“Tech is a Team Sport: When Women Lead, Everything is Possible”: Claire Martorana, Federal Chief Information Officer, and Mina Hsiang, Administrator at United States Digital Service (Video + Transcript)

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Angie Chang: We are having our next panel now. We want to welcome Claire Martorana the Federal Chief Information Officer for the Office of Management and Budget in the Executive Office of the President hailing from Washington, DC.

Angie Chang: And previously, she served on the USDS team at the US Department of Veterans Affairs, working on digital monitorization for veterans and prior to her tour of duty in government tech or gov tech with the USDS she was president at Everyday Health and Senior Vice President at Web MD.

Angie Chang: Also, we want to welcome Mina Hsiang. She is a third Administrator named at the United States Digital Service. She is the first woman and first Asian American to lead the USDS and she brings her experience and expertise to the government. Notably, she was previously a VP at Devoted Health.

Angie Chang: Hi Claire. So get things started. Why don’t you tell us a bit about yourself and what is the biggest digital initiatives that you’ve been working on and some of the challenges that your teams have been taking on.

Claire Martorana: Thanks Angie. Hey, Mina. Nice to join you all today.

Claire Martorana: I think probably the thing I’m focused on the most these days is cyber security. Cyber security is top of mind for this administration and kind of top of mind at this moment in time, as you can all imagine. And we are working across the federal enterprise.

Claire Martorana: So my job as federal CIO is, I help coordinate across all of the federal agencies, there’s 24 CFO act agencies, which are really big agencies then about 140 small agencies, including the Marine Mammal Council, so gigantic and then very tiny, making sure that our entire federal enterprise is safe and secure.

Claire Martorana: Recently in this administration, we launched a cybersecurity executive order, and then we just published out a zero trust strategy to try and help bring all our agencies up to a different level.

Claire Martorana: So that’s what I’ve been focused on and I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to work with Mina quite a bit on our customer experience executive order. So maybe I’ll turn it over to you Mina.

Mina Hsiang: Awesome. And thank you so much for having us, this is super exciting great to see you Claire. Tons is going on across government, we’ve been very focused on things that improve services for the public, things that make key needs of the public more accessible.

Mina Hsiang: So things that you have seen, launching vaccine [inaudible] and adding testing sites, adding appointment availability, launching COVID test [inaudible] and helping everyone get access to new testing, standing up tools and a site and an engagement model to enable folks to more easily get access to the child tax credit, understand what entitled to at a simple reading level…

Mina Hsiang: Which is not easy for taxes and then to support people in applying for the child tax credit and in filing their taxes which is necessary to get all the credits they deserve working on tools that help us do analysis and evaluation in the interest of climate and economic justice investments and making sure that we can ensure that Federal Dollars are going to things that support those goals.

Mina Hsiang: Working on modernizing WIC, which is Women, Infants and Children, and making sure that this program which is run by the states but has a lot of technology and operations behind it has the tool that make it accessible for people at critical time.

Mina Hsiang: So we’ve been really deeply engaged on a number of programs across government as Claire said, many of them are customer experience focused as well as some things that are a little bit more security or processing focused but really helping improve government services across many areas that touch everyday people.

Angie Chang: That’s really great to hear. Thank you for sharing all those examples of the fine work that you’re doing. So can you tell me about what is the CXEO and why we should care about and how you are working to deliver better services?

Mina Hsiang: Absolutely. And Claire jump in. So the CXEO… Government is like organized in this very bureaucratic way, where we have different agencies that all touch the same stakeholders.

Mina Hsiang: We run different programs that have come out in different laws, but the public doesn’t care about any of that. Like you’re a person, you have a moment in your life. You need services, you deserve access to things that you’re entitled to at that point in your life, for one reason or another, you need to register, you need to retire and register for an array of different things that you’re entitled to at that point.

Mina Hsiang: And so this is really the nexus of a lot of our work and our observations and our understanding of how people really need to interact with services. The best companies think much more about the customer at the center. And so this was us saying let’s orient government in this way.

Mina Hsiang: Let’s not make it an exercise for every individual to go learn about every program and have to navigate the same thing over and over again.

Mina Hsiang: How do we start orienting with a mindset that says, how do we serve the individuals who are entitled to and dependent on and use government programs everyday, some of them are about support, but some of them are just about registering and becoming part of the system.

Mina Hsiang: And so putting that all together has been the nexus and that has required as Clara says. And we talk about a lot, it’s really a team sport, right?

Mina Hsiang: That all of a sudden requires all these parts of government to have a similar customer focus orientation, to hold hands and say, okay, so how are we going to serve people?

Mina Hsiang: And it’s been awesome to work with Claire. We have deployed… USDS deploys, a bunch of teams across agencies to help implement that. And then Claire’s team. And I’ll let you talk about it provides the connective tissue and the super structure that makes sure that this all hangs together. So it’s been great to partner and work really closely together in this, but Claire.

Claire Martorana: Yeah. And I think to build on what Mina said – a person, and I think this was really prevalent during the pandemic, a person’s just trying to get something done, they don’t know the org chart of some federal agency. Half the time you don’t even know the name of the agency that you’re trying to get services from.

Claire Martorana: So what we are trying to do with the customer experience executive order is do what we have done in the private sector, right? Which is try to care for your customer. A, know who your customer is, make sure you’re designing your products and services with your customers, not for them.

Claire Martorana: And recognizing that in many instances, you’re possibly going to have to intersect with multiple agencies to get one thing done. And then maybe an office is closed. So the only way a person knew how to approach the government was to go to this place and talk to a person. And then during the pandemic that wasn’t available.

Claire Martorana: And so we’ve spent a lot of time working with all of the work that the US Digital Service has done. And then with other folks across government saying, how do we not only improve the digital experience for people who can use digital channels, right?

Claire Martorana: Not everybody can, some people still want to get somebody on the phone at a call center or walk into a building and have a person to person interaction. We have to think omnichannel. We have to meet people where they are also based on their skills and abilities, because not everybody speaks English.

Claire Martorana: Not everybody understands the legalese on these forms that sometimes they’re asked to fill out, to even get access, to speak to a person about something.

Claire Martorana: So we tried to step back be the customer and really think about how we can make navigating agencies more efficient and effective based on the tools we all know how to use right. In the private sector, all of our phones and the channels that we know how to use.

Claire Martorana: And I think the pandemic was really interesting because it broke down a lot of bureaucratic silos. People previously were like, we can’t do that statute, A, B, C, G, E, F, won’t allow us and during the pandemic, a lot of those barriers were broken down.

Claire Martorana: So we were able to take advantage of that and really accelerate some of this work that was started in government, but we’ve really had the great opportunity to take it several steps further.

Mina Hsiang: Absolutely.

Angie Chang: So what does this mean in terms of execution when it comes to hiring?

Mina Hsiang: So much hiring! OK. I mean, we talked about this customer experience EO. But even just the EO enumerates 36 life experiences that are specifically going to get improved across 17 agencies, in addition to many programs that are not specifically enumerated, all of the things that I listed that we’re working on, none of those are listed in the customer experience EO, because those are additional things that we’re committing to, all of the cybersecurity work that Claire has laid out, needs to be built into all of this.

Mina Hsiang: And so you all know from where you sit, how much expertise, how much skill and focus it takes to accomplish things in this arena.

Mina Hsiang: And we need to bring in a mix of people who come from experiences like the audience here, private sector, public sector, people who have done this at state and local levels, we’re working to bring all of those people together and actually build these integrated implementation teams to work shoulder to shoulder with the staff at the agents who have been supporting the services and understand the customers to build and enable all of this.

Mina Hsiang: Change requires a lot of work and a lot of new thinking and collaboration. And so Claire and I have been deeply focused on working across the government to say, now is an amazing time, there is so much to do, there’s so much support. Jump in Claire.

Claire Martorana: Yeah. And I would say, if you’ve ever interacted with the government and you went to a website and went, wow, this looks old or, wow, I wish I could do this other thing. It’s because you’re right. And we need to be a to do that. But the only way we’re able to do that is if people like you all come along with us on this journey.

Claire Martorana: We need to hire people that look like the American public, that interact across the nation.

Claire Martorana: We want people from different places. It can’t just be New York, DC, Atlanta, Chicago, and whatever.

Claire Martorana: We need people that come from all different walks of life because we all bring such different perspectives. When I talk to somebody who is coming from Kansas and they’re talking about having to drive an hour and a half to a local hospital, that’s different from where I live.

Claire Martorana: And that’s really important for me to have that understanding and perspective when we’re thinking about developing products and services. So the people we want to come and join us on this journey are all of you. I never thought I would join government.

Claire Martorana: I read a WIRED article about president Obama’s tech team. And it had a little thing at the bottom that says, USDS join. And I clicked on, I went online, I clicked on it and I filled out this application.

Claire Martorana: I never thought anyone would call me, a lot of us have imposter syndrome and parts of our careers. And we go, oh, all those people are really smart. And they know how to do all the things.

Claire Martorana: You are all those people, everybody listening right now, you are the people that actually can come into government, do a tour of duty and have an outsized impact.

Claire Martorana: Millions and millions of people can benefit from the skills you have. And that’s a really sobering thing to think about, but it is really true.

Claire Martorana: I mean, I work with people every single day that thought they’d be here for a year and three years later, they’re still doing outstanding work, because they can have such a gigantic impact and build all of those things that Mina talked about earlier. These COVID websites, getting tests out to the American public through the postal service that was all done because people like you showed up to help us do this work.

Mina Hsiang: Could not agree more. And I think just to get more detailed and specific or Angie, if you have a different question, but just to stay on this for a second, I mean the skills that we are looking for.

Mina Hsiang: We are looking for technologists, experts in design, people who are user researchers, data scientists, data engineers, product managers, all of these are the skills.

Mina Hsiang: And now as a moment to bring those into government, it’s a skillset that is rare in government and experience that we want diverse backgrounds and diverse ages and diverse locations, as Claire said.

Mina Hsiang: And in terms of the amount of work to do and the amount of leadership support that you will have to do that, it’s just the teammates. It’s an incredible moment to do that. If I may, I wanted to read a quote, just a woman at USDS said this to me last week.

Mina Hsiang: And it really, to me is like, why we’re here. My partner told me the other day that I’ve seemed extra of happy to him lately, despite the sometimes long hours and a lot of challenges.

Mina Hsiang: This is a unique job. And I don’t think I could have imagined what it was like ahead of time, but it’s definitely the coolest, most meaningful job that I’ve ever had. And I think to me at this moment where people we’re all looking for meaning and to do something important and to be able to use our skills in the most high impact way I have come back.

Mina Hsiang: This is my fourth time in government. I keep coming back. There is no other place that you can so meaningfully use your skills to impact the lives of others. So if it’s at all appealing, now I will plug. We have a website, the one where Claire went and clicked and we pulled her in, which is usds.gov/apply and really hope to see more of be there.

Claire Martorana: Yeah. And Angie, I’ll just add one more thing to pile on. The thing that is really fascinating about the government is if you care about food safety, if you care about healthcare, if you care about helping children, all of those opportunities are available to you. Y

Claire Martorana: ou can basically think of any constituent group and there is work that needs to happen. Technical work that needs to happen to empower the experience that those people have with the federal government.

Claire Martorana: So it is really an incredibly important time to join because we have so much momentum and candidly, we have money to support the momentum because of the American Rescue Plan and the Infrastructure. IIJA infrastructure bill. There’s actually a lot of work going on and what we need are the people to come and help us do that work.

Claire Martorana: And I would just add one thing in closing is, don’t self select out.

Claire Martorana: I was really close to self-selecting out. I don’t know, I’ve just done management and product and they probably need SREs and frontend engineers, not me.

Claire Martorana: Don’t self elect out, please go to usds.gov, apply and start on the journey. And if it’s not the channel through USDS, there’s lots of other places, USA jobs, the technology transformation services. There’s lots of other ways that you can get involved.

Angie Chang: Sounds like that’s the last question I have, which is, advice you would give to a person looking to make a change, or make a difference. It sounds like in this great resignation, great reshuffling, a place that people can go to reinvigorate themselves with something that has important, impactful, meaning to many millions of Americans is go have a tour of duty at the USDS.

Angie Chang: So do you have a final piece of advice or someone who wants to make an impact beyond applying for the USDS or many of these other organizations that you mentioned?

Claire Martorana: Yeah. There’s the US digital core for folks early career at the general service administration. There’s a technology transformation service. There’s 18F, there’s a really interesting group called the presidential innovation fellows that do outstanding work.

Claire Martorana: So there are lots of different ways into the government in addition to USDS but it is absolutely, I’d say raise your hand, go on these websites, take a look around and really interrogate that.

Claire Martorana: The one thing I said I was going to add in closing before, but I’m closing again is I had this amazing woman I worked with at the VA and we launched a product that helped veterans get access to healthcare. And when we launched, literally she started crying and she said, I just spent three years kicking ass and optimizing a shopping cart.

Claire Martorana: And today what I did is helping people and I’ve never had the opportunity to do that. And it was that impactful for her and I’ve never forgotten it. So we see that through our colleagues all the time, as you get to really help people that are in need and you get to use your awesome technology skills to drive that impact.

Claire Martorana: And it’s really, it’s something that we mean has been here in government. Numerous times I had thought, I’d be here a year I’m on my sixth year. You get commitment escalation because the work you get to do is so impactful.

Mina Hsiang: A thousand percent agree. I think we hear all those stories. The other thing I would add is this isn’t something that derails your career, this is a high impact job. First of all, there are also state digital services.

Mina Hsiang: There are state government offices of technology that have other names, but they are opportunities to work in your local community if that’s what matters to you. But all of these, every business that I have worked for every other company that I’ve helped start are deeply intertwined and affected by government programs, by regulations.

Mina Hsiang: This is the other piece of the economy and it’s in the extent to which I am competitive because I understand how things work on the other side as well. And that I understand the interplay and how both the table is set and how the game gets played.

Mina Hsiang: It’s really unusual to have people who have both of those skill sets. So this is also just really valuable for your perspective on the world and your career.

Mina Hsiang: So I would say, it’s both not a limitation and not a step back or a pause in your career. It’s a big leap forward.

Mina Hsiang: It has been really helpful to me in understanding how the world overall works and in my professional development.

Mina Hsiang: And then I would also say, there’s so much to do and there is no one else who is coming to do it. And no one else who is better qualified to do it so come.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you so much, ladies, this was just amazing. There’s so many comments on here where people are talking about how greatly inspired they are by you, Claire and you Mina. This has just been wonderful and we really, really are grateful for the time you spent in not just educating us, but in influencing and inspiring us today.

Mina Hsiang: Thank you so much.

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“Unique Paths to Machine Learning Careers”: Julie Choi, Chief Growth Officer at MosaicML, and Laura Florescu, Machine Learning Researcher at MosaicML (Video + Transcript)

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Angie Chang: Next up, we have women from MosaicML sharing their unique journeys to machine learning careers. I want to welcome Julie Choi, MosaicML Chief Growth Officer and Laura Florescu, MosaicML, Machine Learning Researcher.

Angie Chang: And they’ll share about how they worked at several tech companies, eight total, including a few unicorns and blue chips, and their reason for joining forces at a new startup focused on making machine learning training better for everyone and please do ask questions of these ladies in the Q&A section of Zoom. They welcome your questions and welcome, Julie and Laura!

Julie Choi: Hi everyone. Let me just pull up this, great hello, Happy International Women’s Day, Laura!

Laura Florescu: Happy International Women’s Day!

Julie Choi: I’m so happy to be here with you in our San Diego offices together in real life. So really, really happy to be here with everyone. Thank you so much. The Girl Geek X organization and Angie and everybody, I know it takes so much work to put this event together and we’re just thrilled to be here today to share from our own career stories, as well as from our current intersection where we’re working at MosaicML to train machine learning models faster.

Julie Choi: So let’s get started with Laura and we’re going to take Q&A at the end. We’ll reserve some time. So Laura, you are a machine learning researcher at MosaicML, and it’s just been a joy and delight to get to know you. Can you tell us more about your path that got you to this point?

Laura Florescu: Yes. Thank you, Julie, would love to. So my journey starts in Bucharest, Romania, where I grew up and went to school. I went to a math and computer science high school, and I guess I just kind of loved math. My father had a deep appreciation for it. And so that wore off a little bit to me.

Laura Florescu: And afterwards I went to Reed College in Oregon when I moved to the United States to study mathematics. And so that’s where my academic roots began. And afterwards for a year I worked at Los Alamos National Lab, where pretty much I learned programming and that’s how I got kind of interested more in engineering and technology.

Laura Florescu: And afterwards I wanted to do my PhD. So I started at New York University and I had the honor and pleasure to write a book with my PhD advisor. And so I got my degree in math, computer science, and afterwards I moved to Silicon Valley where I got interested in AI in startups, entrepreneurship, and I made the decision to join right after a small, at the time, startup called Grok. So they are working on custom hardware for inference in machine learning.

Laura Florescu: So I worked on compilers on machine learning there. I learned a ton and afterwards I went to SambaNova Systems also kind of following my passion of accelerating neural networks training. So SambaNova is also building custom hardware for training neural networks. So I worked on many different areas there as well.

Laura Florescu: And now for about a year, I joined forces with you at MosaicML, again, with the same kind of goal of accelerating AI now through more algorithmic side and system optimizations.

Julie Choi: Amazing. I have one question. I mean, this is a brilliant journey and so many amazing points along the way. How did you decide to go into industry versus academia after your PhD?

Laura Florescu: Yeah. So I think a lot of people finishing their PhDs have that exact dilemma. I definitely did and I think I realized I wanted to have more impact in the world, kind of work on work on something that basically the whole world can benefit from. And I felt Silicon Valley and startups in particular would give me that opportunity to do so.

Julie Choi: So it was about impact?

Laura Florescu: Right. Yeah.

Julie Choi: Great.

Laura Florescu: Yeah. Thank you, Julie.

Julie Choi: Sure.

Laura Florescu: So you are Chief Growth Officer at MosaicML. Can you tell us a little bit about your path and where you have been to get to here?

Julie Choi: I’d love to thank you so much. Yeah. When I was a kid growing up in LA, I didn’t imagine that at this age I would be a Chief Growth Officer. Those jobs didn’t exist back then.

Julie Choi: But I think when I look back on the journey, it kind of makes sense that I’m doing what I’m doing because my job right now is to connect us, right? To build relationships with engineers in the research community, as well as at large or medium or small companies who are looking to build AI. And so I am a connector and I’m a people person, but I am…

Julie Choi: I identify as a nerd. So I started my journey in LA. I grew up as an immigrant. Actually I immigrated to LA from South Korea. My parents moved us here when I was the age of three, and my sister was 0.2, literally just born. And we moved here with kind of everything we had and settled in first El Segundo and then North Torrance, if anyone knows Southern California geography.

Julie Choi: And my parents worked very, very hard. They owned a 7-11 store in Lawndale, close to Inglewood. And so they were very, very, very busy and they basically left my sister and I to kind of figure out what we wanted to do with our spare time. And as many kids during the 80s did, I watched a lot of TV on my own.

Julie Choi: I played video games and I just gravitated towards robots and transformers and robo tech, Voltron, anything mechanical as well as these stories of good versus evil. And I identified with the few female heroes that were in these cartoons. And I guess that kind of just spurred me on towards my path in education.

Julie Choi: I went to MIT, continued to find my people and find my groove. But when I graduated, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. So I went into consulting. And I started, I spent five years working with fortune 1000 types of enterprise companies, helping them solve problems, primarily in the security domain.

Julie Choi: So I was a hacker, I was hired to penetrate systems. And that was probably the first time I realized what it felt to be the only woman in the room, especially at RSA Conference. Wow. I was the only woman in the room usually and I was just like, wow, okay. But actually even then my team was extremely supportive and I had allies around me and it was like, do whatever it took to make that customer successful.

Julie Choi: And so I moved to Silicon Valley and here we are at MosaicML. I mean the Silicon Valley chapter also intersects with personally a lot of things, right? I met my husband, had my children, settled in where I live now. And at the same time growing in an understanding of what I wanted to do. And most recently, before deciding to go to MosaicML, I was at Intel and at Intel, I spent four very impactful years helping establish the AI business and brand for Intel.

Julie Choi: And actually the last time I gave a talk was Intel at a Girl Geek X conference. So it’s kind of amazing to do this again, about two years later.

Julie Choi: So here we are at MosaicML and we are here and so excited on this journey to accelerate AI development. And we’re doing this kind of differently than anyone else because we’re applying algorithmic research as well as system level optimizations to speed the way neural networks are trained.

Julie Choi: And so what I would love is given your research and engineering expertise, Laura, is if you could talk us through why neural network training is so important.

Laura Florescu: Yeah. Thank you, Julie, of course. So just a very briefly, a little bit about neural networks and why they’re so important and basically why we’re focusing on them. So there’s simply a series of algorithms mimicking the human brain to recognize patterns and relationships in vast amounts of data.

Laura Florescu: And so very briefly in the image below, you can see we have been given a number of images containing the number five and a bunch of neurons that are trained then through providing this kind of data in order to recognize features and textures and patterns in the images in order to correctly identify what the image is.

Laura Florescu: So through such iterations, we learn to classify numbers in this specific example.

Julie Choi: Oh, so this is unstructured data going in kind of like images and speech?

Laura Florescu: Yeah, exactly. So it can be applied to many different fields, basically anything that you humans would, would create, right? So a bunch of images, a lot of language. So you can imagine the whole Wikipedia, the whole internet, right? Speech data.

Laura Florescu: So many, many different fields affecting all of us. And I guess the issue is the training costs for building such powerful large models have spiraled. So they can actually get into the million dollars range for a single run. And in order to build a powerful model, you need several iterations of such training. And so you can imagine quickly getting to tens of millions of dollars.

Julie Choi: Wow. That seems extremely difficult and limiting in terms of who has the capability to train neural networks today. So in general, what are the types of companies that have this capability in house?

Laura Florescu: Right, so those companies would be, Google, Meta, Microsoft who have access to such resources.

Julie Choi: I see. But it feels like for AI to really reach its potential, we need these capabilities to be in the hands of far more than these things.

Laura Florescu: Exactly.

Julie Choi: Enter MosaicML. So Laura, can you tell us about how Mosaic is accelerating the training of these neural nets?

Laura Florescu: Yeah. So that’s exactly where we come in and it’s my passion to work on such problems, especially as they apply to, as we have here, a couple of different tasks, different domains in which we have done research and shown significant progress.

Laura Florescu: So in the area of natural language processing, which encompasses everything from machine translation, everybody speaks different languages. So it’s huge question answering, information retrieval, sentiment analysis for Amazon reviews, for example.

Laura Florescu: So in this kind of area, through the research we have done by combining multiple algorithms, we have shown speedups of up to 3.7x on these GPT type models, which is the state of the art in language models.

Laura Florescu: And in computer vision, so such as classification, what I showed earlier here, you can see a couple of examples in detection and image segmentation, which are crucial for autonomous driving. So similarly through our research, by combining multiple algorithms, we can train such models up to 4.5x faster.

Julie Choi: So if I’m interpreting the speed or the impact of speed, does training 4.5 times faster mean that you can potentially train a model that would’ve taken four weeks in maybe one?

Laura Florescu: Exactly. Yeah. So you can iterate faster and your costs go down significantly.

Julie Choi: Awesome.

Laura Florescu: What’s really good about it in my opinion, another thing that we’re doing at Mosaic is we have open source our library of such algorithms. So you can visit it on GitHub, it’s called Composer. So it’s a flexible system to combine efficiently such different algorithms.

Laura Florescu: There are about 20 of them right now, and we’re actively researching and implementing more. And yeah, so we opensource that. We welcome community interaction, community feedback, as well as contributions to our open source library.

Julie Choi: And so is this available today for developer use?

Laura Florescu: Right. And that’s exactly how we got the kind of results that I just described.

Julie Choi: The 4x speed up on vision and four and a half… Okay, perfect.

Laura Florescu: Yeah. So my question to you, Julie, then is we have seen obviously how ML is so important and it’s affecting our lives, but why work in it? What’s in it for us?

Julie Choi: Yeah. So why work in ML? I’ve been working in ML for the past seven years. So I started working in machine learning at HPE, and then I went to Intel and I continued to choose to work in this domain because whether we’re ready to embrace it or not, the era of AI is happening now. I mean, it is not a future thing.

Julie Choi: There is so much data that we’re generating every day on our mobile devices and through our computers that now any company in it, not only the things, but there’s thousands of enterprise companies with legacy data and new data being generated, any organization can create AI systems.

Julie Choi: And so the era of AI is upon us because of the convergence of data, as well as tools that extract meaning from the data. And so I feel like it’s very imperative for me to be a part of developing tools that accelerate this adoption, because at the end of the day, AI systems are acting on my behalf.

Julie Choi: They are identifying who I am, right? And they are trying to make decisions on my behalf. And so I would like to be part of setting up the requirements for AIs, both from the ground up at the tooling level, which is where we’re involved as MosaicML and help educate builders of a AI applications so that we can consider basically people like me, right?

Julie Choi: And today is International Women’s Day. And basically almost 50% of the world identifies as female and that’s about 4 billion people. However, only 15% of the ML space in terms of research and science and development identifies as females. And so this is part of why I choose to work in this domain.

Julie Choi: And so actually, if that resonates and if what Laura, you and I discussed resonates with people that are attending the conference today, I really encourage you to join us here at Mosaic.

Julie Choi: It is an incredibly exciting time to be working on machine learning infrastructure and algorithmic software and to be shaping the space and the opportunity that AI presents. So I would like to just, maybe now we can move into question and answer, we’ll stop sharing, and then let’s go into Q and A. So there are a few.

Laura Florescu: Julie, I have a question for you.

Julie Choi: Yes.

Laura Florescu: Do you have any recommendation to someone who might not have any AI or ML background in order to get into the field?

Julie Choi: Yeah. I mean, I think education, there are so many materials out there, on Coursera, as well as there’s many organizations like Women in ML, Women in Data Science, these types of organizations.

Julie Choi: I would definitely go and look for the coursework, if you’re looking for a technical background and then just talk to people, right? Whether it’s over Zoom or now over coffee, learn from the practitioners who are out there.

Julie Choi: Again, I’ve been in this for seven years and so we’ve kind of come to a state where there are lots of sources of information. Yeah. It looks like, oh, I’m so sorry. There’s a lot of, I think we have a couple more minutes here.

Angie Chang: We’re actually out of time, but if you’ll hop into the chat, we can have you answer questions.

Julie Choi: Okay.

Angie Chang: Thank you Julie And Laura for sharing about machine learning careers and how MosaicML is making machine learning training better for everybody. 

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“Launching and Leading Cross-Functional Initiatives as an Engineer”: Izzy Clemenson, Senior Staff Engineer at Slack, and Tracy Stampfli, Principal Engineer at Slack (Video + Transcript)

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Sukrutha Bhadouria: Next up, as you know, we love Slack for being a platinum sponsor and hosting a coffee session with lead engineers, sharing best practices for launching and leading cross-functional initiatives as an engineer.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Speaking today are Izzy Clemenson, Senior Staff Engineer, and Tracy, who we met earlier today, who is a Principal Engineer at Slack. Welcome Izzy and Tracy.

Izzy Clemenson: Hi everyone. Thank you so much for having us. Today Tracy and I are going to start talking about some tips that we’ve learned along the way of leading cross-functional, sometimes company-wide projects as engineers and not as managers.

Izzy Clemenson: Tracy and I have both been at Slack for quite a long time. I have been at Slack for over five years and Tracy, I think you’re on your sixth?

Tracy Stampfli: Little over five as well.

Izzy Clemenson: Yeah. So, we’re going to tell you really briefly about some of the projects we’ve led to give you some grounding as to kind of the size of projects that we’re talking about and then dive into our tricks. So Tracy, tell us about Duplo a little bit.

Tracy Stampfli: Yeah. So I actually talked about this project a little bit at last year’s conference here, and it’s a project that was code named Duplo and that we launched at Slack to address tech debt in both our iOS and Android code bases.

Tracy Stampfli: At the time we had a lot of legacy tech debt and a lot of legacy architecture, which was really slowing down development.

Tracy Stampfli: And so we launched this very big project to modernize these code bases. It took 18 months, which it just finished about a month or so ago and was a really big refactor, which kind of involved all of our mobile engineers at one time or another, not for that entire time, but over that period, pretty much every, all of our mobile engineers on product and info were involved in this project.

Izzy Clemenson: And this was an engineering-led effort. You brought the need to this effort, to our leaders, right?

Tracy Stampfli: Yeah. A group of engineers, I don’t want to take all the credit, but it was an engineering-led effort. We came up with the proposal, we sort of got pushed for both like that. We should have this project done and exactly what we should do in order to address this problem.

Izzy Clemenson: Great. And then I’ve worked a lot as Tracy noted, she’s been working more on the infrastructure side and a lot of engineering-led efforts.

Izzy Clemenson: I spent most of my time at Slack working on the product side of things, working on product and executive driven efforts that involved a lot of engineering. And so Slack Connect is my most recent example. It was a multi pillar multiyear project. We were in beta for two years. It took another year and a half to get to GA.

Izzy Clemenson: And the thing about that was even though the vision came from our CEO, the execution was across all of these engineering teams fundamentally changing what we meant by core objects in our infrastructure. What is a team? What is a user, what is a channel?

Izzy Clemenson: And so, although I didn’t bring Slack Connect to Stewart, Stewart brought it to our engineering team, there was a lot of cross-functional engineering efforts that needed to get done in order to get this feature out the door.

Tracy Stampfli: Great. So we’re going to talk about kind of three different things down to the beginning of a project like this, running it, and then kind of finishing it up successfully and to start with launching a project, a really big cross-functional project that maybe involves a whole bunch of different groups at your company.

Tracy Stampfli: How do you know that it’s actually time to do something that big? How do you know, oh, we really need to do something larger than our normal kind of project to address this. And it’s really about the size of the issue that you’re addressing.

Tracy Stampfli: I mean, in a lot of cases, like the ones that Izzy and I are both talking about, these were issues that our normal processes were not able to handle as part of our kind of normal processes or normal feature development.

Tracy Stampfli: It was something where we really needed a larger effort to address it. And it’s kind of about the downside of not doing something like that.

Tracy Stampfli: We were in kind of an unsustainable path with mobile development at Slack where it was just so much slower to do mobile development because of the tech debt that we knew we had to do something big to address it.

Tracy Stampfli: And that kind of ties into the second point of scoping problems like this. You have to scope them large. You’re trying address a really major issue, a major product need, major developer pain. You have to scope something really large to address that, but that can be really scary as well because it’s risky. It’s big, it’s risky.

Tracy Stampfli: How do you know how long it’s going to take or how many people it’s going to involve?

Tracy Stampfli: So one trick that we used or technique that we used for Duplo was to start off to sort of break it down into milestones and start off with something smaller in order to start off with the sort of the easy ones or the things that are much more well defined. So we said, okay, in this first milestone, we’re going to do this stuff that we know how to do it.

Tracy Stampfli: We know how many people it’s going to take, we know we can achieve it. And that sort of gave us momentum for the rest of the project. And also give us more time to define the rest of the project.

Tracy Stampfli: And in order to figure out like some of the unanswered questions that we had about what we were going to do later on. Izzy do you want to talk a little bit about getting stakeholder buy-in for these big projects?

Izzy Clemenson: Yeah. So like I said, the projects I’ve worked on, the main stakeholder which would be our CEO, kind of came up with it, but there’s a lot of other stakeholders that you need to talk about.

Izzy Clemenson: Tracy needed essentially to get to a point where we’re saying we’re going to stop feature development for a good chunk of people on mobile and make this investment, or in the case of more product focused areas, no one else’s roadmap is going to move forward because this product takes priority.

Izzy Clemenson: And so a lot of the stakeholder buy-in is to make sure that the leadership that you are working with, whether it’s PMs, EMs, customer success, whoever it may be, understand why you’re doing this, what will the benefits be, and how do we know we are making progress? Success we’ll talk about at the very end, but towards the project, we need to know that we’re making progress.

Izzy Clemenson: So that kind of gets into running the project. And when you’re talking about something as large as what we’re talking about here, it’s not a matter of brute force. You, no matter how dedicated you are, cannot do this alone. It is impossible. There are not enough hours in the day or hands on keyboards to do this alone.

Izzy Clemenson: So you need to be a part of driving alignment. Does everyone who is participating in this work, know why you’re doing it? Are you all focused on the end goal and why you’re doing it?

Izzy Clemenson: Once people understand the why and deeply understand it, they are empowered and empowered is a very important word for me here, to make smaller decisions along the way so that you don’t always have to be checking upon things. And you don’t feel like you’re having to micromanage that project progress.

Izzy Clemenson: And that helps keep projects on track. You basically pick different people across organization who are helping drive this project towards the end to you break down smaller projects along the way of this team over here is going to handle whatever case. And this team over here is going to handle this piece.

Izzy Clemenson: And what you need to do is at periodic points, bring in representatives of those projects, smaller projects to make sure you’re working together. If someone’s getting far ahead and other people are behind, does that mean you need to shift focus, go back to your stakeholders and kind of reassess how you’re making progress along the way?

Izzy Clemenson: And once you break down into smaller projects, that’s where the leadership of other ICs is really important. ICs here meaning individual contributors.

Izzy Clemenson: It is really important if you are leading a project to pay attention to the smaller, or smaller is a terrible word, to pay attention to the leaders who are leading the smaller projects, because if your project is this big, this is an opportunity for people to be seen, to be heard, to practice their leadership skills and to get promoted.

Izzy Clemenson: So when I work across multiple teams, I pay attention to who ends up in these leadership positions. You want to, this is a point where you can have a voice in the representation and diversity of the new, the upcoming leaders at your company.

Izzy Clemenson: Because if you’re on the line for the larger project, you can be a representative and invest in representation across the rest of the company or across the rest of your team. As people are working on smaller projects and they can use that as their own skills or to invest in their own skills.

Tracy Stampfli: Yeah. And I really think it’s important to call out the successes of those leaders or just of people working on the project in general. That’s something I always try and stay aware of as with these really big projects.

Tracy Stampfli: It’s part of my job as a leader to make sure other people are recognized. And so calling them out in public channels or to their managers to make sure again like that, the great work that they’re doing is seen super important.

Izzy Clemenson: And even too, back to those stakeholders, people who may not interact with some of the more senior executive leadership, if they have made an impact on this project, their names should be heard and you get to be a part of elevating their work.

Tracy Stampfli: Very true. So moving on to completing a big project like this, this can be actually pretty complicated, figuring out how to measure success of a really big project.

Tracy Stampfli: A lot of times when you get to something that’s this big you kind of have to come up with your own metrics for measuring it. A lot of times, it’s not as simple as, okay, we’re we know this is what we’re trying to do, and then we’re done.

Tracy Stampfli: And that’s not usually the case, especially I think with something like an infrastructure project where maybe it’s a refactor or a migration, you’re not just shipping a product, you’re trying to measure health of the code base maybe.

Tracy Stampfli: And that can be a tricky thing. And so when we did Dupla, we tried to come up with a lot of different kind of quantitative measures, like migrating lines of code or removing deprecated instances, deprecated patterns, adoption of new technologies.

Tracy Stampfli: We’re trying to improve build times or development speed so we tracked local build times and remote build times. So we came up with a whole suite of quantitative metrics, but we also looked at more qualitative metrics.

Tracy Stampfli: We wanted to talk to developers and say, “How do you feel about the impact of this project? Is this actually making your development process easier and faster?” Maybe talking in the case of development, a big product change, talking to customers and getting customer sentiment, developer sentiment.

Tracy Stampfli: These can be really important measures. And being able to see how that changes over the course of the project can really give you a sense of its impact, sort of similar to being it’s hard to measure success.

Tracy Stampfli: It’s also kind of hard to know when you’re done with big projects like this, because again, you’re never really completely done. You’re not going to completely finish getting rid of all the tech debt in your code base. You’re not going to get to the point where everything is perfectly modernized.

Tracy Stampfli: There’s always going to be more work, there’s always more work to do. And so you have to just kind of define a stopping point where you say, “Hey, maybe we’re not completely done this entirely, but we can maybe transition at this point back from, instead of having this big project umbrella that we’re working under, maybe we sort of transition back at that point to addressing, say tech debt as part of our ongoing product work as part of our normal process.”

Tracy Stampfli: And then just setting again a clear goal so that you know when you’ve hit that point and you can show that you’ve delivered the impact that you have said you’re going to deliver before you kind of transition out of this project.

Izzy Clemenson: And that kind of hard to measure done-ness isn’t just for infrastructure or code refactor projects. It’s also something that I’ve experienced with product because a complete product is never done.

Izzy Clemenson: The project I’ve been talking about was something that Stewart envisioned at the very beginning of Slack. Clearly we shipped Slack before this was done and lots of people use our product and it met many, many people’s needs.

Izzy Clemenson: And so one thing along the way is to work particularly with product managers and that part of the executive leadership to say, “How much of what we’ve built solves a current customer need that we can ship today and how much can we build incrementally on top of that?”

Izzy Clemenson: Sometimes the answer is if we shipped what we have today, it still wouldn’t do anyone any good because it’s not finished enough, but other times you can find ways to incrementally shift.

Izzy Clemenson: So you need to have that balance and that conversation with the stakeholders that you have of how can you know when to ship what you have?

Izzy Clemenson: So I just want to say, thank you everyone for coming. I know that not everyone is going to work on a project that is company wide, but I hope some of these tips will allow you to go into your next leadership opportunity with a little bit more confidence.

Angie Chang: Thank you, Izzy and Tracy for your talk. It’s really exceptional. I loved hearing about how to launch a large project as a lead engineer. 

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“Riding the Highs and Lows: Navigating Bad Mental Health Days in the Workspace”: Ashu Ravichander, Principal Product Manager at Workday (Video + Transcript)

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Angie Chang: It’s time for our next session. Up next is Ashu Ravichander. She is an engineer and product manager, currently Principal Product Manager at Workday. And outside of her day job, she leads product for the Human Health Project, which is a nonprofit, connecting patients with mental health and other chronic diseases [inaudible] advocates that help them navigate the healthcare system. Welcome, Ashu.

Ashu Ravichander: Thank you, Angie. Let me start screen share. Okay. Hi, everyone. And thank you so much for joining this talk, writing the highs and lows where I’ll go over some of my techniques to navigating bad mental health days in the workplace. But first introductions.

Ashu Ravichander: Hi, I’m Ashu Ravichander and I’m currently a Principal Product Manager at Workday. I started out my career as an engineer in the healthcare space almost a decade ago now, and since then have built consumer and enterprise products for a wide variety of personas. On a personal note, I have two beautiful dogs and Boo, my cat, with my husband. Outside of work, I live in California now, so I love to kayak in the summers and ride bikes through the year.

Ashu Workday Product Manager Dogs Cat Husband California Bipolar

Ashu Ravichander: I also have bipolar disorder, type two to be specific. Most of my friends and coworkers know the first seven things about me but not the last, because that is not something I ever speak about since it’s not really well understood and is unfortunately so often conflated with your character and capabilities.

Ashu Ravichander: Now I have attended conferences and other events for past decade now, and I have heard some amazing speakers, but I wish 23-year-old me could have heard more people talking about mental health in a tech or professional setting so that it felt more normalized, and that I understood that it was just a difference and should never have been a reason to hold back.

Ashu Ravichander: That’s why I’m here today to kind of do this for 23-year-old me and for anyone else that may need to hear it because statistically, I know I’m not alone and you may not have a diagnosed mental health condition, but honestly, it’s a spectrum and we all have mental health. And some days, it just does not fare as well, whether it’s due to biochemical reactions, external stressors, thanks pandemic, or just being human.

Ashu Ravichander: I think this is important for everyone to hear and learn, to build resiliency. Now earlier, I used to compartmentalize my professional and personal self and never let it seep into the other, but this wasn’t sustainable. And if I wanted to bring my full self to work, I had to positively integrate my condition in because I also have ambitious career goals. And I knew I’m going to build amazing teams working on amazing products.

Ashu Ravichander: I started taking on a more mindful approach to work and making sure I had defenses up against any bad days. And that’s what I want to talk to you all about today. I’m going to walk through my personal experience about how I build resiliency around bad mental health days at work.

Ashu Ravichander: I go through five of the most basic and important things I have in my tool kit that help me be consistent and bring my best whenever I need to. And how I, and hopefully you, can use this to bring your whole self to work. I do want to also call out what the talk is not. None of these techniques are substitute for care, whether it’s self-care, meditation, medication, therapies. There are a lot of great resources out there and I do recommend you seek this out.

Ashu Ravichander: I have put years of work for myself into therapy and medication that has let me come to this point, to be here and talk you all. And I’d be more than happy to connect on this offline. Along with seeking out care, I want to stress that you need to treat your physical and mental health the same and take the time off, take the mental health days off if you really need to.

Ashu Ravichander: And finally, it is not a formula. I’ve had to develop what works for me over years of trial and error and I’m sharing what has stuck. This could look very different for you. And I hope you take this as a starting point to build the tools that will work for you. With that, let’s jump into five simple tools I use to bring my best work.

Ashu Ravichander: Now, my first technique is to build a playbook of templates, frameworks to help give me a leg up on really low energy days. I’m a Product Manager and we are the go to people about our products, right? Quite often, I find that I have to turn around and create something like white papers or business cases for really different audiences in a very short timeframe.

playbook to have a leg up - like meal prep - understand what you need - templates - frameworks - collect and save samples - generate a playbook that you can take with you

Ashu Ravichander: But what do I do if this falls on a really low day for me, where my energy is not where it would normally be? I don’t want to do a bad job just because the timing wasn’t right. I knew I had to do something different to accommodate for this.

Ashu Ravichander: I looked at the most common things I might need on a daily or weekly basis and figure that if I had a template or a framework for these things, then I would always have create starting points for my most common deliverables.

Ashu Ravichander: Think about it kind of like meal prep on a weekday after you’ve had this hard time at work, you finished all your chores, you know you need to have a nutritious balanced meal, but you just don’t have the mental of physical energy to cook up anything elaborate.

Ashu Ravichander: If you do meal prep on the weekend and have some pre-prepared proteins and chopped and season vegetables, then all you really have to do is heat it up, maybe add a really simple salad to it, and wow, you’ve got a great nutritious meal ready.

Ashu Ravichander: The templates that I collect are kind of the same thing. If I get asked to put a business case template together, I already have a starting point with my business case template and you and I know that formatting is 50% of the work. I already have a leg up.

Ashu Ravichander: I also have notes, prompts and question of these to make filling it out easier, almost Mad Libs style. For example, in my business case deck, I have a section on the success metrics and I have a little prompt there that reminds me to detail out the product metrics and how that could tie into the organization’s metrics or OKRs that they’re tracking.

Ashu Ravichander: Now when I need to fill it out, even if I’m having an off day, I’m making sure I cover the right points and details.

Ashu Ravichander: Over the years, I have collected and continue to add what I need in my day-to-day work to my playbook. So far, I have a roadmap deck, feature requirement templates, business case decks, prioritization frameworks, and a few more things that I can lean on.

Ashu Ravichander: I also have the privilege of working with some amazing coworkers and teams in various organizations. Every time I see an impactful presentation or document, including some that we saw in the conference earlier today, I constantly think about my playbook and either ask for a copy or adapt a template from it.

Ashu Ravichander: I have a folder for my work computer with these samples and templates labeled with all the organization teams and branding, but I also make a generic and non-branded templates for myself to use with links to publicly available themes and icon collections, and have it on my private Google Drive, so I know I can port this playbook with me.

Ashu Ravichander: Next, I have what I like to call, spacers. One thing I have learned from cycling through highs and lows is that everything passes. So it really helps me to buy some time or create spaces between me and the critical event or task till I can get back in that right state and have appropriate and reliable responses.

build pauses to give yourself space - everything passes - record and replay - maintain a To-Do list - re-prioritize tasks - create ways to pause and resume

Ashu Ravichander: A few weeks ago, my dog Arby, he had surgery and I think it was on a Wednesday. And I remember I was like a complete wreck that day, but I was still in a few meetings where I needed to make sure I had a handle on the project we’re working on.

Ashu Ravichander: I tried to be as present at the meetings, but since I knew it was going to be a high stress day, I asked for all meetings that day to be recorded.

Ashu Ravichander: For meetings that I couldn’t record, I had my transcription app open, so I had the whole meeting transcribed and had notes for myself. I spent the rest of the day doing less intense tasks, like I think I just sorted through some old detail that I needed and replied to older emails.

Ashu Ravichander: Then at around 6:00 PM, the vet calls me and he tells me, “Arby has made it through surgery. Just fine. It was awake.” I finally felt like I could breathe and got back into that right state of mind.

Ashu Ravichander: Now I know there was some questions asked of me in the meetings and some follow-ups. To make sure I didn’t miss anything, I just replayed my meetings from the day at 2X speed, of course, and looked at the transcription so that I could catch up.

Ashu Ravichander: Now, recording and transcriptions are a good way to build spacers, but there are other ways I do this too, depending on the situation, like shuffling around some of my tasks, so working on more routine or repetitive tasks when I’m stressed and then the more important tasks later, or responding to infuriating emails only after I spent some time out watering my garden and having to think about it, either way a very well-watered garden in case you were wondering.

Ashu Ravichander: But it is a slippery slope between building a spacer and procrastination. I have seen this and experienced it. So I have had to make a sacred rule about maintaining a to-do list in a single spot, which I have to regularly review before starting another task.

Ashu Ravichander: The bottom line here is find out what works for you. Pause, prioritize, and come back to situations or tasks when you are ready.

Ashu Ravichander: Now, the third technique I use is to ask for feedback early and often to almost have a reality check. I’m not going to lie to you. It’s hard to ask for feedback and I am still putting this into practice, but I know it has a big payout.

get feedback for a reality check - ask for feedback early - choose the right people - prepare the questions - wait for the right time - accept positive feedback

Ashu Ravichander: Almost all the time when I’m in a depressive phase, I find that I’m putting myself down almost relentlessly. For example, recently I forgot an edge case while writing product requirements, and someone pointed that out during the review.

Ashu Ravichander: Now my inner voice starts telling me that I’m a terrible product manager, because I couldn’t think of that edge case scenario upfront, and that I’m probably not qualified for this job. Even though rationally, I know it’s not possible to think of all edge cases that could possibly occur.

Ashu Ravichander: And in fact, product requirements are a collaborative effort that grows and improves with feedback and maybe my multiple engineering degrees and a decade of releasing successful enterprise scale products may say otherwise.

Ashu Ravichander: However, this constant cycle of thoughts really magnifies the imposter syndrome. And what I’ve found breaks the cycle is having factual evidence or conversations to overcome it.

Ashu Ravichander: For me, especially at the start of new jobs on new projects when I am still working on getting up to speed or where in storming phase of the project, I find that I’m a lot harder on myself about not being further along and the imposter syndrome is on high gear, and almost always.

Ashu Ravichander: The people around me recognize that the reality is that we are in the storming phase of the project and that it’s normal and we’ll get better with collaboration or that it’s only been two months since I joined, so it’s actually okay to not know as much.

Ashu Ravichander: I ask for feedback early in these cases so that I’m being grounded and have a better pulse on reality versus what the imposter syndrome’s telling me.

Ashu Ravichander: Now it is important to get feedback from the right people. Just because someone is on the same project as you, doesn’t automatically make them a great person to get feedback from.

Ashu Ravichander: For me, these have to be people have a great professional relationship with. I know that they know me and I feel comfortable asking and really discussing their opinions.

Ashu Ravichander: I also prepare what I want to get feedback on because it is important to know why you want feedback and what you’re going to do with it. Is it a specific action on a project or your working style with a team or something else?

Ashu Ravichander: Vague questions give you vague answers. So take the time to prepare the questions to make this meaningful. I also know I need to wait for the right time when I know I’m in a good place mentally to accept the feedback and not be defensive about it.

Ashu Ravichander: And the last thing I’ll leave you with on this topic is a reminder to accept positive feedback. Earlier, I used to spend most of my time reviewing my feedback and focusing only on the negative, because these are areas I could take action on to improve.

Ashu Ravichander: And I would completely gloss over anything positive since my reviewer probably didn’t mean it or they were just saying it to be nice that there was really nothing actionable for me there.

Ashu Ravichander: But now I know it is so important to focus on the positive so that you know what’s working and what strengths you have that you can lean into more. Seek and accept positive feedback.

Ashu Ravichander: Now this next technique is a more recent discovery for me. And I can tell you, it has absolutely been redeeming already. You may have heard this before.

bring positivity to work toward goals - assume positive intent - understand common goals - it's not personal

Ashu Ravichander: Assume positive intent. Practicing this a few times has already helped me so much that I know this one will stick in my tool kit for a long time. So uncertain days with interpersonal interactions, I’m sensitive and sometimes read too much into things, like why does my coworker hate me?

Ashu Ravichander: Just because they said something contradictory or spoke over me in a meeting. There was a time this would have upset me so much that I’d be crying in a bathroom stall over it.

Ashu Ravichander: Now as a bottom line, I just assume everyone I interact with at work has positive intent. It helps me not be angry or annoyed over it, but look at it situationally.

Ashu Ravichander: In the case where someone interrupts me in a meeting, I’m now thinking that you just interrupted me to say something, not because you wanted to cut me off, but because you had something to say that felt unheard.

Ashu Ravichander: Okay. With this context in my mind, I’m going to repeat what he said so you know that I hear you and then go on to the point I was making. In an organization, especially one with great culture, you very rarely meet actual bad players. Instead, if in a conversation or project, if we have that common goal understood, it’s easier to assume that everyone has positive intentions to work that’s that common goal, albeit in different ways.

Ashu Ravichander: It’s usually not personal or malicious attacks, so remember your common goals, and assume everyone works towards it with positive intentions.

Ashu Ravichander: Now I saved this one for the last, because for me, one of the bigger challenges I’ve faced in the workplace with my disorder is the disproportionate reaction to certain situations on certain days. It could be as simple as someone pointing out a mistake I made or getting some not so positive feedback.

Ashu Ravichander: Either of these simple reactions or interactions could have resulted with breaking down into tears when I got home or sinking into depression. This kind of extreme reaction is hard to deal with when you now have to get on with the rest of your day and go into a three-hour grooming session with your engineering team.

Ashu Ravichander: What has really helped me here is finding a few key people who are my anchors and help ground me and rationalize my thought process. A simple conversation or text with my anchors, where I describe a certain situation, helps me understand what a rational response would look like from their perspective versus how my brain might be exaggerating it, and this really helps center me.

Ashu Ravichander: One thing I must caution you about here is the fact that this can be extremely exhausting for the people you reach out to. Be mindful of that and make sure you have a few different trusted people that you can talk to, so you can load balance it without bringing any one single person, but don’t hold back on reaching out to people.

hold steady with anchors - trusted circle of co-workers and friends - rationalize situations - be mindful of how draining it can get

Ashu Ravichander: And if you don’t get a response, move on to someone else if it’s important for you to talk to someone at that time for that scenario. For me, if all else fails, I still text my mom and she replies back, so that’s a great thing. Put in effort into these relationships, and I always look to find ways to give back to the wonderful anchors that hold me steady.

Ashu Ravichander: Well, that’s my tool kit. To quickly recap what I have: Firstly, playbooks that I have built over time to give me great starting points. Second, spacers that help me pause and come back to a task when I’m ready. Third, is feedback, to cut the imposter syndrome in the bud and help me reinforce what I’m good at and what I can work on. Fourth, is assuming positive intent that can help move us all towards a common goal. And finally, fifth, my trusted circle of anchors that I can rely on.

Ashu Ravichander: Those were five of the more important tools I have in my tool kit. And even though I use these tools almost daily, I knew it still needs very intentional practice for it to be useful. And please know that you are not alone.

Ashu Ravichander: Ever since I posted that I was going to talk about this, I was worried whether being this open and vulnerable would impact my career, but it’s had the opposite effect. I’ve had so many people reach out to share their stories.

Ashu Ravichander: These are women who’ve founding companies, and someone else I met who’s had a really hard time with her mental health but is still so very successfully leading a large channel from one of the biggest companies in the world.

Ashu Ravichander: There are many people with these invisible struggles who are flourishing and building beautiful products. We just need to work differently. I’d love to hear your thoughts more about your tools, or maybe just connect on LinkedIn.

Ashu Ravichander: Thank you. And happy Women’s Day.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Wow. Ashu, that was amazing. I felt like you were talking about me. Thank you so much for your amazing talk on managing mental health at work. I know from the comments, a lot of people really resonated with your tips and tricks specifically, because you gave so much context into what the actual problem was that you were looking to solve.

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“From Culture to Products: Why Diversity in Technology Matters”: Intel Executive Panel (Video + Transcript)

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Sukrutha Bhadouria: Next up, we want to welcome a panel of Intel execs who will talk about why diversity and technology matters, from culture to products. Hema is the Director of Technical Advocacy with Ai4Good at Intel. Hema is going to kick things off. Welcome Hema.

Hema Chamraj: Thank you. Thank you, Sukrutha. Hi Sukrutha and Angie. Thanks for having us here. And I’m really glad to be here with my colleagues, Huma and Caroline. And let me hand it to Huma, so she can introduce herself, and then to Caroline, before we get talking.

Hema Chamraj: And also Huma, if you can say, I liked a panel in the past, the previous one where they said, “How did you come into being a technologist?” Is it like accident, or is this your lifelong dream of yours? Caroline, you can do the same.

Huma Abidi: Absolutely. So happy International Women’s Day for everybody. I love the theme this year break. The, so I am Huma Abidi Senior Director of AI Software Products at Intel. And in my role, I’ll talk about what I do now, and then I’ll talk about how I got into this.

Huma Abidi: So in my role, I lead a globally diverse team of engineers technologists, and they are responsible for delivering AI products, which help our customers to create the solutions. So pretty much my entire career, I would say, I have been a advocate for women’s advancement education and I founded Women in Machine Learning at Intel. And I’m involved in various solutions that Intel to do that. How did I come about?

Huma Abidi: I was studying to be a doctor, and I met my husband and all his friends, including Caroline here. So I met these people, bunch of engineers, who were awesome. And I took one computer science course, and then I ended up doing masters in computer science, and I basically let go my pre-med and chemistry and I came into technology. And I have been at Intel since.

Huma Abidi: I was a RCG, Recent College Graduate, and I spent my entire career at Intel doing all kinds of different technologies, binary translations, compilers. And right now I’m super excited to be working on AI, which is AI is everywhere. And I will pause now let Caroline talk, because I can go on forever.

Hema Chamraj: Yeah.

Caroline Chan: Hi, I’m Caroline Chan. I’m Vice President and General Manager of Network Business Incubation Division inside Intel’s Network and Edge group. So my focus is on 5G and Edge, especially around taking 5G into different enterprises, different verticals. So how did I come about doing this?

Caroline Chan: I think I was born into this. My mother was one of the first women in China that graduated in a engineering degree, and not just any engineering, but she was actually working on communication side. So I never had an option, I guess. Both my parents were in this field. They were professors back in China. So when I came here at 18 years old, I went to University of Texas in Austin, and I started engineering school and never looked back.

Caroline Chan: And not just engineering, but I’ve been in wireless and telco my entire career. I had the fortune to meet Huma when she first got married to her husband. Her husband and I were actually classmates and good friends, so I trap her into doing this, the engineering field, but it has been great. I’m doing a lot of this, similar to Huma is, it’s pay it forward.

Caroline Chan: We went through this journey, there’s challenges, the learnings we would like to share that with the ladies coming after us, and hopefully we benefit everyone.

Hema Chamraj: Thank you. Thank you, Caroline. And the same with me, right? And you said you had no choice but to be an engineer. I had two choices, right? Like the one in the previous panel, either be a doctor, or an engineer. And so I was like you, who I just realized, I wanted to be a doctor just like my sister, and it just happened just like…

Hema Chamraj: It was a very, very conservative family. I couldn’t travel to the place where I had to go to college, and so I ended up taking engineering and I love it. I went to school here and I did my masters, came to engineer to Intel, the greatest company that built technology. And I’ve been here. I love it.

Hema Chamraj: And I started really hands-on, trying to build tools, and then move on to saying, “You know what? I want to really understand how technology impacts people.” Right? And that’s where I’ve been really, really focused on trying to understand how technology can be used for good.

Hema Chamraj: And I want to get your perspective as we think about this, right. It’s like we think about… We get all excited about technologies, about the superpowers, like AI, 5G, Edge, Cloud. And it’s a great, exciting time right now, because companies realize that it’s great.

Hema Chamraj: In order to build this powerful, rich technology products and platforms, we had to put people in the center of it. Right? And they’re walking the talk, trying to put things into place to make sure people are at the center of it. Right? But then again, if you hear people, right, it’s like, there’s little bit of overload of everything DEI, and there like there’s little bit of an overload of everything DEI, and there is like people are like, what is this big hoopla about DEI?

Hema Chamraj: And I thought, as women we kind of internalize that we have been through so many challenges, we understand why it is needed, but in a day-to-day work, I thought it would be good to share our perspective on why DEI is important.

Hema Chamraj: And I can kind of kick it off quickly when I think about tech and AI for good, like technology has been like pervasive, like AI especially has been pervasive in terms of how it has kind of touched so many industry sectors, how much it has impacted our lives in many areas.

Hema Chamraj: And then, because I have a health and life sciences kind of focus, I can really appreciate how much AI has compressed the time and money and kind of made things possible that was not possible before.

Hema Chamraj: And yet we have seen in many ways, AI also has kind of shown how things can go wrong when it comes to your healthcare or hiring or justice, you’ve seen so many examples where it has gone wrong and it really comes down to the thing that one of the key problems is the lack of representation.

Hema Chamraj: The lack of representation, the diverse thoughts, the diverse experiences that need to be there to kind of really make sure we have representation at the data level. Because when you think of what healthcare, there’s very much lacking…

Hema Chamraj: Women’s data is lacking in healthcare. So if you think of data or even the representation of people who are building tools or people who are making the decisions, there’s the lack of representation.

Hema Chamraj: And so without that, I really feel we will never be able to realize the superpowers that we talk about. For me, tech or AI for good, it’s really critical to have representation because without which it really… We’ll not see tech being used for good. So that’s my perspective. Let me bring in AI, Huma, because you and your team are building the AI tools, so what is your perspective on why DEI?

Huma Abidi: Yeah. As you said, Hema, that AI is everywhere. Absolutely. And this is from helping determine who is hired or fired or granting a loan, or how much time [inaudible] or how long a person should spend time in prison, or should they be back in prison or whatever. All kinds of decisions that were traditionally performed by humans are now being made by algorithms.

Huma Abidi: So it is no surprise that AI is learning gender and other biases from humans and it’s a huge societal issue, whether I’m building products or whatever… Let’s just talk about that first and then I’ll talk about specifics or what I’m doing about it. So over and over again, we hear about examples, especially that are highlighting these biases towards women and minority, and as you said, we can have data bias.

Huma Abidi: Data is coming from society, and so lack of representation there in the data and then algorithms also. People who are building these algorithms, if they are not representing underrepresented minority or women, then that leaks into the algorithm as well. So this is not only first technical problem because, as I just said, there is innate or unconscious bias that will show up in the decisions making.

Huma Abidi: So if people who are building or creating technology is homogenous, then it’ll work for that particular work thing. So that is true for any technology but especially in AI because it is making those kind of [inaudible] decisions.

Huma Abidi: In my opinion, if women and other minorities from community are part of the teams developing these tools, they will be more aware of what can go wrong. So first let’s talk about that.

Huma Abidi: And working in AI projects, we need to make sure our current and future algorithms are not just powerful, but they’re also ethical and fair, and that’s what my focus is. That’s something that I actually initiated on my own to make sure that let’s focus on how much explainability is there in our software that we’re building.

Huma Abidi: So besides that, I obviously as I mentioned in the beginning, I’m advocate for women and I founded women in machine learning and encouraging women to be a part of that and, Hema, to your point, I’ve found out that women are very interested in AI for social good projects. Whenever I talk about, they’re like, “Can I be part of it?” I feel like women want to be in a world where they want to see their children and others have a fair-

Hema Chamraj: Future generations, yeah.

Huma Abidi: Yeah. So coming back to explainable AI, AI decisions especially in deep neural networks. Machine learning still has decision trees and all where you can see how decisions are made, classic machine learning. But deep neural networks, it’s like a black box. We don’t know how these decisions are made. What is… Am I taking too much time?

Hema Chamraj: [crosstalk] Yeah. Go head.

Huma Abidi: I will just wrap up and say that explainable AI, data sheets for dataset where the data came from, model cards for model explainability, all of that and those things are being put in and that’s going to help with that. [crosstalk]

Hema Chamraj: Yeah, yeah. I think what you’re saying is basically AI is like reinforces and amplifies what we do, so the more good we put in with the right representation, good comes out of it. Otherwise, it can go the negative way. S

Hema Chamraj: o Caroline, you are really driving this exciting place of 5G Edge right and broadband access has kind of shown how critical it is, especially in these times of the pandemic crisis or the conflicts that we are watching. Can you please share with us? Why do you think DEI is important for enabling this innovative?

Caroline Chan: Yeah. Wireless and telco industry long had issues with DEI because it has been always selling to a very finite set of customers taken by AT&T or Verizon and so on. But with 5G, the pervasive connectivity, much like the pervasive AI, you have to reach into every different enterprises and verticals.

Caroline Chan: What that means is your audience, your end customers rapidly becomes everybody in a society, so 50% of our women. And you have to have that different mindset. I’ll give you example.

Caroline Chan: We launched a project in Sacramento School District during the crisis that we are facing because children were not able to learn. In some neighborhoods, they do not have a rich communication. So the folks that work on this, as mother, we immediately recognized how critical that is.

Caroline Chan: Intel Foundation came in, the network group alongside with AWS and other companies that went in, immediately put in a rich communication based on 5G and based on wifi to enable our children to learn.

Caroline Chan: Right now, we are working on a critical project to put in containers with communications with satellite up-links on the border with Poland, so that when the mothers with their children arriving from Ukraine were able to at least let their family back home know that they arrived safely, is that kind of empathy that I think some of us women probably have a little bit more because our experience as daughters and mothers and sisters and wives, we emphasize more.

Caroline Chan: To me, it’s not just selling something. It’s really a project or passion. It’s about technology for good. You talk about AI for good. I always have [inaudible] philosophy 5G needs to be for good as well. It’s not just for selling. It’s really for enriching our lives, make our lives better than before.

Hema Chamraj: Like you said, we have that built-in kind of empathy, but at the same time we feel like this is not something that women are like we can do it alone, right? We need the broader community, but there’s been a little bit of discomfort if you maybe have seen, how should we kind of address that?

Hema Chamraj: We know it’s important. We know how it’s impacting the technologies. It is needed for building rich products and better results. But how do we kind of help them help us to kind of make this become a reality where we have equal representation, the diverse representation? Any thoughts?

Caroline Chan: If I just thought when in a telco side, majority of the decision makers are still men. We need them. We need them to be part of the game. We simply are saying is that women has been so underrepresented all those years and we simply wanted to have gain more visibility, but in reality, 80% of the time we are working with other men, we ask for more understanding and we should also make us all more visible, a little bit more vulnerable sharing when we are feeling that we need help or we need them to help us.

Caroline Chan: I think we should be more vocal. I do find most people, most men are open to work with us, but vast majority are.

Hema Chamraj: How would you, Huma, [crosstalk]

Huma Abidi: Yeah, yeah. I 100% agree with Caroline, but I feel that we have to first level the playing field. That’s what I tell people that of course, if you are referring to that, there was somebody was commenting why do they have Women’s International Day? And why do we, you know, whatever, diversity and this.

Huma Abidi: And this is a fact. We have the data to prove that we don’t have… So at Intel, we are doing so many different things. For example, in 2019, I believe we reached gender pay equity. It took so many years and finally, we reached that goal. And this is global. Then we are taking goals. There is a reason why we are taking goals because this is a problem.

Huma Abidi: For our 2030 goals, one is for women and underrepresented minorities to double the number of them in senior leadership position. There was a problem because [inaudible] there. The other one is by 2030, 40% of women will be in the technical field working in technology. So these are the things.

Huma Abidi: So first we level the playing field. Of course, there would be diversity for everyone, there won’t be women, but right now we have an issue, and as Caroline said, a lot of men means they have been so supportive and so it’s been awesome that we have support, but if there are these questions asked, this is my response always.

Hema Chamraj: Very correct. Right. I mean, you’re talking about the need, what is the need. I mean, the fact that there is less than 25% of role of women representation in AI. When there is 75% of jobs out there, I mean, the disparity needs to be fixed.

Hema Chamraj: And then we have to kind of create this environment of I’m part of women in AI group where we call zero exclusion, nobody’s excluded. We want everybody to come in and help us, but there is a disparity, help us really fix that one.

Hema Chamraj: I have mentors who are men, who are really being really supportive and I would encourage more of them to kind of step out and help us get to a place where we really create this reality where we are all in there.

Hema Chamraj: There are no holes in any of the data, there’s no holes in representation, and we can really create some amazing things. And again, I’m glad that Intel is actually walking the talk. They have this [inaudible] goals like the ones that you talked about, Huma, in that how to double the number of women in the leadership roles. And also the fact that we should start a lead. I mean, it’s not just hiring and retaining, it also [crosstalk]. Yeah. So anything on that one, and what we could do better on the pipeline?

Huma Abidi: Yeah. So again, I’ll come back to the work that Intel is doing. Obviously, I’m very involved in various things, but there is a million girls moonshot project that Intel has, and it has joined forces with some fantastic foundations. A

Huma Abidi: nd this is aimed at equipping one million girls from under-resourced communities with engineering mindset. Once we have that, that is the building the pipeline and once we have enough in the pipeline, then we can just change. So foundation has to be changed. We cannot just [inaudible].

Hema Chamraj: I see Angie’s kind of doing [crosstalk]

Angie Chang: Thank you so much.

Hema Chamraj: [crosstalk] But thank you.

Angie Chang: It’s a fast full conference day. Thank you so much for joining us.

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“Transitioning From IC to Manager, and How To Lead If Management is Not For You”: Slack Engineering Panel

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Angie Chang: Our next session is a slate of technical women from Slack, from engineering managers, to leadership beyond the management track. I’m so excited to hand it over now to our Slack panel moderator to get things started. Welcome, Brooke.

Brook Shelley: Thanks Angie. Yeah, as Angie said, we’re from Slack. My name’s Brook, my pronouns are she/her, and I am a manager in the infrastructure group at Slack. I manage two different teams, one for asynchronous jobs, and one for data management. I’d like to start us off by just going around the group. And if you want to name, pronoun, and then what got you into engineering or development in the first place? So Leena, you’re first on my screen, why don’t you go ahead?

Leena Mansour: Sure. Yeah. Hi, my name is Leena Mansour, my pronouns are she/her. I’m an engineering manager at Slack. I run a team of mobile developers.

Leena Mansour: What got me into this is I was 16 and I did not want to follow my parents’ footsteps. So I didn’t take any biology because they were all in the medical field. And where I grew up, your options were you were a doctor or your engineer.

Leena Mansour: So I went into engineering. I thought computers were cool. It worked out for me. They are cool, so here I am.

Brook Shelley: They’re still cool, right? Otherwise, I got to find a new job.

Leena Mansour: Yeah. Yeah.

Brook Shelley: Mina, how about you?

Mina Markham: Hi. So my name is Mina Markham, my pronouns are she/her, and I’m a staff engineer here, and I got in engineering by accident. I used to be a graphic designer professionally, and so I taught myself the basic HTML and CSS so I could build a graphic design portfolio website so I could get a job. But as I learned how to do that, I found it interesting, so I kept learning how to do more and more web development things. And eventually I realized, “Hey, I could actually get paid to do this instead of the design stuff.” So I shifted my attention to learning more about that and eventually got a job as a front developer and kept learning and growing in that. So it was organic, but by accident.

Brook Shelley: And I heard you start working at Slack because you thought that’s your best way to meet Beyonce, right?

Mina Markham: I mean, yeah, obviously I’m still waiting. I’m crossing my fingers, but yes.

Brook Shelley: I mean, we know a few people who are pretty cool use Slack, but maybe she doesn’t yet. We got to let [crosstalk].

Mina Markham: Maybe not yet, but if anyone out there has a connection, just hook me up.

Brook Shelley: That’s right.

Mina Markham: I’m waiting for it. I’m waiting for it.

Brook Shelley: Yeah. Mina’s information is in the things, and she’s serious. Find Beyonce for her.

Mina Markham: I am dead serious. Yes.

Brook Shelley: Hi, Rukmini. How about you?

Rukmini Reddy: Hi everyone. I’m Rukmini, my pronouns are she/her. SVP of Engineering at Slack. I run Slacks platform. I wanted to be an engineer since I was eight years old. This has been my dream. I’m a total geek. I love building things, and yeah, I’m happy that I was able to realize an early childhood dream.

Brook Shelley: Heck yeah. Tracy?

Tracy Stampfli: Hey, I’m Tracy, my pronoun are she/her, and I’m a Principal Engineer at Slack. I also got into tech by accident. I started off studying mathematics, and originally thought I was going to get a PhD and become a professor of mathematics. I know that’s a very glamorous career choice, but then midway through grad school, figured out that wasn’t actually what I wanted to do, and ended up leaving. And by accident, getting into tech, starting off in QE and then working my way over to development. But now I’ve been in tech for very long time, and have found it really, really great and fulfilling.

Brook Shelley: Start with you, but can you say what’s your title at Slack? Because I think people don’t quite [crosstalk]

Tracy Stampfli: I said my title, Brook.

Brook Shelley: Oh, you did. I’m sorry.

Tracy Stampfli: I’ll say it. I’m a Principal Engineer, and I’ve never… I’ve stayed [crosstalk]

Brook Shelley: That’s the highest level here, right?

Tracy Stampfli: It is the highest level at Slack, and I’ve stayed on the IC side of things. I’ve never switched over to management. And I’ve really found that for me, at least, I’m interested in having impact on the direction of product, and planning, and all those things, technology decisions. But I want to do it from the standpoint of being more of a tech lead, and not from moving into management.

Brook Shelley: Yeah, that makes sense. And myself, I guess I should say I started off in literature. I wanted to be a writer. I still am a writer, but I needed to make money, and it turned out fixing computers was a better way to make money. So I started off in IT, moved into Ops and SRE work. And now eventually back into management and I wrote promo packet as Rukmini says. We have a thing at work called Manager Olympics, where we have a series of events that take place over a few months, and we just finished. So now I’m just celebrating.

Brook Shelley: But yeah, I like working with people better than computers these days. They’re harder to troubleshoot, but they’re more rewarding when you do. Computers, just say 200, okay. People might cry, or say thank you. It’s nicer. Let’s say the opposite side of Tracy, Rukmini, what made you want to get into management?

Rukmini Reddy: That’s a great question. So I started my journey being an individual contributor. It was a very tiny company. So me being a principal engineers nowhere equal to Tracy’s Principal Engineer at Slack. Woohoo. But I was a principal engineer in a tiny company, and my CTO then came to me and it was like, “You are really good with people. I always feel like you can give hard feedback. You’re able to drive for clarity. You’re hyper-organized and you’re bringing everyone together. Have you considered moving into management?”

Rukmini Reddy: And like most of you, I went through all the stages of grief I see go through when someone else says you should be a manager. And I was a like, “No, I won’t do it to, maybe I should explore it.” And the assurance I had from him at that time, which was very, very advanced for the time it was in, was if you hate it, you can go back to being in IT. So I was like, “Okay, I’m going to try.”

Rukmini Reddy: And I tried, and you know to Brook’s earlier point, people don’t come with debug statements. They don’t come with here’s how you are supposed to deal with me. And I just found it just so much more complex than programming, and also so much more rewarding.

Rukmini Reddy: I think that’s the part I want to underscore, because I realized that my purpose in life was to enable others finding their purpose, and their journey. And I just wanted to be that bystander and cheer them along, and brought me lot of joy in ways like coding did not. So I never look back. I say, I’m one of those people who just absolutely loves being a people manager because no two days are the same for me.

Brook Shelley: Now I’ve heard when you’re a manager, you never get to code again. Right? You could never do a personal project. You can never even open a computer other than for a meeting. Is that right Leena? Have you had that experience?

Leena Mansour: I believe it’s illegal, and the police will show up at your door if you launch any kind of code editor. Yes. That is true.

Brook Shelley: The stack overflow [inaudible]

Leena Mansour: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you definitely can. And I know I try every now and then, but you get so rusty and then you go try to touch it and you’re like, “Wow, I’m really bad at this.” But it is so still really fun to build little things just for yourself.

Brook Shelley: But I always try to over-engineer my stuff. My website’s built on Netlify, with docker containers and all sorts of stuff. Because I’m like, “Oh, if I can’t program at work, I’m going to do it way too much for my blog.” And Mina, did you have pressure as well? To become manager, become a lead in some way? I imagine so, because people [inaudible] quite a bit.

Mina Markham: So yeah, a little bit. There was a fork in the road in my career at Slack. And for a long time, I thought… Not just at Slack, but my career in general, and for a long time, I thought that to be a leader I had to go into management. Like that was the only way to truly lead anyone.

Mina Markham: And luckily I had a great manager at the time, who let me know, “Yeah, you can be a leader and not manage people.” Which is great, because I didn’t want to manage people. So I went the IC track instead. But yeah, for a long time, people kept trying to tell me, “Hey, you’d make a really good manager. You should look into it.”

Mina Markham: And not to say that I wouldn’t be good at it, but it’s not a skill that I necessarily want to do. I like coding. I want to stay more into coding, and more into doing architecting and strategizing. So the fact that I was able to shift into IC leadership, and be more of a mentor to people, versus actually managing people was great.

Brook Shelley: Yeah. That makes sense. And for me, I’ll say as a manager, I manage two teams. I absolutely depend on my leads. The tech leads I have, I wouldn’t be able to do most of my job if I didn’t have their advice, and their ideas, and even their mentorship with other people on the team. So, it’s pretty key.

Brook Shelley: What keeps you going every day? I know it’s been a hard time. We’ll start with Mina this time. But it’s COVID, there’s a war, there’s all this stuff going on. Whether you’re working with people, working with computers, there’s not a lot of respite sometimes. The Internet’s still there, so how do you stay motivated?

Mina Markham: I can answer that. I’ve actually disconnected just a little bit from social media, just because the onslaughts of information does get very draining. So I’m staying motivated by narrowing the focus of what I let grab my attention. I mean, that’s a little bit of a privilege, because I can turn off certain things and not pay attention to them, which is not what everyone can do.

Mina Markham: But yeah, I’ve decided to shift, to focus on more things, closer to what I can control. The sphere of influence I have, because I get really anxious when I see all these things happening that I can’t do anything about. So I’ve tried to stay motivated to like, “okay, what can I personally do?” And that helps me to find some purpose in getting up and doing the work that I’m doing. So yeah.

Brook Shelley: That makes sense. What about you, Tracy? What keeps you coming back to Slack?

Tracy Stampfli: For one thing, I think that one thing that’s nice about getting to the higher levels of being, and I see is that you really get to design what your role is yourself. No one’s really telling me what to do at this point. No one’s telling me what to do, and so I’m really figuring out what do I want my role to be?

Tracy Stampfli: I actually went through this exercise recently, where I tried to write down, and define, this is what I think my role is. This is what I think I should be doing with my time. And that was actually really interesting exercise to go through, and really useful, because it did make me think about what do I want to spend my time doing? And what do I think is important?

Brook Shelley: Oh, that definitely makes sense. How about you Leena?

Leena Mansour: Sorry. Yeah.

Brook Shelley: No, it’s okay.

Leena Mansour: I mean,

Brook Shelley: There’s a lot going on in the chat too, so.

Leena Mansour: There is, there is. Yeah, I adopt the stick your head in the sand mentality when it comes to most news. I hear about the big things, because you always will, but it’s hard when there are things that you can’t do anything about.

Leena Mansour: It’s also been hard because I’m in Canada, and Canada has been mostly locked down for a really long time. So you find your own ways. So I actually have my knitting right here. I knit through meetings, most meetings, and you just got to focus on the things that…

Leena Mansour: What I keep reminding myself of is like, “What do I truly like about the job?” And like Rukmini, I really, really enjoy helping people figure out what their goals are and get those goals. So if I’m having a hard time, I just focus, and have some of those conversations with my people and feel like I’m leaving some positivity in the world through that. And then we sleep, and we start over again.

Brook Shelley: Totally. And Rukmini, I mean, you’re a boss’s boss’s boss. So all the pain and suffering and emotions go to you, right? You’re sort of where it ends? Is that?

Rukmini Reddy: You know, actually I think it just comes down to, I think whether you’re in IT, whether you’re a manager, use your empathy. Put yourself in other people’s shoes. You are leaders in the company. When global events out of your hands are happening, first process the change for yourself and what it means and how you are going to show up.

Brook Shelley: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Rukmini Reddy: Because one thing that’s really important in a leadership position, whether a manager or not, you are a multiplier. People look up to you in moments of stress, in moments of uncertainty, and they try to understand for themselves how they should react. And this is where it’s okay to be vulnerable.

Brook Shelley: Yeah.

Rukmini Reddy: It’s okay to say you don’t have shit together today, and that’s okay. I didn’t last week, because I led teams in Ukraine for many, many years, and this has been very heavy on my heart. But just knowing to it’s okay to be vulnerable, having empathy, losing…

Rukmini Reddy: And keeping people focused on what matters. What’s your impact on the business? Why are you here? And understanding what motivates people. What do you want to be motivated by? And redirecting them to that, is I think the most helpful thing you can do as a manager or leader.

Brook Shelley: That totally makes sense.

Leena Mansour: Just to build on that, one of the things that I do often, I know I’ve seen some of the people on my team in the chat. I know they’re here. I have no problem telling people, “You know what? I need a mental health day.”

Brook Shelley: Yeah.

Leena Mansour: And I think that’s so important, because we all need mental health days, and it’s a lot easier or for your team when they see you taking mental health days to say the same and not be like, “Oh, I’m vomiting today.” That’s extra energy that they have to expend to make up something.

Leena Mansour: So be honest, you’re a human being, and so is everybody else. If you folks on the pod, the no bones and bones pod, we use it a lot in our channel to indicate our status of how much energy we have that day. But yeah, just be human.

Brook Shelley: I like that. I like that. I always just say my stomach hurts, but then I’m like, well, if my stomach hurts, I can still type. So what can you do there?

Mina Markham: No, I kind of agree with both Rukmini and Leena, that I am very open when I need a break. So I will tell people very clearly, “Hey, I need a mental health thing.” I don’t even try to fudge it with, “Hey, I’m sick.”

Mina Markham: No, I just, I need a break. I am burned out. I need a break. I will see you all in a couple of days. And my manager was very, very open, very receptive to it. So yeah, I try to model that healthy behavior. I’m like, “No, I’m feeling overwhelmed. I need a break. I will come back when I’m a hundred percent.”

Brook Shelley: And we have sabbatical now at Slack too, which I don’t know if any of y’all have taken advantage of it? I have a person on it right now. And you get like a week for every year that you work.

Brook Shelley: I always tell my people, I’m happy to approve up the two or three weeks, no problem. Past that, it gets harder to justify it, but take a sabbatical if you want to take off a month or two. That’s amazing. Tracy, you’ve been here for a while. Have you taken a sabbatical yet?

Tracy Stampfli: I haven’t taken a sabbatical here. I worked at a previous company that had sabbaticals, and I think they’re super, super great, and super wonderful, for avoiding burnout because everyone gets burnt out after a while, and being able to take a longer break is really awesome. So I’m hugely in favor of the benefit and have done it in the past.

Brook Shelley: Yeah. Yeah. It definitely helps to reset a little bit. Because otherwise, I feel like you go on a vacation for a week and by the end of the week, you’re starting to forget that you have a job, but then you have to remember and woof. Then you have to go, “What do I do here?”

Brook Shelley: One thing I wanted ask Tracy, especially, is, how do you find your ability to lead from the front, from being an engineer? In what ways are you able to influence product decisions or strategic decisions? How do you navigate that?

Tracy Stampfli: Well, for one thing, I think you have to find the right place, the right fit for you, the right company fit. I mean, I don’t want to make this all about how great Slack is, but you know. But it is a place where ICs really can be leaders, and where you can have that kind of influence, and not every company is like that.

Tracy Stampfli: So I think that’s one big thing is you just have to find the right fit for you, the right place where you are able to have that impact. And then I think a lot of it is just being willing to step forward and take ownership of things and say like, “Hey, I really have opinions about what the technical direction of this part of the product should be. Let’s talk about them.”

Brook Shelley: It is collaborative too, right?

Tracy Stampfli: Yep.

Brook Shelley: It’s not just like here, “I’m the sage star. I’ll tell you everything.”

Tracy Stampfli: Yeah. It’s definitely also a big part of it is trying to get other people to trying to bring forth the ideas from other folks on your team, or beyond your team, and say, “Hey.”

Tracy Stampfli: Part of it is just calling out. There may be some big issue that we need to address, now let’s try, together, figure out what the best path forward is. And then you, as the leader, can be the messenger for that to executive leadership or whoever.

Brook Shelley: And Mina, how about you? How do you influence all of us manager folks?

Mina Markham: How do I influence the managers? Oh, wow. As I’ve gotten to the staff level, my manager sees me more as a partner, as opposed to a… I don’t want to say, use the word support, because that’s not the right word, but basically we work together to figure out what the next steps for the team are.

Mina Markham: He’ll ask me for my opinions about, “Hey, what do you think we should be working on?” It’s more like what Stacy was talking about, about how defining our own path. Now he counts on me to see all the things that he can’t see, like where are the trouble spots in our code base, or the trouble spots in our processes.

Mina Markham: And so I use my heads down nature into more than the weeds to let him know what’s important, and what our team should be focusing on. And aside from that, I also let him know like, “Hey, I think this person would be good for this project.”

Mina Markham: So I help him to figure out how to best utilize other members of the team as well, and from what I know of, how they want to grow and what they’re capable of, and things of that nature.

Mina Markham: It’s become less of a, “Here’s what you need to do, Mina,” more of like, “Hey, Mina, let’s figure out what the next steps for the next quarters are together.” And I like that. I like it a lot.

Brook Shelley: Yeah. That’s really awesome. I like that. So one question I wanted to ask too, maybe for Leena and Rukmini, is as you got into your career and you started into management or into leadership, did you have someone that mentored you, or someone that you emulated or learned from, or sponsored you a bit? And maybe telling us about that? Leena, go for it.

Leena Mansour: Sure. Yeah. I mean, I had a lot of great role models that I worked with. I had to fight to become a manager. I had to quit jobs, and threaten to quit jobs, and leave and come back and do all kinds of things to get my people management role I really wanted. And I had a lot of people who supported me in helping me figure that out.

Leena Mansour: But I think that honestly, the most important piece and the most important and helpful thing in my journey being a manager is my peer mentors. I always, always, always have a group of managers who are on my level, but also higher. Just varying levels.

Leena Mansour: That is a small, small, small trust group that you can go with, with your problems, and talk out how you would solve it. It’s been the most helpful tool for me for anything, because you don’t just get one person’s perspective, you get a whole group try and solve your problems for you. Highly recommend.

Rukmini Reddy: Yeah. I have a squad. A squad that speaks truth that I don’t want to hear to me. It’s super important. With people who tell me I don’t have it together, and I need to fix things. And it’s really important to have that squad of people who think of your scope larger than you can think for yourself, right? They shouldn’t be like narrow you down, they should actually open things up for you.

Rukmini Reddy: And I rely on them to show me opportunities that I haven’t been considered for myself. And they’re extremely important for you at every stage of your career for you to have a squad.

Brook Shelley: I have my business boys. So my former founders of the company that acqui-hired by Slack. And I ask them a lot of advice about finances, and whatever else. They’ve founded companies, they’ve led stuff, and so I’m always just like, “Hey, tell me the secrets, business boys.”

Brook Shelley: I also highly recommend bicycling during and after work, because the computer’s not there and you can escape. So I think that we are out of time, but any last words of wisdom from anybody? Just take more breaks?

Leena Mansour: Breaks.

Mina Markham: Breaks.

Leena Mansour: Only take whatever path you actually truly want, not the path that you think you’re supposed to have. Find cool people to talk to you about what that role looks like, so you can actually understand.

Brook Shelley: Heck yeah. All right. Well, thanks everybody. Really appreciate your time and I’ll pass it off to Sukrutha.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you so much. Special mention to your amazing cat.

Brook Shelley: Oh yeah. That’s Snorri. He gets sad when I talk to other people besides him. He’s right here right now, hold on. All right, do you want to say hi to everybody?

Rukmini Reddy: Hi, kitty.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you so much to the women at Slack for sharing your amazing insights on leadership, from both the management side of the house, as well as from the IC side, the principal and staff engineer side.

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“Let Them Shine: A Different Approach to Hiring”: Camille Tate, Head of Talent at Strava and Elyse Gordon, Senior Director of Engineering at Strava

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Sukrutha Bhadouria: So, our next talk is by Elyse Gordon and Camille Tate from Strava. We have Elyse who’s a Senior Director of Engineering and Camille who is the Head of Talent. And they are going to talk to us about how they have evolved their tech hiring at Strava. We all know how challenging it is actually to find us the right people for that role. And we don’t want to ask them questions that are not relevant and interview them for skills that they’re never going to need to exercise. So, this is really important and interesting for us all to learn. Welcome, Elyse and Camille.

Camille Tate: Thank you so much.

Elyse Gordon: Thank you for having us. We’re really excited to be here. So, I’m Elyse. I work at Strava as a Senior Director in Engineering. I’m going to talk a little bit about why I’m here talking about this today and why this is important to me. I have spent many years in [inaudible] as an engineer and engineering leader in tech at this point. And I have felt for a long time that the way we interview folks whether it’s the specifics of questions we ask or just general like philosophy and approach just isn’t really serving the industry as a whole and definitely isn’t serving folks who are underrepresented in the industry across the board.

Elyse Gordon: And so, at Strava, over the last couple of years, we’ve really had the opportunity to rethink this and do things in a different way. And so, I’m excited to be here and talk to you about that today. And Camille is going to talk a bit about her why for being here, too.

Camille Tate: Hi, everyone. Thank you so much to Girl Geek and ELEVATE for having us here. We really appreciate the opportunity. My name is Camille Tate. And I’m with Strava. I’m the Head of Talent here. And I get the privilege and the honor to work with Elyse on a day-to-day basis. I’m very excited that we’re having this discussion about building diverse teams and the work we do at Strava to try to make our environment anti-racist culture and company.

Camille Tate: My why is simple. I live this life every day. It’s something that … I’m a black woman in tech. I’ve been in tech for quite some time. And there, I’ve experienced numerous things when it comes to hiring. I’ve seen numerous things being on the recruiting side in terms of discrimination and equality, people not putting in the effort to reach out to underrepresented groups.

Camille Tate: So, my why is personal to me and I love that Strava is on the path to making a change in our industry of tech, and trying to be a blueprint for what we can do in terms of promoting and hiring people from all walks of life. So, that is my why.

Elyse Gordon: Thanks, Camille. It’s always awesome to hear your talk about that more. So, I’m wondering like you’ve spent many, many years in recruiting both at tech companies and then the wider industry, can you talk about why sourcing is such a key part of hiring diverse teams? And really, what we’ve done to think about sourcing differently?

Camille Tate: Yeah. So, I don’t know how many recruiters we have that’s attending this conference, but it’s a well-known fact that the majority of applicants that apply for roles specifically in tech are majority white. That’s just a fact and it’s something that I’ve seen in the almost 17 years I’ve been doing this. So, sourcing is super important.

Camille Tate: And I think when … I want to redefine what sourcing means. Sourcing is not just going out and cherry-picking different people from all walks of life. Sourcing has changed. And I like to describe it … I don’t know if Elyse has heard me talk about this but I’ve mentioned it in other chats.

Camille Tate: Sourcing, I call it the three Es. So, if you don’t have these three Es a part of your sourcing strategy, then you’re probably doing things a little bit differently than the way we go about doing and promoting and just exposing opportunities to people from all backgrounds.

Camille Tate: So, the three Es are exposure, engagement and effort. And so, when you think about sourcing and it’s not just going out and cherry-picking people from underrepresented groups. And actually an example of sourcing is what Elyse and I are doing today which is speaking with all of you. So, sometimes, sourcing is more so exposure because I talked to a lot of candidates.

Camille Tate: A lot of candidates know who Strava is, but there are a lot of candidates especially from underrepresented groups that don’t know who Strava is. We have over 90 million athletes on the Strava platform. So of course, those athletes in that community know who Strava is, but then what about the groups that they are not necessarily in …

amille Tate: To Strava, an athlete is anyone who sweats. But maybe people have this impression that, “Oh, if I want to work for Strava, I have to have all these qualifications. And in addition to that, I have to be this endurance athlete that does all this cycling and running and things like that.”

Camille Tate: This is an opportunity. This is an example of an opportunity where we’re sourcing and we’re saying, “This is Strava. You don’t have to be an endurance athlete. I’m certainly not. And I’m still here thriving and striving.”

amille Tate: And so, that is just exposure is a key piece of sourcing, making sure that you expose opportunities and your culture to people that wouldn’t normally have heard of your company and the culture and the things that you can bring to the table as an employer.

Camille Tate: And then engagement, engagement is maybe someone that you speak to or something like that, they don’t have the qualifications or they’re not in alignment with roles you may have at the moment but you want to stay engaged with them. So, engagement is very important in terms of sourcing. It’s not necessarily all the time filling a role right then and right there, it’s keeping relationships going, i.e. building relationships with HBCUs or outreach organizations.

Camille Tate: You don’t want to just go to events or just go to a career fair, you’re looking to build long-term relationships. And then just effort, everybody needs to put in the effort to source and step outside of their comfort zone and not stay in their bubble or their network that they’re used to operating in.

Camille Tate: Sourcing is very much an inside job. I know we look at it as something that’s external and you’re reaching out, but it’s very much an inside job because you’re looking to communicate authentically with candidates from all backgrounds. So, I would say sourcing is very important, but it’s not the sourcing that we know of the past.

Camille Tate: This is the new sourcing and is better because you’re building more relationships and you’re creating just an alignment with candidates and building those relationships for now or in the future. So, I would say that that’s why source is important and those are the components of sourcing that we embrace at Strava.

Camille Tate: Also, one more thing before I get back to you, Elyse. But sometimes if you want to source and build relationships with underrepresented groups, you have to invest. Obviously, we are a sponsor here at the ELEVATE Conference and so appreciative of the opportunity, but sometimes you have to invest resources to gain access to people that you want to reach. And so, sometimes I know a lot of companies are like, “Well, let me just pick your brain,” or, “Let me just do this,” and you think everything is for free.

Camille Tate: Well, if you don’t have access, you need to invest resources. Sometimes that means paying money to have access or partner with a company that aligns with your culture and your values to gain access to the candidates you are looking to reach. So, that would be my thing on sourcing. Elyse, did you have anything to add to the sourcing piece?

Elyse Gordon: No, I mean, I think that was amazing. You covered it all. I will add, I am also not an endurance athlete. I love walking and moving, doing a little bit here and there what I can. I’m a mom so like do what you can. But we do not hire people because they can ride their bike 40 miles or run a marathon. We hire you because you’re going to contribute to the team. So, I think that’s just a really important thing to say.

Camille Tate: Right. And I wanted to pass the mic to you, Elyse, because I’ve been with Strava for 14 months and obviously have the privilege of working with you. And you’re very involved in hiring on the engineering side. And I would say that engineering at Strava is some of the most engaged and active hiring managers and teams and hiring processes that I’ve been a part of. So, I like you to speak to just the prep and process from an engineering hiring standpoint and what you and the team do to prepare yourself for hiring at Strava.

Elyse Gordon: Yeah. I mean, this has been a really key area-I mean, this has been a really key area of focus for us, both for a long time, in some ways, one of the hiring values we carried forward with us when we started doing things differently was actually put the candidate experience first, put the candidate first. And I think that was a good thing to bring with us.

Elyse Gordon: We just do it maybe in a different way now, but we’ve invested a ton in both how we talk to candidates, what we talk to candidates about, just basically communicating and authentic to Strava way, being transparent. We do a lot of prep with candidates. We tell them topic areas. We let you know what you’re going to be interviewing about. We don’t give you the whole question verbatim, but we give you enough time and information so you can be ready and confident going in.

Elyse Gordon: We never want anybody to feel like they’re taking a test, or feel like they got surprised. Right? We want you to do your best when you show up here, just like we’re trying to put our best foot forward. So I think that’s been a really key part.

Elyse Gordon: I think on the other side, how we actually have rethought the hiring process, we really look for all of our questions to reflect real work, no algorithm, sort of gotcha kind of questions. We’ve done a ton of work there. We continue to do work. If a question we don’t feel like is helping us evaluate candidates well, then we rethink it.

Elyse Gordon: And that’s a high effort process. It takes time to make new technical questions, and make them good, and make them reflect work. But we’ve really seen that the effort put in there. We’ve gone a lot of return. We can better evaluate candidates. We can evaluate level better.

Elyse Gordon: We get a lot of really great feedback on our process from candidates. So we’re both seeing how do we feel about it? How do candidates feel about it? We’ve invested heavily in rubrics. So I think you can never make a hiring completely objective.

Elyse Gordon: We’re all human beings involved in this process, but we try to take as much of a objective approach as we can get, especially with technical questions where we can have a rubric, the interviewer can fill out a rubric, and it’s the same every time. And that’s been really important.

Elyse Gordon: And the last thing I’ll say on this topic is we’ve really gone to a per role approach. And so last year we hired a bunch of folks coming out of boot camps, which was awesome. It’s a program we’re going to continue this year, really excited about that program. But when we first started interviewing for it, it just wasn’t working.

Elyse Gordon: We were not able to evaluate candidates with our current interview process well, and so we took a step back and we said, how can we let people shine? Which is where the [inaudible] came from. Thank you, Michelle Bousquet, our Head of People.

Elyse Gordon: And so we really took a step back, and rethought it, and we have a totally different interview process for early career now that is really looking at potential, and is not show us what you know, because you’re at the beginning of your career.

Elyse Gordon: We’re going to train you. Right. And so the questions we should be asking about bringing people on board are very different and that’s been really successful. So we’re just looking to continue to iterate, and continue to do more of that going forward.

Camille Tate: Yeah. And one of the things that I know you all do is speed to hire. I know a lot of companies just, “We got to fill all these roles, and we got to go, go, go.” And it doesn’t matter who’s in the pipeline, just pick the candidate who has the qualifications and move on. Elyse, I think that you all have done a really good job and say, “Wait a minute, our pipeline is not diverse enough. It doesn’t have… We haven’t exposed it to enough people. Let’s take a step back, and slow this down before we hire.”

Elyse Gordon: Yeah, I mean, as we were preparing for this, I really spent some time reflecting on the speed thing. And you know, honestly, this was not something we really went in knowing this was going to change so much. And I feel like this is… In Strava, when you talk about anti-racism, we talk about unlearning a lot.

Elyse Gordon: And this is something I felt like we had to unlearn, because everywhere else I have hired, even at Strava before the last couple years, speed was the end-all be-all, right. Speed to get that person in the door. How fast can you be interviewing? How fast can you make a decision? Right? And we have really walked away from that to the point where we’re willing to lose candidates, because their timeline and our timeline is not matching up.

Elyse Gordon: So I think that we have really committed to going in a different direction. And I think that’s good, because I think when you are all about speed, hiring managers tend to feel the pressure to do things like hire the first person they see, instead of seeing a bunch of candidates and say, “Who’s the best person and from this group?”

Elyse Gordon: And because of what Camille was talking about, that the people who apply tend to be in the majority groups, right? You do not serve your team goals of building a more diverse team when you hire that way. And so we have taken an approach where we do batch candidates, and it does take longer, to go from opening a role, get a bunch of candidates through screens, then get to onsite. It takes longer.

Elyse Gordon: However, we’ve been finding that when we do that in batch of candidates, we often find more than one great candidate in the batch. And then we make more than one offer, because we have more than one open role. And so the overall speed isn’t necessarily dramatically slowing down, but it feels slower in the middle, and that’s something we’ve really had to work on and adjust. And as a team, unlearn that, because it’s hard to go away from what you’ve known your whole career, the way you’ve been hired into roles is challenging.

Elyse Gordon: And so I think this is one of the things that we’re going to keep looking at. Like how do we make this continue to be great going forward? And how do we carry this forward, maybe even more intentionally? I think we’ve come to it, now how do we make it even more intentional?

Elyse Gordon: Camille, I have been wondering something. I see a lot on LinkedIn lately about people hiring DEI recruiters, or DEI specialists, sourcers, and we don’t hire like that. The whole team does it. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that?

Camille Tate: Yeah. I mean, that’s a great question. I see it too, on my LinkedIn. I’m obviously connected to a lot of recruiters. But yeah, in my opinion, building a diverse team is everybody’s job. And specifically, not even a recruiter’s job, it’s the whole company’s job. That’s what I say every time I’m talking about hiring to the lovely teammates that we have at Strava. It’s everybody’s job.

Camille Tate: I don’t think that it makes sense, or it’s a benefit to anyone, to have separate diversity recruiters, or diversity sources over here. And then everyone is what, just… I don’t know what they’re doing over here, if everyone over here. So it’s important that the whole team leads with, if we say at Strava, we’re building diverse teams, that means we. That means every single person at Strava.

Camille Tate: That’s our philosophy, it’s not separate. It’s a part of who we are. It’s a part of our culture. We discuss it in interviews. Anti-racism is our number one ABC, which in some companies are their values or foundational principles. So it is important that everybody gets on the train, and is incorporating that into how we interview, how we hire, how we recruit. So that’s our philosophy, and I know we’re wrapping up, so there’s Angie. Thank you so much.

Angie Chang: Thank you so much, Camille and Elyse. There are so many quotable quotes. I’m sure they’ll be on Twitter later. So thank you so much for sharing all of your wisdom and insights about how Strava has evolved hiring.

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“How to Get the Promotion You Deserve”: Ali Littman, Director of Engineering at Modern Health (Video + Transcript)  

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Angie Chang: We’re going to be having our next speaker join us. Her name is Ali. And she’s a Director of Engineering at Modern Health. She’s passionate about companies with strong social missions and dedicates as much time as possible to DEI efforts. She has led Women’s ERG, served on Belonging Councils, mentored women on achieving their goals and has been a … I’ll let her introduce herself. Welcome, Ali.

Ali Littman: Thank you, Angie. Let me get my slides up. Good morning, everyone. Hope you’re having a great day at ELEVATE already. I’m Ali Littman. I’m a Director of Engineering at Modern Health. And I’m going to be talking to you all today about how to get the promotion that you deserve.

Ali Littman: This topic is very, very, very near and dear to my heart because there are so many hardworking people who might have the tools or might not have the tools in order to ensure the career growth that they deserve. So, I’m very excited to share some of my lessons learned throughout my experience and give you a tour of some things that you can actually try out in your career growth.

Ali Littman: So, brief overview of the agenda. So, I will get a little vulnerable with you all. I encourage you to get vulnerable with me in the chat and share some things that I’ve learned along the way.

Ali Littman: I’ll also give you some really strong tactical advice around how you can take control of your growth. This includes setting expectations around promotion, developing a plan and actually sticking to it, taking control of it and making sure you grow alongside it, and also how to properly self-promote and make your achievements seen.

Ali Littman: And then lastly, just walking through all the different people that might be already in your corner that you can leverage to ensure that they support you on your growth path. All right, so diving into lessons learned. Just to kick things off, I’ll introduce myself a little bit more and tell a bit about my story.

Ali Littman: So, I’m Ali again, Director of Engineering at Modern Health. I just switched over to Modern Health very recently. So previously, I was Director of Engineering at Omada Health. I have a pretty nonstandard background. I started my career doing like a large company, technical project management work. And then, over time, moved into startup technical project management work. And then, from there, grew into engineering leadership. So, very interesting growth path. And I can share some experiences along the way from that journey.

Ali Littman: I think some other things that I identify with that are important to share, I identify as a leader, a mentor and an imposter syndrome coach with a focus on evolving the workplace for women and other underrepresented groups. I’m also a woman and a manager. I have been promoted myself. There’s been times when I haven’t been promoted. And then also, I as a manager have made mistakes. Even as a very growth-oriented manager, I didn’t always get it right either. So, that’s something we’ll focus on a little bit more today.

Ali Littman: So, sharing some of those hard lessons. So, I’m going to share a few personal stories. And in the chat, share some times where you maybe learned the hard lesson as well so other folks can see that you’re not alone and I’m not alone. So, one big lesson, a common fallacy, I thought if I worked hard, I would get rewarded. In this particular case, my manager didn’t have sufficient visibility into my work, I didn’t have sponsors and I didn’t understand the power dynamics in the office, therefore I got less visibility and fewer opportunities.

Ali Littman: Also, I’ve had times where my manager evaluated me on things that had little to do with my output. I was judged based off of frustration shared in one-on-ones rather than the quality of my work. I didn’t know how to intervene and ask for a more fair evaluation. Additionally, I had one moment where I didn’t remind my manager to promote me. They wanted to but they just forgot. I didn’t remind them. And actually, in this case, a male counterpart had to remind my manager that I should probably be promoted and it was squeezed in the last minute.

Ali Littman: So, I’ve definitely learned some hard lessons along the way. This is the shortlist. And as a manager as well, I have made mistakes. This I think is a really important thing to understand. Even a manager who wants to support you and has a great plan around it, they might have a lot on their plate. They might still execute imperfectly. It is so important in all of this that you and your manager are very much on the same page and your team and your growth.

Ali Littman: And then, lastly, I personally have had successes with promotion. I have coached others on how to get success promotions. And even in one case, I was promoted against all odds. I was told that I was unlikely to get the promotion I wanted on the timeline I wanted, but then I met with my manager, made an overt plan with them, executed against it and was actually able to get the promotion that I wanted on the timeline that I wanted.

Ali Littman: So, I’m very excited to share with all of you how you might be able to replicate some of the successes I’ve had from the lessons I’ve learned. Feel free in the chat, too, to share some of your favorite promotion success stories. I’m not the only one who has learned some of these lessons and I think we can all learn from each other on this.

Ali Littman: So, let’s get into those tactics I mentioned. All right, so first thing, setting expectations around promotion. This is one of the most important things that you can do is signal your intentions. So, clearly communicate your growth goals. You see a statement here, “I want to do blank by blank.” So, I think what’s important here is to make sure that you really state your career goals. They shouldn’t be a secret. They shouldn’t be a secret aspiration. They should be something you’re constantly talking with your manager about. Have them be front and center in your one-on-ones.

Ali Littman: I often put them at the very, very, very top. So, they can’t really be ignored. They’re not a secret. They’re always top of mind. So, find that central spot for reference. Make sure it’s clear what you want. And as you’re talking about these things, maybe for the first time with your manager or maybe it’s not the first time, make sure that your conversations are around goals. It should be a very collaborative conversation, understanding how they can support you. I strongly recommend against any setting of any strong expectations or ultimatums. This should be really collaborative and goal-oriented.

Ali Littman: And I think another area to get strong alignment with your manager on, I’ve already do this a few times already, realistic promotion timelines. Setting expectations around the timeline is an important way to put pressure on making sure you get what you want by when you want. And also to show that you’re serious. There might be some standard line that your manager might give you around needing to be performing at a certain level or being with the company for a certain amount of time. These might be real requirements that they need to ensure before they can promote you.

Ali Littman: So, make sure that you have this conversation so you can understand how your manager can pitch this potential promotion to leadership in the future and so you have good expectations around what timing looks like.

Ali Littman: Okay. Next up, this is one of the more important things, aligning with your manager on where you’re at. You and your manager need to agree that you’re operating at the next level. They need to be able to articulate whether you are or whether you’re not. And as they make that pitch for promotion, they need to state the case as to why you already have been doing the job that you want to do.

Ali Littman: In this case, I would strongly recommend doing evaluations against whatever your manager might use to do your performance reviews. So, this might come in the form of a career ladder or leveling framework. We’ll talk a little bit more about that in a few minutes. But I strongly recommend doing a self-evaluation using that tool and sharing the results with your manager. That way, you can have a strong conversation around where you might be aligned in terms of your performance next level or where you’re misaligned.

Ali Littman: There might be cases where you’re saying, “Hey, I’m a fantastic cross-functional collaborator or something like that and here’s why.” Maybe your manager just hasn’t seen those five examples that you have. And maybe they thought you were actually not operating at the next level, but now you can convince them that you actually are. Or maybe there is a legitimate gap that you need to work on. And this is a great point to understand. Here’s exactly what you might need to do in order to demonstrate that you are ready for the next level.

Ali Littman: And then, yeah, so we’re all business superheroes here. We’re all trying to actually solve some important business need in the work that we’re doing. So, I think part of the expectation-setting process includes identifying that business need that you’ll be filling upon promotion. So, this can be a tough one for folks sometimes I think especially in engineering. But if there’s no clear role that needs to be filled or if there are business roadblocks outside of your control but you’re still looking to grow, I would say ask for alternate pathways to growth in the way that you want it.

Ali Littman: Have that documented, this is really important, so you can at least get the right experiences or navigate around the blockers. An example here might be maybe you need to demonstrate that you can manage managers but there’s no new managers in your organization. So maybe you can look into switching teams or mentoring all of the new managers, things like that. You can find alternate pathways to that growth and still make some progress.

Ali Littman: I think on this one, I’ll also say if the company wants to retain you and believes that you’re ready to make an impact at a higher level, they’ll make it work usually. This might not be straightforward but it is possible that the role that you want doesn’t exist, in which case, take stock as to whether this is the right role with the right company. If it’s not, there’s no opportunity for you to actually grow the way that you want.

Ali Littman: And also, things change rapidly. People leave companies. So, just always be on the lookout for the next opportunity you can take advantage of as the business itself is shifting.

Ali Littman: Okay. Now, how to make a growth plan and take control of it? Great. I would say, ask this question early and often, what is getting to the next level entail? What do you need to be doing to make it? This is a really critical question that you need to be able to answer and build a growth plan around with your manager.

Ali Littman: A big piece of this puzzle is understanding if there is a growth ladder or a career ladder, a leveling framework, whatever that might be, some kind of framework where you can evaluate the skills and capabilities that you need to demonstrate at each level so you can understand where you land on that ladder. You need to have a clearer picture of what the roles and responsibilities are and expectations so you can defend the fact that you’re ready for that next challenge.

Ali Littman: I would ensure that you know this ladder inside and out. And ask for evaluations, relative ladder, at least twice a year from your manager. I would recommend doing them right after your performance reviews because often, those do not reference the growth ladders at various organizations. So, it might be a good opportunity to follow up with the feedback you receive to say, “Okay, and what does this mean? How does this translate into the leveling framework?”

Ali Littman: Or after performance reviews, does it make sense? Maybe you got a good sense of where you landed. Doing this in between performance review cycles could be another good call. In a lot of cases especially for folks who work at startups, there might not be a growth ladder.

Ali Littman: So, I would recommend asking for one or making one. This is a tactic I’ve seen use several times and used by myself as well. If a ladder doesn’t exist, go ahead and make one and see if that’s going to be useful to your manager, ask if that’s something you can start. That way, you actually can put input into what goes in there that might be helpful for you. And it can expedite you having something to evaluate your performance relative, too.

Ali Littman: And if you don’t like the ladder, give feedback to management on it. And it might need to change to actually be supportive of folks’ growth of your company. And then, building that growth plan. So, growth plans can take many forms but this is something everyone should have. Maybe you’ll have a very specific growth document. I’d strongly recommend this in the event that you are struggling to get that promotion, you want something more formal. Otherwise, it could be something that’s part of your one-on-one document, Trello boards. I’ve seen it all.

Ali Littman: But in a perfect world, your growth plan should have some of the following elements like, what exactly are those skills that need to be demonstrated in order to show you’re ready for the next level? What actions do you need to take to demonstrate those skills? Maybe it’s a project. But also, how is your manager going to catalyze your ability to demonstrate those skills? It’s not a one-way street here. You need to be connected to some of those opportunities to show off what you got.

Ali Littman: And then lastly, having measurable goals or tactics for assessment and a plan for recurring measurements. So, having these things be as quantifiable as possible is going to be important. But sometimes, you might only get qualitative feedback, in which case, just understanding that the measurement mechanism is that feedback and getting good feedback in certain areas.

Ali Littman: And then lastly, I would refresh this growth plan regularly. Make sure that you take a look at it ideally monthly but refreshing it fully maybe about quarterly would be what I would recommend. And then, I always say the feedback is a gift. And so, be hungry for it. It’s a gift just like cookies. Cookies are my favorite gift. So, yeah, ask for feedback as often as possible. This is a really important part of this growth process. And set expectations with your manager on how often you want that feedback to be reviewed.

Ali Littman: I’d suggest at least monthly. I would also ask your manager to collect feedback from certain people in certain growth areas. So, they might not know or always be talking to all the people that you’re working with very closely, so ask them for more feedback on a recurring basis. And lastly, curate your reviewers. This is a great thing that you have control over. So, who do you want to wow? Who gives you helpful constructive criticism?

Ali Littman: I would say ask for feedback regularly from these people. So, by the time you hit the review cycle, you already have their buy-in and know exactly what they’re going to say. So, this feedback is useful in the reviews but it’s even more useful before the review and long before the promotion cycle comes.

Ali Littman: Now, let’s take a minute to talk about self-promotion. So, one of my favorite other top topics is self-promotion. So, there’s three different levels but I’d recommend really focusing on the core one, no surprise, based off things I’ve been saying, your manager. And then there’s also the department and the company. So, when it comes to your manager, do whatever you can to brag to them. In one-on-ones, proactively share like, “I got this feedback. I achieved this goal. I did this extra thing, I solved this problem.”

Ali Littman: Ask your manager how they want to find out about your achievements and funnel all of them through that pathway. I usually have an FYI section that I have in every single one of my one-on-ones with my manager just to let them know all the great things that I’m doing in case they missed them. I would also say share wins at the department level. This could mean being the one to present a group achievement at an all-hands or sending that launch email.

Ali Littman: I would also suggest being very vocal in public forums. There’s always a set of public forums in an organization where management’s evaluating how people are showing up as leaders and contributing. Understand what those are and be present in those. They might be a guild meeting demos, etcetera. And also, volunteer to lead initiatives that leadership cares about. This will give you some additional departmental visibility.

Ali Littman: With the company, I would suggest to share wins. Find reasons to share your achievements. If they’re impactful, people might legitimately need to know about them. So, see if you can present at a town hall, send an all company email, etcetera. And then lastly, and all this is classic advice but write a killer self-review. This is very important in order to solidify your promotion but it should be what catalyzes it. So, it’s like your self-pitch but you should be self-promoting along the way. And this should be like the summary of all your self-promotion you’ve been doing. All right.

Ali Littman: So, last section here, growth takes a village. So, who do you have in your corner that can amplify your growth and successes? So, here, I strongly recommend finding a sponsor who can promote your work to the right leaders and give you the right opportunities. This can take many forms and often is a matter of sharing your goals with everyone and seeing who gets excited about them.

Ali Littman: Also, understand how your manager maps to executive leadership. This way, you can understand who to wow and what your manager needs to do to get you promoted and identify if there’s any communication breakdowns on how your performance is being evaluated and discussed with the promotion decision-makers. I’d also recommend just telling everyone you work with what you’re aiming for in terms of growth.

Ali Littman: Focus on experiences and feedback and the support you need. And take time to get their feedback, get their support, wow them especially if they’re an executive leadership representative. They’re the ones in the room come promotion time. All right.

Ali Littman: And then lastly, just a reminder, people really want to help you. I think we all forget this sometimes. But studies show asking for help really, really goes a long way and people are very likely to want to help. So, make meaningful connections. Ask for feedback. Ask them to amplify your good work.

Ali Littman: I would say also find a mentor, this is really important, both internally, externally on different topics, whatever you need, get that help, get their perspective. Also consider coaching. I’m a fan of life coaching, this really helped me clarify not necessarily that I wanted to get promoted, but exactly what I wanted out of my time, what I wanted out of work so I could ask for the right experiences that then align with my career growth.

Ali Littman: And lastly, your manager wants you to succeed. So, just my final plug, lean on your manager. They’re in your corner. They might be busy. They might actually not be doing their job or not doing their job well. So, manage them and managing your growth. And they’re going to be there for it. They will.

Ali Littman: So, I know we’re at time. So, we might need to revert to your questions via email so you can reach out to me. Find me on LinkedIn. And I’m happy to answer questions and provide support in your career growth journeys.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you so much, Ali. I was going to say you’ll see some questions on the chat and through the Q&A section, you could even choose to respond there.

Ali Littman: Okay.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: But this was really insightful for me. Even though I’ve been in the industry a long time, I feel like I learned so many new things, as well as got refreshed on all the things I should be doing as well. So, that was really, really helpful even for me. So, thank you so much.

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“Decision-Making at Scale: Morning Keynote”: Arquay Harris, VP of Engineering at Webflow (Video + Transcript)

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Sukrutha Bhadouria: I’m super excited and honored to introduce Arquay Harris, who is our keynote speaker for today. Arquay is the VP of Engineering at Webflow. Prior to Webflow, she has held engineering leadership positions at so many different companies like Slack, Google and CBS Interactive. Fun fact, she’s a developer who also has a master’s in design. She loves the manager form and functions, so interesting and impressive. When not working, she can be found cooking, stumbling over guitar and piano chords or watching Seinfeld. Welcome, Arquay.

Arquay Harris: Hello everyone. Nice to see you. I’m so excited to be here today and I’m going to be talking today about decision-making at scale. And first I’m going to give a little bit of an introduction, which will be almost everything that you ever wanted to know about me, not quite everything, but almost everything. And the first thing that I think you should need to know about me is that I have been a Girl Geek supporter from way, way back. And I brought proof, here are my receipts. This is from a very, very early Girl Geek dinner that I went to and it was in 2009. And I’m pretty sure that I went to one before that, but this is as far back as Gmail goes. I tried to find an earlier one, but I couldn’t.

Arquay Harris: And this is almost a full circle moment for me giving this talk today because when I think about that time, when I first met Angie, for example, and I was just a very junior leader and to be here today, keynoting and hopefully inspiring and giving some knowledge to the next generation, it just shows the longstanding impact that Girl Geek has had and how much they’ve represented underrepresented genders and how much they’ve done for the community and tech. And so I’m just really excited to be here keynoting, and I can’t think of better way to spend International Women’s Day. So thank you for having me.

Arquay Harris: So first off, my name is pronounced Arquay. I really wish that I had this very exciting backstory, like I’m named after an African princess or something like that, but really it’s just my parents were obsessed with SEO. It’s true. You can find me anywhere on the web just because they really had foreshadowing. And I have the very, what is now traditional non-traditional background and that I grew up pretty humble background, and I loved mathematics. I was president of the Mu Alpha Theta, the math honor society. I was in math club and I went to college to become a math teacher because I really believe that math and science are the great equalizers. You could math and science your way out of poverty. I love visiting the island nation of Sokoto.

Arquay Harris: And I had an afterschool job where I was introduced to Illustrator and Photoshop, and I loved math, but I noticed I was most engaged when I was drawing something on Illustrator late at night in my dorm room. And I transferred schools to study media arts and design, and anyone who hears me talk hears me talk about this background. I mention this a lot because I really do think this non-traditional journey that I’ve had really is kind of the core, it gives me this unique perspective. And so I got into coding initially because I didn’t like this process of handing off my designs to someone else, something got lost in translation. And I figured I have this analytical background. How hard could it be? Other people learned. I started with Flash and then I moved on to PHP and Python and all of that.

Arquay Harris: And so I later came out to the Bay Area to go to graduate school and I did more coding there, but also fine art painting 3D. And so I’m this very odd combination in that I am a developer, but I’m also a classically trained designer and I have an MFA. And this has really served me well because I’ve been able to have really informed conversations about topography and color and I also understand what can be built because I’m a developer. And then a lot of things happened, fast forward and now I work at Webflow, and Webflow for me is I feel this perfect mix of art and technology and design. And it’s almost just this job that’s tailor made for me, given my background.

Arquay Harris: And I think that my journey and my kind of non-traditional path has really prepared me for this role of VP of Engineering at Webflow, because their mission is this visual development platform. And it empowers non coders who create these incredible experiences for the web. Because whereas, in the past being able to do this was almost this gatekeeper scenario by these few select people who could code. And so what Webflow does is the democratization of that. Getting people into this world of coding, even if you don’t know how to code.

Arquay Harris: And so as VP of engineering, I oversee all of engineering at Webflow. And my career path has been quite windy. I’ve worked at big companies and small companies, early staged companies, companies that were acquired by other companies, right? And so working in these various environments, I think has given me a very unique perspective. And I’ve been able to learn from each role and develop these skills for decision making, which leads us to what we’re going to be talking about today.

Arquay Harris: I think whenever you give a talk, it’s always really important to start your talk with a quote from a really smart person. I don’t know, this is just a thing that I do and you should try it out. So the quote here is that “The difference between a right decision and a wrong decision is context.” It’s very easy to wish that we had a time machine and to look back with hindsight and just know that you have all the answers, but sometimes you just have to make the best decision with the information that you have at the time.

Arquay Harris: And when you’re beginning something, whether it’s a company or any kind of endeavor, decisions are more like a labyrinth. There’s a one true path. I have a muffin shop, I make muffins, I sell muffins, right? It’s really easy, kind of one foot in front of the other, you know what the decisions are to make. But then as you scale, decision making becomes much more complex, right? You can go left, you can go right. It’s more like a maze in that scenario. And it’s not always clear what the right decision is to make.

Arquay Harris: Studies have shown that more choice, this abundance of choice, doesn’t always help us make better decisions. And in fact, it can make us feel worse about our decisions, even if it was the correct one. So take a scenario of a buffet, you go to a buffet and there’s all these choices. And so you have raised expectations.

Arquay Harris: Everything looks good, this got to be great. And then you started thinking about that opportunity cost, where you’re like, “Well, I could get a Mexican or I could get Chinese. I had Italian yesterday for lunch.” And then you make your choice and you either have regret or anticipated regret where you think, “Arg, I should’ve got what that person got. I don’t think I got the right thing.” And then you have self blame where you just say, you never picked the right one, right?

Arquay Harris: And how this can manifest itself in a real world scenario is let’s say you have to make a build versus buy scenario. You do this evaluation and you look at all the tools, you see what’s out there. And then you’re like, “Arg, darn it. I should have picked build.” And that can lead to this horrible cycle of self-flagellation, which can be unhealthy.

Arquay Harris: And so then how do we know what decision is the right decision? And that very much depends on your perspective. So as an executive or as a senior leader, you have this very unique vantage point where you can see very high level, right? And you might also have information that other people may not have.

Arquay Harris: But then at the same time, you could have someone who is in IC who says, “Look, Arquay, you’re way up here. You don’t have the perspective. You don’t really know what it’s like down here in the trenches. And that on call is really nerve-racking and pretty hard.” And so context is really important.

Arquay Harris: So as we just talked about, I have a fine art background. And in undergrad, I studied this film, Rashomon, which is a brilliant film by a brilliant director, Kurosawa. And it’s a story of a murdered samurai and it’s told from three different perspectives that are all quite different, and so much so that this is now used so much as a cinematic technique, that it’s referred to as a Rashomon effect.

Arquay Harris: And there’s modern examples of this. For example, if you’ve ever seen the television show, the Affair, or if you’ve ever seen the usual suspects where you take something that happened and you shoot it from different perspectives and you get this kind of story that doesn’t really align. And so it’s not really that necessarily that these people are unreliable narrators, it’s that truth really depends on your vantage point.

Arquay Harris: So then what is the truth? Right. Okay, there is no one truth. That’s the answer, especially when it comes to decision-making, because generally what fuels decision-making is priorities and priorities are very much in the eye of the beholder. And so context matters and our own experience is rarely the whole truth. And how this can show up in your rural world is often because we can’t make a decision, or we don’t know the one on true path.

Arquay Harris: We end up being pulled in a bunch of directions and so we end up making small progress on many things, right? Rather than making meaningful progress on fewer things. And as we scale both our business and our organization, the ability to make that meaningful progress becomes more and more important. And so a question is what are some things that prevent us from making good decisions? Right? Because many things are vying for our attention. And as I said, we’re pulled in a bunch of directions.

Arquay Harris: So as the leader of an entire engineering organization, I view my role as sometime acting as an umbrella to really shield my team, my organization, so that they can get things done rather than being this funnel that just lets a bunch of process and distractions come through to the point where people are quite literally asking and screaming for help.

Arquay Harris: And to cope with this, we sometimes develop techniques to adapt. And some of those techniques though, are anti-patterns. So you think to yourself, “Okay, well I have to make a bunch of decisions. What’s the best way to make a decision? Okay, well, I probably need information.” So then you create these boss like structures where people are pushing information up to you constantly rather than creating leaders, empowering people, pushing authority downwards. And then when you do that, you can scale yourself and your decision-making and then also your organization.

Arquay Harris: And now, while you want to empower people to make decisions, there’s also a balance because when we don’t always have of the conviction and where sometimes can be unsure about how to make a decision, you get the dreaded consensus based decision-making, where you have to get everyone’s opinion and no one can agree. And so then because of that, you end up making no decision.

Arquay Harris: So you get this paralyzation of indecision that happens. And like everything, everything has a shadow side, right? So you want to have conviction, but you want to be mindful of the extreme because you get this Ikea effect where you think, well, I made it, so it must be great, or my ideas are the best. And so you don’t want to shut out all external opinions and believing only in your ideas and putting those above everything else. So everything is balanced, right?

Arquay Harris: And so overall, I would say that when making decision it’s important to be open to new perspectives. So there’s a balance between open to new ideas and also a consensus based. Now I will totally fully admit that sometimes like this graphic, I’m a square person. It’s like, but I’m a square, and I have decided that I’m square and I’m a square. But the key to being a good decision maker is that you need to learn to let the expertise of others aid you in your decision making and not have so much conviction that you can become stubborn.

Arquay Harris: And I fully recognize that it is easy to say, well, just have conviction. Like just do what you think is best. But conviction is hard because how do you know if you’re making the right decision? Particularly if that decision affects a lot of people. As leaders, we are making decisions in isolation. Some decision that you make can impact someone’s life or their livelihood or their family, right?

Arquay Harris: So, it’s not always easy to know. And so the question of how do you know if you’re making the right decision? The truth is that you don’t, but there’s some things that you can do to gut check. And one example of this is the front page test. How would you feel if your actions were on the front page? Would you be embarrassed? Would you squirm? Would you feel shame about it? Or would you stand proud and happily defend those decisions?

Arquay Harris: Another thing that you can do when evaluating your ideas is it can be good to think about it in terms of a dialectic, right? So if you have some idea or some process, think about what is the antithesis of this? What is the antithetical reaction that someone could have? So that sometimes can lead you to resolution, or it can prepare you if you need to defend your position and show that you thought it through.

Arquay Harris: So whenever I’m rolling out a new process or doing something like that, I think about, okay, well, what is an objection that someone would have to this? Why would someone not like this? Kind of think about all sides of the argument and sometimes that might lead you to resolution because you’ll think, oh, well, that’s a good point. I should have thought of that. Or at the very least think about ways to stick with your decision, but maybe mitigate it, right?

Arquay Harris: Because in preparation for that opposing reaction. And now despite our best efforts, we do all the right things, we think it through, we sometimes just still get stuck. I have looked at this sideways, every different direction and I really have no idea what to do.

Arquay Harris: And so sometimes rubber ducking can help and rubber ducking is a common thing. So for engineers, imagine if you are really stuck on this problem and you don’t know what to do. And so you go to another engineer and you talk through your problem and by virtue of you talking it through, you come up with the solution.

Arquay Harris: And so the idea behind rubber ducking is it doesn’t need to be another engineer. It could literally be anything, it could be a rubber duck, right? And so just that thought process of saying it out loud, it’s just like Eureka, I know what to do. And I have certainly been the benefit of getting on stuck by rubber ducking.

Arquay Harris: And I want to say that this is not easy because to adapt your approach to decision-making requires a pretty significant change in mindset and change can be overwhelming because you think, where do you start? Am I doing it right? Am I in the right direct? Am I just making a mess of everything? But just like mole hills, small changes over time can lead to very big impact. And so I think that decision making is hard, but it’s much easier once you actually start.

Arquay Harris: And so some key takeaways are, you want to focus on the challenge because the first step is just acknowledging the difficulty, that’s half of it. Because if you think about in your life, people who you really admire, or people who have to make these really hard decisions, these people aren’t born with all the answers, right? Like it’s not just they descended onto planet earth and they just had it all inside their brain. No, that’s not usually how it works. It usually takes practice and repetition.

Arquay Harris: And so just acknowledging that it is hard, I think is really important to just kind of ease up on yourself and recognize that this really is hard work. And then secondly, focus on the evolution, right? You won’t always make the right decisions and that’s okay. You’ll be able to adapt. And you’ll iterate. Perfection should definitely not be the goal. It’s more about learning and evolving because if you could get it right on the first try then decision-making wouldn’t be so hard.

Arquay Harris: And then lastly, you should focus on the journey because it’s a marathon, it’s not a sprint and wisdom doesn’t happen overnight. And as you grow as a leader and you face new challenges, you’ll learn and you’ll grow and decision-making become easier and easier. So thank you so much for your time, it was really great to be here today. And I hope that you have some really great questions for me. Otherwise, I’m just going to keep talking about how much I love Girl Geek. So I hope you have questions. Aw, thanks. I’m reading the chat. Everyone is so kind. Thank you. I’ll sit here. I’ll smile.

Arquay Harris: Thank you. Oh, that’s so nice. I don’t know, I should be reading these out loud. It’s very sweet. So I’ll do a little self motivation here and I got a couple questions in chat. And Angie definitely correct me if I’m wrong, if I’m supposed to wait for the moderator, please, someone hop on, but otherwise I’m just going to go through these.

Arquay Harris: The first one is what would you say were the two most difficult things you encountered as you climbed to your current position? Ooh, that’s an interesting thing, right? Because first, I want to just dig into the climbed to your current position thing, because I used to talk a lot about self-advocacy and about how to advocate for yourself and how to advocate for others. And I always talked about thinking about your highest aspiration.

Arquay Harris: And I would say that when I was a little baby developer, I don’t know that my highest aspiration was to be a VP of Engineering. Actually, I would say that it was not because VPs manage directors who manage managers who manage ICs. And the thing that I really loved about management was kind of that one to one connection. Right? And so given that, I think that, that maybe possibly is inherently what I would say was the most difficult thing, which is, I think when I give the talk about self-advocacy, I talk about thinking about your highest aspiration and making sure that you reevaluate it.

Arquay Harris: Because for me, one of the reasons why I never really aspired to be a VP of engineering is because the prototype in my mind is like Andy Grove, right? He’s in khaki pants and he’s wearing a blue shirt and he’s an older white gentleman. And it’s just not something that I really saw for myself.

Arquay Harris: And so I think part of that is just challenging that mindset and thinking like, “You know what? This can be whatever I want it to be. I can define what this looks like.” And I mean, yeah, there’s just the normal things, like big issue of low expectation being a woman, being the only or being the first, those things are also very hard.

Arquay Harris: And so the thing that does give me hope is that I really do feel like things are changing. I hope that answers your question. It kind of got existential, but I think that’s basically just said a thank you so much for asking.

Arquay Harris: The next question is… Oh, okay. This is kind of similar. Thank you so much for sharing such a practical way to handle decision-making. What has been your biggest hurdle to overcome in this area? Oh yeah. I mean, I would definitely say two things.

Arquay Harris: The first is making sure that you have information at the right granularity level, right? Amazon has this concept of kind of like one way doors, which is… And I employed this a little bit with my team a one way door is a thing that effectively you can’t walk back and a two-way door is a decision that you can make, but it’s pretty easy to roll it back.

Arquay Harris: An example of a one way door would be like, may I use $3 million to build a new job queue or something like that, right? Like something where there’s some sort of big implication either financially or internet or time wise or something like that. And so I think it can be hard to know what those one way doors are because sometimes a thing that seems insignificant and small could actually have a years long implication on your team and on the company.

Arquay Harris: And so kind of really getting enough information at the right granularity level that you can make those kinds of decisions. And I think that’s probably just like a pretty hard hurdle to overcome. And then also just the not knowing if you’re making the right decision too, because you never really know until you have the benefit of hindsight and then you can look back and it was either… It’s that context thing, it was either right or wrong. Yeah.

Arquay Harris: So next question. You said decisions are made in isolation. How do you keep yourself accountable and also protect your mental health? I think I’m going to tease apart and I think I know of what you mean by that. Did I say something around how they’re intrinsic, like how they’re… I’m not sure, but I would just answer it and say the way that you can protect your mental health is this whole being easy on yourself.

Arquay Harris: I think a lot of times, particularly when people get to really senior positions, they put this pressure on themselves, like, “Everyone is counting on me and if I make a mistake what’s going to happen?” And I think as a woman and as a black woman especially, there’s this very famous XKCD comic that I quote a lot where the first page is someone is teaching a guy math and it’s like, “Oh, Bob, doesn’t get math.” And then the next page he’s teaching a woman and it’s like, “Women don’t understand math,” right?

Arquay Harris: There is just like every single thing that you do has this added pressure because you are representing an entire race or an entire gender or an entire culture or whatever it is. And so I think that the way to kind of protect yourself is to just acknowledge that you’re not going to get this perfect every single time and that’s okay. That’s part of learning and growing. And I wish that I could say that is the thing that I always knew. Definitely not. It is the thing that I developed over time and the longer that I do it, I think the easier that it gets.

Arquay Harris: Ooh, this is a good one. What is the most difficult decision you ever made? Coming in hot, I love that. That one I would say any time that you’ve had to terminate someone or put someone on a performance plan or something like that, those are always the hardest decisions because you know that that decision that you’re making, just the ripple effects, you’re affecting again that person’s family, their potentially their ability to support their family. You could even be potentially affecting that person’s ability to get another job, right? Based on their performance at this role.

Arquay Harris: And so early in my career, this was a thing that I had to sort of develop some kind of framework around. And whenever I’ve had to do that, I asked myself these three questions. And then this is my kind of way finding, the first question that I asked myself is, am I being transparent? Meaning if I have to let someone go or performance manage them, will it come as a surprise?

Arquay Harris: Will they just be like, “Oh, I never saw this coming.” No, hopefully that is not the case because I’m communicating with them. The second thing is, am I supporting this person? [inaudible] and then I always say is if you need help, I will extend a hand, but I’m not going to carry you, right? Now, and what that means is I will support you. I will give you feedback. I will try to make it so that you can get better and improve. And then all those things considered. If it doesn’t work out the last and most important question that I ask myself…Those things considered if it doesn’t work out.

Arquay Harris: The last and most important question that I ask myself is that I act with integrity meaning was I secretly whispering behind this person’s back? Did I put them on a pit, but really I just want to fire them? And so, having this North Star really helps me with difficult decisions. And I have developed these frameworks about decisions like that that I have to make in my life. But as a leader, that would never get easier no matter how long, for me anyway, how long you’ve been doing it.

Arquay Harris: Do you have advice for other female leaders of tech teams? I mean, sure. Yeah, I think I would say develop a support system because I don’t really feel that I have that coming up because it was so isolating because I was generally either the only woman … I mean, there’s many teams that I worked on where out of dozens and dozens of people, I was the only woman. And certainly, I’ve worked on teams where out of dozens or maybe 100 people, I was the only black person and it is very hard.

Arquay Harris: And so, when you don’t have that community, you can start to second guess yourself and make decisions … decisions become hard. And I’ll give one anecdote that I’ve shared a few times which is I once had a conversation with a white male, [inaudible 00:36:36] white male. And I asked him, I said, “Imagine if every single day you had to go to work and every single person that you worked with was a woman. And now imagine every single one of those women was black.” And that is the reality for so many of us in tech where we are just so marginalized.

Arquay Harris: And one of two things would happen. You would either try to assimilate as much as you can, you would try to get yourself a head wrap or maybe you’d get some braids or something while you were trying to fit in as best you can or you would completely second guess yourself and not have any semblance of self. You wouldn’t get their references. You would have no idea who Issa or Molly were. You would just be confused all the time.

Arquay Harris: And so, for other female leaders, that is quite the reality particularly at the senior levels. I mean, we can cite many, many companies where the only person in their executive leadership or the only person on their board or whatever is just one woman.

Arquay Harris:This isn’t what you asked but this is one of the reasons why I joined Webflow, why it was so attractive to me as a company is that my partner who’s the VP of Product, JZ, who is the best person ever. Still I’ve really tried, I cannot think in recent memory of another company where the VP of Prod and the VP of … Oh, my time? Well, it was a great anecdote but JZ is amazing. That was the TLDR. But I think that was my last question. It’s been great. So, thank you so much.

Angie Chang: Thank you, Arquay. I really love your engagement with the audience. Sorry to leave you hanging, I was typing away. I was like, “Oh no, I have to find her window,” so sorry. Thank you so much for taking all the questions. I love your quote and your talk and thank you so much. Everyone, this is going to be on YouTube later. So, if you missed it today, since I know we’re all busy people, this will be on YouTube. Don’t worry about it. You’re registered. You’ll get it in your email. So, thank you, Arquay so much…

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

Girl Geek X Elevate 2022 conference addressed #BreakTheBias 🙅🏻‍♀️

Our 5th annual Girl Geek X: ELEVATE Conference on March 8, 2022 in celebration of International Women’s Day hosted over 3,600 around the world. By the numbers, Elevate hosted 45 speakers across 23 sessions, supported by 14 sponsors (they are actively hiring, check out their jobs!)

Events such as these, along with Girl Geek Dinners, are important ways to elevate women as experts in their profession, and to provide a safe space to speak candidly about career development and mental health. Here are the Top 10 Tech Talks from ELEVATE 2022. Our inspiring speakers shared nuggets of wisdom, encouraging perseverence, learning from failure, and lifting as we climb.

Watch the Elevate 2022 Conference session videos on YouTube!

Our speakers addressed the IWD theme “Break the Bias”

#1 – Camille Tate, Head of Talent at Strava, breaks the bias of traditional tech hiring, challenging recruiting to step outside normal comfort zones and personal referral networks. Elyse Gordon, Senior Director of Engineering at Strava, agreed that “as a team, we had to unlearn hiring fast and being okay with slow, more intentional hiring” to build a diverse team.

“Building a diverse team is everybody’s job, specifically, not even recruiter’s jobs – it’s the whole company’s job. It’s important that the whole team leads to build diverse teams – every single person at Strava.”

Camille Tate, Head of Talent at Strava

📺🍿✨ Watch the Strava talk on hiring diverse teams to hear from Camille and Elyse articulate the 3 E’s for successful recruiting, share how antiracism is a company value (incorporated in how they hire, interview, and recruit) and more. Strava is hiring – check out their open jobs!

#2 – Engineering leader Tracy Stampfli, Principal Engineer at Slack, breaks the bias that management is leadership, instead talking about the ways how individual contributors (ICs) can lead and influence projects. Mina Markham, Staff Software Engineer at Slack, agrees that “you can be a great leader and not manage people. I like coding, I want to do architecting and strategizing. I was able to shift into IC leadership to be more of a mentor, rather than managing people, it’s great.”

“At Slack, ICs can be leaders and you can have influence, and not all companies are like that. You have to find the right place, the right company fit for you to have that impact. You have to be willing to step forward and have ownership of things and have opinions.”

Tracy Stampfli, Principal Engineer at Slack

📺🍿✨ Watch the Slack panel discussing transitioning from IC to manager, and how to lead if management is not for you to hear from Rukmini Reddy, SVP of Engineering, Leena Mansour, Engineering Manager, Tracy Stampfli, Principal Engineer, Mina Markham, Staff Engineer, and Brook Shelley, Engineering Manager (moderating). Slack is hiring – check out their open jobs!

#3 – Raji Subramanian, VP of Engineering at Opendoor, challenges women to break the bias and be recognized as technical leaders and technologists, not just leaders. She talks about the need to break preconceived notions, and building relationships to understand what you need to get to the next level.

“Lead from the front. Hold the mic. Be the representative who gives the voice to the project you led. Visible results versus invisible results.”

Raji Subramanian, VP of Engineering at Opendoor

📺🍿✨ Watch the Opendoor session to hear from Raji Subramanian, VP of Engineering at Opendoor and Heather Natour, Head of Engineering, Seller and Consumer Growth at Opendoor (moderating). Opendoor is hiring – check out their open jobs!

#4 – Tiffany To, VP of Product at Atlassian, calls out the bias or false belief that women are not ambitious. She seeks more awareness on mindsets around failure, and redefining failure in your unique career path. Kristen Warm, Senior L&D Manager at Atlassian, broaches imagining a career buffet in lieu of a path.

“Do women want leadership roles? Yes. There’s no ambition gap. Women in tech want a seat at every table all the way to the top.”

Tiffany To, VP of Product at Atlassian

📺🍿✨ Watch the Atlassian session to hear from Tiffany To, VP of Product at Atlassian. Atlassian is hiring – join their talent community to check out their open jobs!

#5 – The first female Federal CIO Clare Martorana smashes stereotypes in tech – challenging us to rethink who works in tech, where they live, and normalizes imposter syndrome for applying to jobs.

We want people from different places, it can’t just be New York, DC, Atlanta, Chicago… We need people that come from all different walks of life because we all bring such different perspectives. It’s really important for me to have that understanding and perspective when we are thinking about developing products and services. The people we want to join us on this journey are all of you.”

Clare Martorana, the first female Federal CIO, in conversation with Mina Hsiang, the first female and first Asian-American Administrator at the United States Digital Service (USDS)

📺🍿✨ Watch the USDS session to hear from Clare Martorana, Federal CIO, and Mina Hsiang, Administrator at USDS. USDS is hiring – check out USDS.GOV/APPLY!

#6 – Ashu Ravichander, a Principal Product Manager at Workday, discloses her professional ambitions in tech, reveals a mental health condition (bipolar disorder), and shares her five tried-and-true tools for maintaining her mental health to bring her best to work every day.

“I wish 23-year-old me could have heard more people talking about mental health in a tech or professional setting, so that it felt more normalized.”

Ashu Ravichander, Principal Product Manager at Workday

📺🍿✨ Watch the mental health session to hear from Ashu Ravichander, Principal Product Manager at Workday about her best practices for managing a mental health condition. Anyone who experiences stress can benefit from her mindful grounding techniques.

#7 – Veteran Saas Executive Leyla Seka, COO at Ironclad, talks about breaking the bias when it comes to who gets venture capital startup funding. After managing acquisitions at Salesforce (where she was most recently EVP after a decade climbing the ladder), Leyla united Salesforce Ventures with UC Berkeley to help launch Black Venture Institute, creating a pipeline of diverse investors to fund diverse startup teams.

📺🍿✨ Watch the Ironclad keynote session to hear from Leyla Seka, COO, and Jiahan Ericsson, Senior Director of Engineering (moderating). Ironclad is hiring – check out their open jobs!

#8 – Community organizer Jen-Mei Wu balances healthy skepticism with her excitement for the web3 opportunity to address financial inequity – sharing different ways to make a difference with a small and mighty entrepreneurial team (e.g. decentralized finance helping fund non-profits, dealing with carbon).

“Crypto is a way of moving toward funding without compromise, or at least, fewer compromises. If we can fund our projects without compromises, then we can work toward self-determination. I hope you go and build stuff.”

Jen-Mei Wu, Community Organizer

📺🍿✨ Watch the economic justice and cryptocurrencies / web3 session to hear from community organizer Jen-Mei Wu.

#9 – Michelle Yi, Senior Director of Applied AI at RelationalAI, rejects the stereotype or bias that an advanced STEM degree begets working in the tech industry. She demoes a knowledge graph of women in tech to show “that it doesn’t matter what [educational] background you have, but there is a place for you in tech,” highlighting backgrounds in English, psychology, art, and more.

“The thing is, when you are one of these weakly connected components, you might sometimes feel like you are the only one, But that’s not true, there are so many of us that are out here.”

Michelle Yi, Senior Director of Applied AI at RelationalAI

📺🍿✨ Watch the RelationalAI knowledge graph session to hear Michelle Yi, Senior Director of Applied AI at RelationalAI, on knowledge graphs as the future of data.

#10 – Deafblind accessibility educator Erin Perkins urges employers and organizations to break the ableism bias, accepting responsibility to prioritize and make the situation better for everyone. She notes that transportation and flexibility may be difficult for people with disabilities (“the original hackers”), leading them to have a higher chance of being entrepreneurs / self-employed.

“Remember: Progress, not perfection.”

Erin Perkins, Accessibility Educator

📺🍿✨ Replay the accessibility session, where educator Erin Perkins shares why inclusive design in important for all of us. Captions are enabled.

Special Thank You To ELEVATE 2022 Sponsoring Companies

Thank you to the great folks at Atlassian, Slack, Strava, Autodesk, Front, Intel, Ironclad, MosaicML, Opendoor, RelationalAI, Splunk, United States Digital Service, Fisher Investments, Meta – all of these organizations are actively hiring! You can find their job links below.

Special Thank You To:

Take a look at these job opportunities from our sponsors and government participants!

Atlassian is a leading provider of collaboration, development, and issue tracking software for teams. With over 100,000 global customers (including 85 of the Fortune 100), we’re advancing the power of collaboration with products including Jira, Jira Service Desk, Jira Ops, Confluence, Bitbucket, and Trello.

Join the Atlassian talent community!

Slack has transformed business communication. It’s the leading channel-based messaging platform, used by millions to align their teams, unify their systems, and drive their businesses forward. Slack is where work happens.

SLACK IS HIRING!

Check out open jobs at Slack!

Strava is Swedish for “strive,” which epitomizes our attitude and ambition: We’re a passionate and committed team, unified by a mission to build the most engaged community of athletes in the world. With billions of activity uploads globally, we have a humbling and audacious vision: to be the record of the world’s athletic activities and the technology that makes every effort count.

STRAVA IS HIRING!

Check out open jobs at Strava!

Autodesk is changing how the world is designed and made. Our technology spans countless industries, empowering innovators everywhere to solve challenges big and small. From greener buildings to smarter products to more mesmerizing blockbusters, Autodesk software helps our customers to design and make a better world for all.

AUTODESK IS HIRING!

Check out open jobs at Autodesk!

Front is your hub for all things customer communication. Behind every amazing business is, well, people: a team and customers. And no matter what industry you’re in or where you’re located, it’s those human-to-human interactions that make your experience with a business truly stand out.

FRONT IS HIRING!

Check out open jobs at Front!

Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) is an industry leader, creating world-changing technology that enables global progress and enriches lives. Inspired by Moore’s Law, we continuously work to advance the design and manufacturing of semiconductors to help address our customers’ greatest challenges.

Check out open jobs at Intel!

Ironclad is the #1 contract lifecycle management platform for innovative companies. It’s the only platform flexible enough to handle every type of contract workflow, whether a sales agreement, an HR agreement or a complex NDA.

IRONCLAD IS HIRING!

Check out open jobs at Ironclad!

MosaicML is a deep learning startup with a mission to make machine learning training more efficient for everyone through fundamental innovations in algorithms, systems, and platforms. We believe that large scale training should be available beyond the well-resourced companies, and bridging the gap between research and industry is core to our success.

MOSAICML IS HIRING!

Check out open jobs at MosaicML!

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

OPENDOOR IS HIRING!

Check out open jobs at Opendoor!

At RelationalAI, we offer a cloud-based Relational Knowledge Graph Management System (RKGMS). We believe relational knowledge graphs are the ideal foundation for data-centric systems – systems that learn, reason, and predict over richly interconnected data.

RELATIONALAI IS HIRING!

Check out open jobs at RelationalAI!

Splunk Inc. turns data into doing with the Data-to-Everything Platform. Our powerful platform and unique approach to data have empowered companies to improve service levels, reduce operations costs, mitigate risk, enhance DevOps collaboration and create new product and service offerings.

SPLUNK IS HIRING!

Check out open jobs at Splunk!

The United States Digital Service is a startup at The White House, using design and technology to deliver better services to the American people. We partner leading technologists with dedicated public servants to improve the usability and reliability of our government’s most important digital services. When you work at the U.S. Digital Service, you change the lives of millions of Americans.

Check out open jobs at US Digital Service!

Fisher Investments is a different kind of investment firm. We don’t come from Wall Street, nor do we believe we fit in with most of the finance industry, and we’re proud of that. We work for a bigger purpose: bettering the investment universe. As of 12/31/21, Fisher Investments and its affiliates have offices in 8 countries and manage over $208 billion in assets for more than 100,000 clients.

FISHER INVESTMENTS IS HIRING!

Check out open jobs at Fisher Investments!

Meta builds technologies that help people connect, find communities, and grow businesses. When Facebook launched in 2004, it changed the way people connect. Apps like Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp further empowered billions around the world. Now, Meta is moving beyond 2D screens toward immersive experiences like augmented and virtual reality.

META IS HIRING!

Check out open jobs at Meta!