DeKnikker: When Jenny was telling this story of when she negotiated at PayPal and how Judy was like, “Ask for more everything. Don’t just ask for more salary. Ask for more time off. Ask for more stock.” Literally, go back and ask for more of all of the things that they’ve offered, and she got all of it. Not the entire amount, but also just Negotiation 101, give yourself all the levers. I’m not just going to ask for more money. I’m going to ask for more stock, and then you know which things are more important, but if you go back and ask for more of everything, and then you already have your idea of the things that are important, then you can trade those off of like, “Okay, I don’t need that much stock, but I would like my base salary, or if you can’t give me the base salary that I want, then I need an extra week of vacation, or I need the signing bonus,” or whatever those other trade offs are, but I’m going to have Judy help me next time I go negotiate.

Angie Chang: There’s a book called Getting More: How You Can Negotiate to Succeed in Work and Life, which is a book that I think Google has recommended to all of their employees in helping you to become a begrudging negotiator and learn that negotiation, how to do it in incremental ways and how you’re perceived. It’s really helpful.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Yeah, and that book’s good because if you’ve read other books, then it’s like, “You need your big, hairy, audacious goal and your, like, BATNA, the best alternative.” It’s like business school stuff in negotiation. Your best alternative to a negotiated agreement or whatever, and all of that. This book is not that. This book is for real people that are in real life situations.

Angie Chang: It’s about how to plan better vacations, how to have happier encounters with your bank account, how to make little wins in your career.

Gretchen DeKnikker: It’s not your standard negotiation book. I highly recommend it, also.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: And just as a take away, I think you want to consider whenever you’re being offered something, it doesn’t mean… when you negotiate that, it doesn’t mean you’re being less liked, going to be perceived as less likable, or difficult to work with unless the way you say these things, obviously. You can negotiate, but be respectful when you’re negotiating, and not sound apologetic, and also a lot of the times, situations like this, people are expecting you’re going to negotiate and they already have a limit to how far they are willing to go, and they’re just honestly going to tell you that.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: The last time I had to interview for a job, I was attempting to negotiate for a salary increase, and the recruiter started to sound really irritated with me and I just froze and I gave up, and then maybe six months after that, I asked my boss where I stood in comparison to everybody else in terms of my salary, and I told him what happened with the recruiter, and he said, “I want to tell you something. No one’s ever going to revoke a job offer just based off of the fact that you asked for more.”

Sukrutha Bhadouria: So, going forward, if I’m ever in that situation, I definitely want to be asking for more while sounding appreciative at the same time.

Angie Chang: Yeah, you always hear stories of people getting their offers revoked.

Gretchen DeKnikker: What?

Angie Chang: There are stories of that happening.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: I’ve heard that, too. I know someone for whom it was revoked. I don’t know what led to that, whether they ended up hiring someone, offering the position internally in the meantime, but there are ways you can negotiate without sounding obnoxious. That doesn’t mean you don’t do it at all.

Gretchen DeKnikker: If they did revoke it, again, fuck ’em. That’s probably not the place for you. We need a whole one on just negotiation.

Rachel Jones: If that’s so ridiculous to this place that I think I deserve a little bit more than they’re offering, yeah. I don’t want to work there.

Angie Chang: And thought maybe it was just that recruiter that didn’t hire her making that mistake and losing out on a really great candidate.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: I don’t think it’s only a gender issue where women are less likely to negotiate. It’s also culture, and a lot of cultures, you were taught not to, whether you’re a man or a woman. Anyway, they can’t list of who you are if you’re in that group of people that feels uncomfortable with negotiating. It’s understandable to be worried, [inaudible 00:24:29], and, for example, even now when I get a raise, or more stock, I know that that’s the best that could have been given to me because of how the system works. Then to negotiate further than that when I know there’s not going to be a change. I have to pick which ones I negotiate for and which I don’t. It makes more sense to me to discuss the promotion and getting to the next level as opposed to, “Okay, there’s a fixed budget. The entire company is going to get a certain amount.”

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Negotiating that, I don’t know if that’s going to lead a different result. There’s other ways for me to get a dialogue going instead of me saying I’m not happy with what was given to me.

Angie Chang: I think just inserting negotiations normally into your life, a lot of them, so that you’ll make some ones here and there, and nothing is ever depending on one thing.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yeah, what I was trying to say is I have to be ready to what I’m negotiating and why I’m negotiating it. I have to be convinced, first, that it’s what I want and what I need and I can make an impact. I can change. I guess, for sure, I should be pushing for getting to the next level when I do believe I deserve it.

Angie Chang: Are you negotiating your vacation?

Sukrutha Bhadouria: No, because it’s a fixed thing. Some companies have fixed vacation policies.

Rachel Jones: Yeah, you got to know where and when and how. How do you advocate for yourself?

Sukrutha Bhadouria: The how is the hardest part. Arquay Harris, Director of Engineering at Slack, at the 2018 Elevate Conference, gave her own advice for advocacy.

Arquay Harris: So, even though others help you along the way, you are your own best advocate. I keep a running list of all the projects, outlining every single thing that I’ve worked on, and more importantly, the impact of those things, and I encourage you to do that, and also to do it maybe just in your personal Gmail, in your personal docs, or wherever, someplace that’s external to your current job, because you want to be able to aggregate this information, and also take it with you when you go to other places. It’s good to look back. Because what happens is when it comes time for promotion, or comes time for review cycles, you get recency bias.

Arquay Harris: You think about the things that you’ve done in the last six weeks, or maybe even the last couple months, but if you make it a part of your practice to every week, or every couple weeks, sit down and say, “Oh, what did I do? How does that impact the company?” Because the other thing that people do is they outline the things that are shiny, but even if it’s shiny, if you didn’t work on it, would it have still launched? If you didn’t do it, would it have mattered at all to the company? What is the impact of this thing and why is it important?

Arquay Harris: So, I encourage you to do that, and also, it helps you when you go and have a conversation with your manager so that you can say, “Look, these are the things that I’ve done.” That said, I have never in my professional career had a situation, I mean never, had a situation where a manager has said, “Great, Arquay, you’re doing awesome. Time to promote you to the next level.” Never happened, every single promotion that I’ve ever gotten has been me saying, “I am operating at this level. I’ve done all of these things, and I think I’m ready for the next level and here is why. Here is why,” and you can hand this to your manager and have a conversation with your manager to demonstrate these things.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: I love the idea of keeping a running list of projects because sometimes we just forget, or we don’t think it’s important enough to highlight, and so absolutely. I remember when I first heard her say this. I was like, “Oh, I should do it,” but I haven’t been as good about keeping a list up to date, and it definitely inspires me to keep doing it. Same with Arquay, I’ve never gotten a promotion that I didn’t ask for. Perhaps I’ve gotten appreciated through salary increments and through more stock that I didn’t ask for, but never a promotion.

Angie Chang: What about you, Gretchen?

Gretchen DeKnikker: Yeah, I think I’ve just spent a lot of time advocating for more resources, just because when you’re employee four, or employee 17, that’s the thing that you’re always looking for, and I’ve always been close enough to the CEO that I generally know the salaries of everybody around me, so I know when that stuff’s coming. So, it’s also not something that I’ve really looked at.

Rachel Jones: I think tips for advocating for more resources. Earlier in our discussion, you definitely had some helpful thoughts about that. So, it’s not even just getting a promotion, or getting a raise that you have to push for.

Gretchen DeKnikker: And advocating for my team, which it’s definitely easier to advocate for your team than it is for yourself, I think, but a lot of times, the stuff that you get for your team elevates you, too. There’s very rarely it doesn’t.

Angie Chang: I feel like this activity sounds really great, and I’m like, “Oh, I love it,” and then I’m like, “Can someone just share with me their brag list so that I can then copy and replace,” because it’s just always helpful when you have a rubric of what it looks like.

Gretchen DeKnikker: I feel like yours, Angie, like Sukrutha’s would be five bullet points of no more than four words each. Yours would be 17 pages written like long form. The two of you would say the same thing in like this very different way. I can see why this would be hard for you, Angie. Angie likes words. She loves words, especially writing words.

Angie Chang: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Girl Geek X podcast. We’ll be back soon with more advice from women in tech.

Rachel Jones: This podcast is produce by me, Rachel Jones, with recording help from Eric Brown. To learn more about Girl Geek X, or buy tickets to our next dinner, visit girlgeek.io. You can also find videos and transcripts from our events. If you’re interested in hosting a Girl Geek dinner, email sponsors@girlgeek.io.

Angie Chang: This podcast was brought to you by SquareTrade. SquareTrade is the top-rated protection plan trusted by millions of happy customers and offered by top retailers like Amazon, Sam’s Club, and Target.

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Girl Geek X Poshmark Lightning Talks & Panel (Video + Transcript)

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Tracy Sun speaking

Co-Founder and SVP of New Markets Tracy Sun welcomes the crowd to the Poshmark Girl Geek Dinner in Redwood City, California. The stylish evening’s theme: “people-powered innovation”.

Speakers:
Tracy Sun / Co-Founder & Senior Vice President of New Markets / Poshmark
Barkha Saxena / Chief Data Officer / Poshmark
Vanessa Wong / Senior Director, Product Management / Poshmark
Angela Buckmaster / Associate Director, Community Operations / Poshmark
Camille Forde / Senior Manager, New Markets / Poshmark
Adrienne Hamrah / Software Engineer, Cloud Platform / Poshmark

Transcript of Poshmark Girl Geek Dinner – Lightning Talks & Panel:

Tracy Sun: So I’m here, I get to kick us off. And so after welcoming you, welcome again. What I’m going to do is tell you a little bit about me. I’ll do that pretty fast and then share what people-powered innovation means and why we chose that to be the theme of the evening. And then we’ll just kick it out to all of the amazing speakers that you’ll hear tonight. I believe there’s six women that will talk to you tonight about who they are, what they do.

Tracy Sun: When we talked to the panels, everyone wanted to share a tip that they’ve done or something they’ve done in their career that they really wanted to share with the group. So we’ll talk a little bit about tips and try to have a whole bunch of fun doing so. So to kick it off. My name’s Tracy. I’m one of the co-founders and I head up a new department at Poshmark we’re calling New Markets.

Tracy Sun: My background, I grew up in the East Coast. I’m still kind of an East Coast person, but getting more and more West Coast as the years go by. I started in science. I was a science geek. I loved reading about brain and behavior. I moved into fashion pretty early on because I loved building brands and obviously now, I’m in technology. So my one thing I wanted to share with all of you is you can switch industries. I get this question a lot. It’s hard. So you have to really want to do it, but if you want to do it, you can do it. And I’m happy to answer questions later about some tips on how.

Tracy Sun: But the first I’d say is you can do it and you have to believe in yourself. And I’ve done it twice and who knows what happens to me. I’m still pretty young and have a lot to look forward to. So now about the theme of the evening, people-powered innovation. The reason that this is the theme is this is Poshmark’s superpower. What I mean by this is this is the one thing we do that we think we do better than anyone else.

Tracy Sun: And we wanted to share with you how we’re thinking about it and what we mean by it. Because I think that maybe you can take some of that into your own lives or into your own careers or how you think about innovation. It might inspire you a little bit. So that’s why we’re choosing the theme is just really talk about our strengths and the things that we’re really proud of. So people-powered innovation to us means three things.

Tracy Sun: The first is, and then video kind of alludes to all three of them. The first is we built our entire business off of people. We call ourselves a social commerce platform. And what that means is we take people and we insert them into all the important parts of commerce. We think that all of us have stories to tell. We tell them differently. That’s part of the beauty of photos and words and stories. So we want to put that back into commerce. We think that there’s more to selling a dress than seeing it on a hanger at a store. So how did she style it? How did she feel when she was wearing it? Things like that. We think that’s really important.

Tracy Sun: So we put people back into the conversation of commerce and then we build an entire platform around this so that people, anyone, any one of you, it sounds like we have some poshers in the room, but really anyone in the world can become a seller, no matter what your experience, how much money you have, whether you’ve done it before or not. All those things are irrelevant. Anyone can be a seller. And so what we see now is we have 40 million registered users. About 6 million of them have become sellers. Meaning we’re one of the largest selling networks in the world.

Tracy Sun: So raise your hand if you’re a Poshmark seller here. Congratulations. You’re one of 6 million people in the US that are selling on Poshmark, including a lot of us here. So congratulations. So that’s number one. The second thing is you can’t build a people-powered platform without the people. So the second thing we did is we built a community. And what that means is we focused day one on really taking a look at our users and doing everything we can to support them and so saying, we are behind you to help you build your business and we encourage our community to talk to one another in case we can’t be there to support you, support each other.

Tracy Sun: And so not only does that happen in physical venues like this, but it happens in events that we hold like in our app. So a mobile event and it happens in the conversations when you’re on Poshmark and then it happens offline as well. So a lot of times we’ll see Poshmark users talk to one another, they met on the app and then they talk to one another in real life. And that to me is one of the most beautiful things about why I love coming to work every day. It also reflects in a lot of our business metrics too.

Tracy Sun: So, for example, every day a Poshmark user spends 30 minutes on Poshmark. And for those of you in commerce who think about these kinds of metrics and maybe some of you are not in commerce that think about these kinds of metrics, that’s unheard of for commerce. People don’t spend 30 minutes talking about shopping elsewhere and maybe nowhere. So people are not just talking about transactions on Poshmark, they’re also talking to each other as human beings. And that’s where we like to spend our time. That’s how we find extra minutes in the day when we’ve had a long day is to have a human connection.

Tracy Sun: And so, in so many ways, we feel like we’ve built a really large marketplace and a really large platform but also a really large place for people to come and to connect with people, either that they know really well or that they’re meeting for the first time. So that’s the second piece. And then the third is Team Posh. So there’s some of us here tonight. Team Posh is really all we have. We don’t hold any inventory. It’s all people. And then a lot of code that happens and a lot of packages shipped around but there’s 400 or so people that are part of Poshmark that really make everything go round.

Tracy Sun: So we spent a lot of time thinking about how we can innovate in this realm and really keep people happy and motivated, creative. And eight years into the business still feel like they’re learning new things every day. And so I’m really excited to kick this off. We have five people coming up to share their story, get into some specifics about the innovation that they’re seeing and the stories that they have. So with that, I’d like to bring up our next speaker. Can I go ahead? I’m going to go ahead and do it. Okay. So our next speaker is Barkha and she’s our Chief Data Officer here and officially one of the coolest women at Poshmark.

Barkha Saxena speaking

Chief Data Officer Barkha Saxena talks about being a data geek, and working with mobile, social, and commerce data, at Poshmark Girl Geek Dinner.

Barkha Saxena: Thank you, Tracy. Hi, everyone. Is everyone having fun? I was telling Tracy that I’m always bummed when I go after her. She’s such a fascinating speaker. So I’m basically making sure that nobody has very high expectation. I’m going after Tracy. So just about a little bit about myself. I’m Barkha Saxena. I’m Chief Data Officer at Poshmark. I’ve been here for five years. But somebody was asking me, I was talking to them, hey, this whole data thing didn’t exist 10 years ago so what did you do then? I was like, yeah, it’s true. This whole world data service didn’t exist but I had been literally doing this. This was my first job out of college.

Barkha Saxena: I studied statistics. Numbers is what I have known my entire life. I spent my first 10 years at a company named FICO. I was a data scientist there. I started as an individual contributor, moved into management role and then I spent some time in product management, sales, and corporate strategy. After that, I spent a couple of years in advertising industry, still focused on the data, building data products for advertising. And then I had my second child and I thought I would take a little bit break. And like in two weeks break time, my husband, someday one day comes and he says, hey, I heard about this really cool startup. They had these virtual parties which is called posh party and I think you should go and meet with them.

Barkha Saxena: And I was like, okay, it doesn’t hurt to meet. So I found a connection to Manish and I met with Manish and Manish said we had some conversation and then he said, “Hey, you should come and meet with Tracy.” You just met with Tracy. Once you talked to Tracy. There is no going back. So here I am, five and a half years ago, I joined Poshmark, still here and having a lot of fun. When I joined Poshmark, it was really the driving factor was people. I met with Manish, Tracy, Chetan, Gautam, our founding team. And honestly, it had been a long time.

Barkha Saxena: Like being in the tech sector, I had not met so many smart but super humble people. And then from being a data geek, this aspect of I’m going to be working with mobile, social, and commerce data. It can’t get any better than that. What I didn’t understand at that time was when you are putting this social and the commerce together, it’s a totally different beast than just thinking about the social network and just thinking about the commerce. So Tracy explained the social commerce from the vision perspective but I’m a data person. So I have to understand it from the data angle.

Barkha Saxena: So how did I understand the social commerce? And how I started to understand it’s really not putting two plus two, four. Really getting them together is we are making two plus two, seven. And the way it works is from the data perspective, when you are selling, what are your goals? You want to acquire users who will come and buy stuff. So at Poshmark, you build your follower network, you follow people, they follow you. And by that way, you are basically finding out the impact, the people who are going to see your merchandise.

Barkha Saxena: Then how do you market inventory? So there is a whole aspect of sharing which happens in the platform. Everyone who is successful in selling at Poshmark knows that you cannot be successful if you’re not sharing. So you’re engaged in sharing, not just your item but you also share other people’s items. Because when you share somebody else, they will share yours and you are basically just expanding the network of the people with whom you’re sharing your item. So you market your items, but then after that, you have to close the deal. How do you close the deal?

Barkha Saxena: You have to engage with your buyers in conversations. So their conversations happen in their platform around fit, style, color, and then Poshmark has built all these tools in the service of community to which you send out offers in a very personal, personalized manner to all these buyers. And that’s how you close the deal. So sellers are very vested in being social in the platform because at Poshmark that gives them an advantage to drive the more social you are, the more successful you will be. Now from the buyer’s perspective, the reason you want to be so socially engaged because when you follow people, it’s exposing you to a larger and larger merchandise which means you are looking at so many items from where you can buy.

Barkha Saxena: So you are getting exposed to the styles of different people. You engage with the seller because you want to be able to understand the merchandise beyond what just the description is telling. If you think of the reason the whole social commerce exists because just in reflecting back, the 15–people who are a little bit older. If you think of the way the commerce was done like 15, 20 years ago. I grew up in India and a lot of time when we went for shopping, we will just go back to those limited number of shops. But it was fine to go because you will go and talk to the person who is selling and that person will know which grade you are in, what you’re doing, what’s happening at your home. And it was fun in those conversations.

Barkha Saxena: As commerce became very efficient with the e-commerce and access a lot of inventory and fast shipping. It was all very efficient but it took the fun away of that personal conversation. And what we have learned at Poshmark is people actually like to connect and talk to each other. So buyers, when they engage with sellers in the conversation on hey, will this dress look good on me or like because the same dress size can be different in different [inaudible]. How do you figure it out it really fits you? So you engage in that conversation and you’re figuring out.

Barkha Saxena: Buyers do a lot of liking activity in the platform and that’s because by doing like you are creating this sort of your wishlist of the items you want to buy. By doing the activity, you’re also building the connections with the seller. So when seller is ready to make an offer, there is a way for seller to reach out to you. So that’s how like when I started looking at social commerce and the numbers started to explain why the social is truly driving the commerce. It wasn’t just hey, we got a commerce, they come less to the social. This is the genius of the founding team who built this amazing platform.

Barkha Saxena: Social is so integrated with the commerce that the two actually drive each other and that is what has gained given us such a unique advantage that we didn’t just try to bring the two pieces together. We built them interlinked from the day one and then you build that kind of platform with the types of numbers Tracy was sharing, like 40 million users and 5-6 million sellers stylist, 18 million shares per day. Think of the amount of data we are collecting. Like we have 30 plus terabytes of data, 400 plus million events logged every day. You leave a data team in that kind of environment. It’s like the wonderland for people.

Barkha Saxena: So my team is so excited. It’s a cross-functional thing. We work with multiple teams and we are solving problems that cross the aisle. From working with the marketing team on different types of users. That question problem. Working with Leanne’s team and helping out how we can serve our community better. Working with Tracy’s team and figuring out how can we help them launch market. There’s so many problems teams are solving, they get to work with humongous amount of data. They get to use different types of data technology and the tools to build out the solutions which creates business value for our community.

Barkha Saxena: And just to bring it back to I’m very lucky to have such a fantastic team which is just building all these awesome solutions. But the reason all of us are so engaged in doing all this wonderful work, going back to what Tracy said, this is just a wonderful place to be. The people are–I don’t know how many have notice our core values. I have worked at multiple places. This is the first place where I would say we actually live by our cultural value. We focus on people, truly on people. You heard Tracy. The whole conversation is started on people. We lead with love. We trust each other. We believe in supporting each other.

Barkha Saxena: We embrace all the weirdness. That is one of the core value. Honestly, even I use it in my personal life. Like when you start to accept people for what they are, life just becomes simple. And then together we go. So we are so vested in each other’s goal that it just makes this place, this beautiful place. With that, let me invite… Can I invite? More wonderful people that you guys can meet with. Okay, thank you.

Tracy Sun, Adrienne Hamrah, Camille Ford, Vanessa Wong, Angela Buckmaster

Poshmark girl geeks: Tracy Sun (speaking, right) moderates a panel discussion with Adrienne Hamrah, Camille Ford, Vanessa Wong, and Angela Buckmaster introducing themselves at Poshmark Girl Geek Dinner.

Tracy Sun: Sorry, I’m just trying to make them nervous. We’re just going to get excited, get loose. Let’s go. So first question, can you introduce yourself a little bit about what you do at Poshmark? So everyone has context of all the amazing things you’re going to say after that.

Angela Buckmaster: Yes. Microphone on. Okay. Hi, I am Angela. And as Claire mentioned, I am the Associate Community Operations Director. And so my team works under the Community umbrella and what we do is actually support all other areas of the community team through data analytics, product knowledge, and training.

Vanessa Wong: Hi, I’m Vanessa. I’m senior director in the product team and I run the core experiences team. And when I say core experience, what it means is the buying, the selling, the social interaction, working with our power sellers, our new sellers, any international expansion. And then also like market expansion as well.

Camille Ford: Hi, everyone. My name is Camille Ford. I work on the new markets team and the markets team is really focused on driving expansion into new business areas. So what that looks like could be developing a new category, launching multiple markets within the product alongside Vanessa’s team or expanding into new departments as well.

Adrienne Hamrah speaking

Software Engineer Adrienne Hamrah talks about innovation at Poshmark Girl Geek Dinner.

Adrienne Hamrah: Hi, everyone. I’m Adrienne. I’m a software engineer on the growth team. What does that mean? I basically work on projects to bring in new users to our platform. Whether that’s like an influencer project or just any like fun new things, new features.

Tracy Sun: So I know it was pretty fun to hear from me and Barkha but these ladies have the real stories that you want to hear about. As I was hearing earlier about what you guys wanted to share. I just thought it was great content to share with this group here. So no pressure. So we talked a lot about… Sorry, I’m being really goofy. It was a crazy day today. We talked a lot about innovation. And I kind of talked about it at high level, Barkha talked about it at high level. Can you guys really bring it home? Like what does innovation look like to your day to day?

Tracy Sun: Is there an example of something you’ve done recently, for example, that you think it was just a really cool project to work on because it involved innovation and, or something around people? I think that would be great for everyone to hear. Who wants to go first? Adrienne, you want to go? We’ll go backwards.

Adrienne Hamrah: So a good example of innovation was we basically wanted to bring the influencers I work with on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, etcetera. We wanted to bring them onto our own platform rather than going through a third party. So that was my first project, starting from helping the product manager all the way to doing the tech spec and actually executing on the code. And one example of innovation is in order to like see the level of influence someone has, we have to have some sort of metric so we know how much to pay them for, for posting on Instagram, for example.

Adrienne Hamrah: And instead of going through their API because there was a lot of stuff going on Instagram and they’re saying they were taking away their API, we decided to actually just use the HTML code and get their stats that way. So I think that was a really fun example. Because the first thing, if you’re familiar with software, the first thing you usually do when you talk to different companies, is you go through their API. And we decided to just bypass that completely.

Camille Forde speaking

Senior Manager of New Markets Camille Forde talks about markets and using technology and social as tools at Poshmark Girl Geek Dinner.

Camille Ford: So the innovation question’s interesting because I feel like throughout my career I’ve always tried to think about how can I do something different? But at Poshmark, I feel like that question gets tipped a little bit. It’s how can we do things differently using social as a tool, using a technology as a tool. And so I feel like working on markets for the past six months is a really good example of that. And so markets themselves are just easy experiences within the product that make it easier for people to connect, sell, and shop by what’s important to them.

Camille Ford: And in many ways, it’s just a layer on top of Poshmark’s existing platform, but really digs into the social piece, which is, brings it back to people, I think at the end of the day. And so for me, even working on markets and figuring out like how can we get people to shopping experiences that are relevant? It’s almost like this backwards thing where through markets we’re now enabling people to shop the way that they used to shop.

Camille Ford: So if I only wanted to shop luxury and I want to go into a luxury store and I want that like real-time feedback on a certain thing, I can get that through the luxury market on Poshmark. And so to me, this is like an interesting full circle view of innovation around how can we use the tools that we have to kind of bring it back to its core. And so just working on launching markets over the past six months, I think now we have roughly 25-ish markets has been an interesting experience for me with regards to innovation.

Vanessa Wong: So, many years ago, we launched a feature called Offer. And what that feature is, I don’t know if any of you… Has anyone used it? Raise your hand if you’ve used that feature on Poshmark? So it really mimics normal behavior. You’re there like, think about the olden times. You’d go barter and negotiate. And we kind of bring that to life in the app. So what we did last year is we launched a feature called Offer to Liker. Has anyone ever liked an item on Poshmark? Has anyone had a listing and gotten likes on Poshmark? Yeah.

Vanessa Wong: So it’s an amazing feeling. You know that these people are really interested in your product. And so you’re getting all this love for this product. And so we thought why don’t we use that energy to the seller and help them. So what we launched is Offer to Liker and where you can give a private discount to the people that like your item. And that’s been amazingly successful for us. We’ve just used kind of normal behavior and we’ve used that organic behavior and we’ve amplified that through our product.

Angela Buckmaster: Awesome. So I’m kind of echoing some of the things that you’ve heard. Poshmark is a social commerce platform. And so on the app, people are commenting and communicating with each other on listings. They’re liking. They’re communicating and building bonds with each other through buying and selling. And so from the very early days of Poshmark, we actually saw that these users, these poshers, were, as Tracy mentioned, getting together outside of the app, as well, very organically and just meeting up.

Angela Buckmaster: There’s actually a term that has been coined for someone that’s a friend that you meet on Poshmark that is PFF which is Posh Friend Forever. And so, as you can tell, these bonds are lifelong. And so we saw this and we thought, okay, this is really, again, the lifeblood of Poshmark. We are all about the people and spreading the love. And that’s the only reason all of us are here today. So we came up with a type of event called a Posh N Sip. And the Posh N Sip is a posher-led event.

Angela Buckmaster: And these poshers are finding the venues. They are inviting their friends, their family, their PFFs, to get together and not only talk about Poshmark but also just build upon these bonds. And make more connections and really grow and empower each other. And so I think, to me, that’s something that’s super exciting because we get to see them meet all over the country and just get together and just kind of continue what they have on the app but in the physical world as well.

Tracy Sun: Okay, great. So we talked a lot about innovation and if you guys want any more, feel free to ask. They’ve all agreed to stay for the Q&A so you can’t leave. We’re doing a Q&A right here and then after if you have questions that you want to do in private. Now I want to talk about you as people. You have so much experience that I think is so interesting. It was really interesting to me to hear it. I think it’d be really interesting to everyone else in the room mostly because we’re all so different. Our stories are all so different.

Tracy Sun: And so can you share a little bit about how you got to Poshmark and if there is, and with that, is there anything you did along the way that kind of helped you get into the role or any tip you have? I imagine anyone, here either now or in the future, might be looking to make a change in their job, for example. So if you have any tips on that or you might want to have a job. So if you have a job are they any tips on how to be successful. It’s just you are four really successful women. And then I think I’d like to give a little bit of the floor to that. You want to start, Angela?

Angela Buckmaster: Yeah. Awesome. So I actually have been at Poshmark for a little over six years now. And so I found Poshmark through a friend who still works here. We were friends through middle school and high school, and she heard that I had graduated college and was looking for my first big girl job. And she was on a community team here and said, hey, you should come interview. So I did. And at the time, we had basically one role, which was community associate. And through that, we wore a lot of different hats, as is typical at a startup. And from there, we kind of started to build into different teams.

Angela Buckmaster: And so from there, I moved into the support team. It’s still under the community umbrella and I did some management for a couple of years. And through that, I noticed that I started having and more of an interest in our KPIs and our SLAs. And I wanted to know why are they the way they are. How can we make them better and to really understand them on a deeper level. And so I started speaking to my manager and Leanne, our SVP, and just letting them know I’m really interested in this. I would love to move into more of a data-driven role.

Angela Buckmaster: The time wasn’t right, right at that moment. But I kept telling them and I kept trying to get into projects that I could kind of dip my toes into the analytics area until the day came when Leanne approached me and she said, “Okay, the role’s here, let’s do it.” So I happily went to that more of an analytics role on the community team which was awesome. I got to stay with my community family and did that for about a year.

Angela Buckmaster: And then Leanne approached me with another opportunity and said, “Hey, let’s build out this team.” So now I have the three areas. I have a data analytics team, a product knowledge team, and a training team. And so I’ve learned a lot over six years. I’ve learned that you can’t just keep your dreams to yourself. I think something I really believe is whatever you think about and you talk about all the time is what you are or what you will become. And so I was very open and I kept telling people about my dream and I truly believe that that’s why it happened. Because if you don’t speak up, no one knows. So if that’s my little tip, I would encourage you all to just be very open about your passions and your dreams.

Tracy Sun: That’s so amazing that, Angela, you knew your dream and then went and told your boss. That’s so vulnerable. It’s so scary. Has anyone here done that? Told your boss you want a different job or you want a different you know. Anyone who wants to do that? Just kidding. I love my job. I was just trying to get people… So if you’re one of the people raising your hand, come talk to her. Because she did it and sounds like it worked out for her. So, Vanessa, you want to go?

Vanessa Wong speaking

Senior Director of Product Management Vanessa Wong talks about her journey in product management, and moving on up, at Poshmark Girl Geek Dinner.

Vanessa Wong: Cool. So when I graduated college, the economy wasn’t great and I was just applying jobs everywhere. I was hanging out with my unemployed friends. It was really fun, but my parents were like you need a job. And me being a geek, like many of you guys, I saw a job posting. I don’t know if you guys have heard of CNET? They review electronics and I love electronics. They do a lot of cool tech stuff. It’s in San Francisco. Super fun. And I got a job there. Just amazing. And it’s at a big company. It’s like, “Wow, that’s really cool.”

Vanessa Wong: But I started my job and I was really bored. It was just something, yeah, it was a job, but it wasn’t something fulfilling. But then I got immersed and started talking to people and I got involved in helping building tools for that team with engineering. I was kind of doing product management for the backend tools but I wanted something more. So like Angela, I actually went up to my VP and very–more like a “Hey, this is something I’m already doing. What can I do next?” Like, “How do I prepare myself? Do you have advice for me? Do you have input?”

Vanessa Wong: And he was very open and receptive and pretty much immediately he was like, let’s craft a role for you, which was amazing. I did not expect that. I came to kind of talk to him, building a case, not sure what would happen. I definitely was really scared, but he was very receptive and I got the role as a project manager to help build internal tools. But deep down, I really wanted to work on the user side. So I was building tools for the shopping team. So that was my kind of first step into shopping which kind of leads to where I am at now.

Vanessa Wong: And so then I was in that role for maybe about a year and then internal opening opened to be a PM for CNET shopping and CNETshopper.com and I applied. And what was great about the people at CNET is that they were so supportive. My manager was like, “Hey, yeah, go, go talk to that hiring manager.” And we were able to work through and I was able to transfer into that role. And then I was there for several years and then it kind of leads me to Poshmark where my then boyfriend was like, “Hey, there’s this job opening at this company called Kaboodle.”

Vanessa Wong: And Kaboodle is our CEO, Manish Chandra’s, first company that he started. And I just applied. I was like, okay, this seems pretty cool. I’m already doing something in shopping. This is social shopping. This is pretty new then. And then I applied and I wasn’t sure about this whole thing because it was still pretty new. Social shopping was a pretty new concept back in the day. And then I applied and then worked there for several years. I went on with my journey in product management to many different companies.

Vanessa Wong: And then I had kept a close relationship with Manish and he’s always been my mentor. And then one day he’s like, “Hey, what about joining Poshmark?” And I was like, “Yeah, of course.” This seems natural to work with people you really trust and you really admire. But coming full circle back to my role now, just a couple of weeks ago, someone on my team, she came up to me and she kind of did the same thing that me and Angela did.

Vanessa Wong: She’s like, “Hey, I love what I’m doing but I want more. Can I talk to you about it?” I’m like, “Yes.” She’s like, so the first thing she said was, “Sorry, if I’m being aggressive,” and I stopped her right there. I was like, “You’re not being aggressive at all.” Like, “I welcome this. Please, please feel that you can do this any time. I’m here to help you fulfill your dreams.” So we’ve started this conversation and we’re really helping her where we’re going to really help chart her to her dream.

Tracy Sun: That’s amazing.

Camille Ford: I’m going to cry.

Tracy Sun: Yeah.

Camille Ford: Sitting next to her. So there really are some interesting themes here. I also graduated when the economy wasn’t doing so hot and I felt like, what is the responsible thing to do now? Go be an accountant. And so my team teases me now because I call myself a recovering accountant because that’s exactly what I am. But I started my career about 10 years ago at PWC. It felt like that was the right thing to do. That was the safe thing to do. I had student debt, but it was like not the right thing for me at all. In about a couple of years into doing that, after I felt like I had a good foundation around financial services. I was auditing at the time, mainly VC funds and private equity funds.

Camille Ford: I also then went to my boss and said, I’m not happy. Like, I like it here. I like the people, I like the culture, but I don’t like the work that I’m doing. And I feel like there’s a part of my brain that’s withering away because I’m not doing anything creative. And they helped me, they helped me find a new role. And so I moved into a marketing function where I felt like I could get some different functional expertise in something that felt like I would be able to still use the analytic side of my brain but also use the more creative side of my brain as well.

Camille Ford: And it was a really great learning experience. But after a little while, it also felt like, okay, what’s next? This isn’t quite enough. And so I made the decision to move from the East Coast. I was in Boston at the time, go Bruins, and I moved to the West Coast to attend business school. And I was really intentional about my time during the MBA to just like, one, unlearn all the stuff that I didn’t feel like was for me. Because I told myself, “You are an accountant. You are only the analytical person. Who are you to think that you can be creative? Who are you to think that you can find both of those things in one job and be happy? Who are you to think you can work in fashion at all?” And really opened myself up to the possibilities of what could be.

Camille Ford: And so I spent those two years just doing a lot of internships in fashion tech and just retail and trying to just learn everything I felt like I didn’t know. Interestingly enough, I had been a user of Poshmark for several years. Actually, before I moved for business school, I sold all my stuff on Poshmark, moving across the country. And it was right before I was about to graduate. I look around and a lot of my classmates have these fancy jobs. They’re all set. They’re enjoying all this traveling and here I am still recruiting up until the day of graduation.

Camille Ford: I’m looking at Danny back there because I got a call from the Poshmark recruiter on the day, the morning of my MBA graduation and I thought he was going to say, Camille, we have an offer for you. He didn’t. Instead, he’s like, “Camille, we don’t have something for you right now. But like we still want to stay in touch.” And that was a little heartbreaking, to be honest, going into graduation, but still stayed the course. And a week later which actually was on my 31st birthday got a call from Danny again and this time it was like Tracy’s ready to make you an offer.

Camille Ford: And I share that level of detail only to say that what got me through like, one, switching these functions, kind of keeping the momentum up when I felt like I wasn’t necessarily getting to the place that I wanted to be in the time that I wanted to be at, to get there, rather, is just this layer of tenacity. And just going after it and knowing that like you are totally worthy of whatever it is that you think that you can get. Because the opportunity might not present itself right now but it definitely will.

Camille Ford: And so just staying the course that you feel like is true and natural to you and not being nervous that like, “Hey, I’ve invested all these years in like financial services.” Like that’s what I’m an expert in. No, like, now I’m an expert in social commerce. Or I’m going to get there. So just being really honest with yourself and not giving up on yourself would be my best advice.

Adrienne Hamrah: That was amazing. So like everyone else, I also had a career change. I actually had four. So 10 years ago, I was in school. I was in structural engineering and undergrad and while I really liked like calculating forces and making sure things don’t fall down in buildings I ended up getting–

Tracy Sun: Me too, by the way.

Adrienne Hamrah: Yeah, it’s still like every time I drive over a bridge I’m like, I hope this bridge like doesn’t shake. That’s always in the back of my head. So I ended up actually taking a job in civil engineering with the city of San Francisco, interned there for public works. Really, really boring. I worked on sewers and sewers are very, very boring. They like fall apart every 100 years. There’s not much thinking involved. So I went back to school, got a masters in engineering management because I wanted to learn more about the business side, the people side of things.

Adrienne Hamrah: And then after that, I actually went to Verizon. I did a four-year rotation program and that was really, really cool. I got to do four different jobs in four years. Got really great training with executives, seeing how they run a really large company. But telecom was also very boring to me. It’s like there’s only so many cell phone towers I can design. They all look the same and not very challenging.

Adrienne Hamrah: So I shifted again, I decided to become a product manager, and luckily, a girl from high school was the recruiter at a really small startup of 55 people at the time. It was in the cancer research clinical trials space. And so that was really interesting to me because I actually was pre-med for a hot minute in college. So I was like, I’m going to go back to healthcare. As a PM, though, I was doing internal tools and I don’t think that was the right fit for me. And also, the management there was just a disaster.

Adrienne Hamrah: And I think the most important thing I learned out of that is it doesn’t matter how cool the space is or how cool you think the product is. If the people, if they’re not the right fit for you, then go. Because you’ll find someplace else better. So after going through that experience and even though I was like this is such a cool like company, I was like, this is not the right thing for me. So I walked away and then I decided to go into software, so I did a boot camp.

Adrienne Hamrah: It was a three-month boot camp, 100 hours every week of coding. It was the hardest thing I’ve had to do. Harder than structural engineering undergrad because it was all crammed into one. But I came out of it absolutely loving it. I met up with a girl at a new restaurant opening. She’s actually there, Christina. Because we do food influencing on the side. And so she was like, I work at this company called Poshmark. We’re always hiring. I’m sure we have software engineer openings. Why don’t you like look?

Adrienne Hamrah: And so I took a look. I decided to apply. She referred me and I just absolutely fell in love with the culture, the people first, and then it happens that the product is also something I love and I use as well. So it’s like best of both worlds. So I think my tip is, first, if it’s not the right fit for you, don’t be scared to move. For me, I moved four times, four different companies. But just don’t settle and just go for it.

Tracy Sun: Thank you for sharing your stories. You guys, can you give them all just a… Yeah. Amazing. So I’m going to ask one more question and then I think we’re going to open up to Q&A. So those of you who know me and there’s a lot of you in the room, I’m a huge believer in superpowers. So I just gave Poshmark a superpower, which is people-powered innovation. And what I mean by a superpower is that there’s typically one thing that you can do that you know you do better than everybody else. And if you’re lucky, it’s useful in your personal life or career, but it doesn’t have to be.

Tracy Sun: And so I think it’s really–sometimes you don’t know what it is and sometimes it can change but I think it’s really helpful to have that conversation with yourself. Like, what is my superpower? So that you can carry that with you and just know, no matter what, I can do one thing better than everybody else. And I think that’s great for confidence. So I wanted to–this is one of the questions I snuck in there so I’m not going to call on anyone. But if you want to volunteer and share with us your superpower, my hope is that if we share then if you don’t know what yours is maybe we can help pull it out of you by sharing what ours is.

Tracy Sun: So I’ll just start. I didn’t know this until a few years ago but I think one of my superpowers is that I’m really good at telling stories if I care. And I’m really bad at telling stories if I don’t care. And so going back to like career stuff, I have to do things that I care about because then I do my best work. So I think my superpower is, I’m a good storyteller. Anyone want to share?

Adrienne Hamrah: I don’t know if this is a superpower, but I can literally talk about food forever, which is like it’s how I got this job. It’s how I got the job before this one. It’s great because like this company loves food too. So it just worked out and I’m like a supertaster. So I’m just very sensitive to like ingredients as well. So I’m the kind of person sitting at the table and like asking the waiter like, “What exactly do you put in here?” “Oh, yeah, yeah, I did taste that.”

Camille Ford: That’s funny. My superpower? I would say that I’m really good at building relationships with people. Not like massive amounts of people, but if I like find my group, I can really build deep relationships with them and it certainly served me at work, given that the markets team needs a lot of other people to get things done. But it just played a big role in my life to be able to like put myself in other people’s shoes.

Camille Ford: And it’s funny because my friends tell me I’m a good listener. My mom tells me I was the worst listener as a child. So I’m not exactly sure how to reconcile that. But other than kind of going this back to this point around caring. For the people that are around me, I care a lot, and building relationships has been something that I found I’m pretty good at it.

Vanessa Wong: So for me, I don’t know if this is a superpower, but I think this applies to–how many moms are out there? Yeah. So I’m a mom to three young children. I have three girls. They’re all under the age of five so I have to multitask like crazy. My husband has a really busy job too and so I think that carries on into my work life and personal life. I became super efficient after I had my first child. I don’t know if that applies to you other moms too. So I would say a superpower that I have is just being able to manage multiple things, switching context here and there and just being able to switch gears on the fly and just to readjust and reassess and prioritize accordingly. So, yeah.

Angela Buckmaster: So I think my superpower is actually something that other people knew about me before I knew it about myself and that is that I will and can support anyone in anything they want to do. So when I was a kid, I was the kid in elementary school who would get put in groups with like the trouble kids because I’d be so patient and supportive but I could like help the group get to the group project and get through it. And so for a lot of years though, I didn’t really realize this about myself and people are like, you should be a teacher, you should do this, you should do that.

Angela Buckmaster: And I always was like, “Oh, what’s my skill? What’s my thing?” And then actually being here at Poshmark and noticing kind of the roles I drifted towards and the people that I drifted towards, I kind of drifted towards the natural leaders because I wanted to support them and empower them. And I found eventually by spending a lot of time looking inside that that’s actually something I enjoy and I’m really good at. So I would say that’s my, my superpower.

Tracy Sun: Thank you guys for sharing. Let’s open it up for Q&A. If you have questions, I don’t know what to do. If you have questions, the mic is coming around. Raise your hand. Barkha, do you want to come up here? You’re fair game for questions. Thank you.

Speaker 12: Thank you. Thank you for sharing. I have two questions, so you can answer either or. One question I have is just about how you try to maintain the company culture as you grow into a larger company eventually over time? The other question I’m curious about is how you use innovation to stay ahead of your competitors? Who are your competitors?

Tracy Sun: Angela, you want to take those questions?

Angela Buckmaster: Yeah. So the first question about culture. I think for us, like you said, we’re scaling so much, so rapidly, not only internally, but externally. And so we have to think about both. And tying back into something I said earlier, I think that the way that we make sure that we continue to scale our culture is to make sure our culture is top of mind. Because again, if you think about it, if you talk about it, if you embrace it, it’s only going to get better. And you can never forget about it. So doing things like making sure we stay in touch with both our internal and external community all the time. Even at the company here.

Angela Buckmaster: So when I started six years ago, we were in one room and I knew everyone, I knew what they ate for dinner the night before. And now that we’re spread out and we’re on two different floors, it is a little bit harder, but you have to remember that we are all working together towards the same goals. So we talk to each other a lot. I can still go up to anyone in the company and talk to them about anything that’s happening inside or outside of the app. So I think again, just keeping it top of mind and always trying to think of how can we do this better has made us be able to scale our culture with the company.

Vanessa Wong: Yeah. Actually, I’ll do the first one too and I could go a little into the second one. So for our product features whenever we build something, we look at what our values are and we always make sure they’re rooted in there. So our CEO is really into love. I don’t know if you’ve guys have… You should catch some of his videos on YouTube but he always says something where you lead with love and with love comes money. And we use that a lot in our product thinking. We have a like, which is a heart, but we don’t have like a hate or dislike. Like how Facebook has different reactions.

Vanessa Wong: We always–everything is really positive. Everything is really transparent. And that goes along with a lot of our company culture as well. Everything is transparent. You can voice your opinion. You know what’s going on at our all hands–all the information is kind of disseminated into everyone. So that’s kind of how we look at when we’re developing products. As far as our competitors, yeah, we’re always checking them out. They’re always doing cool and unique things.

Vanessa Wong: But again, I think because we’re so different. We have like the largest community, social community out there. We have to take a little different angle. We can’t be like an eBay. They’re very different than us and whatever–let’s say we do something similar to them, it may not work for us. So we’re always on the lookout, but we always search within of like what would really help our sellers stylists? As people, they’ve started their own businesses on Poshmark. How can we empower them and how can we help them grow? You’ll be good…

Tracy Sun: No, no, no, no. She’s all right. I was going to echo.

Speaker: Do you have another question? Otherwise, we can keep going. All right there. Is there a mic?

Audience Member: Hi. I have a question about user feedback. How do you gather that and how do you incorporate that into the product development and innovation?

Angela Buckmaster: You can maybe onto that.

Vanessa Wong: So I actually work with people like Angela and we meet with the community team very often. I look at our Facebook groups and we talk to our users. We go to Posh Fest and we’re very connected to our users and we hear what’s going on and we incorporate that into our product roadmap. There are things that our users may request but they may not fit in. They might think that that is the solutions for them. But when we internally talk about these things, we think one step further is like, is that really helping? That might be one thing but we have a larger plan and larger vision for them.

Vanessa Wong: And I think one of the coolest things that I’ve done at Poshmark is each year, we have an annual get-together with our seller stylists called Posh Fest. And I’ve been very fortunate the last couple of years to kind of announce what we did for our hackathon. And so what we did is we had users submit things that they’ve want in the app and we get like, I don’t know, thousands and thousands of requests. And they’re like the spreadsheet is crazy.

Vanessa Wong: But I love looking at it each year because I’m like, “Oh, this is what they’re interested. This is what they’re passionate about.” And so, for example, last year we were able to rehaul our newsfeed and this is something that the users have wanted for so long and they were so excited about it. Another killer feature that we launched was they’d been always wanting a draft listing and so we were able to launch that. So that was really amazing.

Speaker: I think we have a question over here.

Audience Member: Thank you, everybody. I’m actually a Poshmark buyer, especially. I’ve been seller but buying more than selling. And so a question I have for you that I’ve noticed is that there is a very distinct culture within Poshmark. And I was wondering, how do you ensure that positive culture and thinking when like cybersecurity issues or bullying issues and things like that online considering there’s 40 million users, how do you use data or how do you think about the product or how do you build the communities to be able to continue that very specific type of culture that’s already been there? And especially around Cybersecurity anti-bullying.

Tracy Sun: So I’ll start and then Barkha, if you have anything to add, let me know. So we get this form of question quite a bit. And the first thing I’d say is it’s really hard to fake a value. So when you talk about the values that are our unique community, I’d say that comes from what we want and it’s a little bit of the world that we wish we had before we had Poshmark. We live it here at headquarters and it’s, we intentionally said let’s also build it into the user experience and also to our community.

Tracy Sun: And it’s really hard to fake that because you almost have to be a little bit crazy about it and not know you’re crazy. And in that way then you just naturally start to act in a way that’s according to your values and it becomes stronger and stronger. So what we did is we talked a lot to Angela’s point. We knew people were important to us. We knew culture is important to not just culture here, culture in our app, in our community. So we had that top of mind and built everything with that in mind.

Tracy Sun: And there are some times where we said this would make sense to make more money. But this doesn’t make sense if we want to be empowering to our sellers. And so we had our North Star and we chose that path. And so if you know what your North Star is and for us, it’s our people, then it’s easier to make those decisions when those crazy moments happen and you’re panicked and you don’t know exactly what to do. I don’t know if I can answer anything about cybersecurity. Can you? Where is Chetan?

Barkha Saxena: Or Gautam.

Tracy Sun: Or Gautam?

Barkha Saxena: Well, the only thing I would say is we also rely on our community to help with that. That’s the power of this community who is very passionate. For them, Poshmark is not just a product. It’s their own thing. So they really help us with that too. Like there’s lot of comment reporting, a lot of reporting that happens which goes to Angela team and of course, you have to look at it like the… You can report anything. But that’s where their team has the expertise in knowing like how to do it. But I think it’s our community who is actually allowing us to scale more than I would say the data in this case.

Speaker: We’ll take a few more questions.

Audience Member:  Thank you. And thank you guys so much for volunteering your time to talk to us today. My question is around branding, especially when starting a company and starting a venture, especially social like Poshmart. How did you decide your values and how did you decide what kind of brand you wanted to put forward?

Tracy Sun: So I touched a little bit before… I’ll take, okay. I touched a little bit before about our values and just to recap, I think it comes from what you deeply care about and the founders and the founding team, we have a lot of things in common but I think one of the strongest things we have in common is just a belief in the way we want the world to be. So it’s almost outside of business and it’s not just a company value. It’s like our personal values. So it comes from there.

Tracy Sun: In terms of branding, I think that’s a really interesting one for us. And when it came time to really formalize our thoughts around brand, we were a little bit confused because we’re a company that wants to empower other people. And so if you create a really strong traditional brand, likely you will alienate some people. So I come from the fashion background. So my first thought was, “Ooh, we’re going to create a really cool logo and all of our messaging and all of our images are going to look chic and sophisticated.” Things that you had imagined at like Net-a-porter, for example, or just another cool brand. But we’re like, “Yeah, but 80% of America doesn’t want to see that. So what do we do then?”

Tracy Sun: And plus all of our sellers, they have their own story. How can we possibly create a brand around our story? And this is where those core values come into play. And one of our core values in terms of how we prioritize our time is to get behind our sellers, get behind our community, and make sure that we’re empowering them. And so when we think about brand, our brand became empowering sellers. And so when you see some of our videos or you see where we put our energy into things that might be called brand. We usually don’t put our faces, we put your faces right and we celebrate your wins. We don’t really celebrate our wins because if you or the community’s winning, we know we’re winning. So a lot of our brand is around community, honestly.

Speaker: Last question.

Audience Member: Thank you all so much for taking the time to speak with us today. I was wondering if you have an example of a challenge that you’re facing as a company right now or maybe in the recent past. And I’m interested in hearing about what kind of problem-solving methodology you use in a fast-paced environment like Poshmark.

Vanessa Wong: So I think one of the problems is scaling. We’re getting larger. Our app has a lot of different things in there. We want to introduce new features, but I think the core thing is keeping it simple. We don’t want it to be complicated. We don’t want a million steps in the listing flow. We don’t want to make buying complicated. But we do want to introduce new things that are useful for everyone. So I think one thing we’ve introduced within the last couple of years and we’ve introduced a concept of a metamodel.

Vanessa Wong: And what it is, is it’s basically a core set of principles that you kind of adhere to when you’re building a feature and really mapping it back to those. So if I’m going to create this button, like does it really adhere to what we’re trying to do? So really sticking that and it really gets the team aligned, as well. So let’s say we have a team of like 10 engineers working on it. That helps us really stay focused and make sure that we’re reaching our North Star.

Tracy Sun: Just to add one thing to what Vanessa said. The metamodel is a great one. But really that the problem that we’re facing that led that to be the solution is that we used to be a team that would sit around the table and design the product and then we grew to 400 plus people. And what we found is conversations were happening all over the place about the same project in different offices. We have three other offices around the world, and we had trouble–We would always try to communicate but things would always slip between the cracks.

Tracy Sun: And so that’s a challenge of scale that we had is we were not talking to each other in a way that — we weren’t communicating. We were talking and not communicating. So what the metamodel does, and you can call it what you want, but it gives guidelines. Here’s the core values. Here is what when we’re doing a feature, when we’re doing a project, we’re doing a campaign, here’s what it should do. And so double check yourself so that we don’t have to. We can be more nimble as a smaller team.

Speaker: All right. Thank you so much. Let’s give them a big round of applause here.

Tracy Sun, Claire Berkley

Technical Recruiter Claire Berkley passes the mic to SVP of New Markets and Co-Founder Tracy Sun to deliver opening remarks at Poshmark Girl Geek Dinner.

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