“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)
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: 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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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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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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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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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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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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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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!
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.
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.”
#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.”
#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.”
#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&DManager at Atlassian, broaches imagining a careerbuffet 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.”
#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)
#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.
#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.”
#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
#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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“Girl Geek X Intro” by Angie Chang and Sukrutha Bhadouria, Girl Geek X co-founders.
Angie Chang: Awesome. I think we’re live now with the Discord Girl Geek Dinner. Hi. Hello from the San Francisco Bay Area. My name is Angie Chang and I’m the founder Girl Geek X. Sukrutha! Say hi and introduce yourself.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hi. Yeah. Hi Angie. It’s like jumping numbers, but yeah, I’m Sukrutha and I’m Angie’s partner and supporter and big time cheerleader. Together, we want to bring to you a community for you to be comfortable to be a part of and not try to seek help from. With that, we also have companies that sponsor each event and so if you’d like to partner with us and be a sponsor, reach out to us to see how you can get your company to have access to this amazing community that you are a part of.
Angie Chang: Cool. I’m going to do a quick check in with everyone. Where is everyone logging in from? There’s a chat feature if you can say hello and where you’re coming in from. I feel…
Sukrutha Bhadouria: People are saying that there’s no audio from us, but they’re also answering the question about where they’re from. So…
Angie Chang: Awesome. It’s good to see people coming in from all over. The pandemic has brought us together virtually. We’ve been doing these Girl Geek Dinners since 2008. They started out in places like Google and Facebook when those were smaller companies and over the years we’ve continued to go to all these different companies. And now in the pandemic, we’re virtually getting together and hearing from women at these tech companies and startups and hearing from them and being inspired continually, and always learning about what’s the latest, what people are working on and what are the challenges that they face and what they’ve overcome and getting really inspired by them.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Angie someone’s dialed in from Kenya.
Angie Chang: Oh my God and Jamaica.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: How cool is that?
Angie Chang: Cool.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Jamaica too, that’s amazing.
Angie Chang: So who here has been to a Girl Geek Dinner before? I’m just curious. And what do you remember or like from it? I think for me personally, I always like to tell people why they come to Girl Geek Dinners, you got to learn about what are the job titles, because they change all the time. They’ve changed in tech and they change in business and the word operation comes up a lot more like product operations, product marketing.
Angie Chang: I think we learned so much by just going to Girl Geek Dinners over the years and seeing the women come on stage and seeing their job titles and hearing them talk about what they’re working on and how they do it. And then people pick it up at other companies and startups and other cities around the world.
Angie Chang: So to me, it’s really fascinating to continue to see what women are doing in tech and other fast moving industries. And I’m really excited tonight to hear from the women at Discord. I think now is a time that we have to turn the mic over to our Discord host, Jire, and she is…
Sukrutha Bhadouria: She is awesome.
Angie Chang: Yes.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: So many different words to describe Jire, I’m going to grab the mic from you and go ahead and do that because I’m excited to introduce Jire. Jire is passionate about leveraging technology to increase social impact. She has served an elected office, worked on education access in the Middle East and redevelop curriculum to impact the way children learn about the internet. That is so cool.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: An alum of the Brookings Institute, Twitter, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and Airbnb, Jire is currently working on inclusion, diversity and purpose at Discord. She holds a degree in international studies and economic development from Boston College. Welcome, Jire. You’re so cool.
Jire Bademosi: Thank you so much for that wonderful introduction. It’s so great to be here with you and with Angie and the rest of the community. It’s so, so, so inspiring. My connection actually to Angie goes so many years ago and I used to be a member of her email for Women 2.0, back in the early, I guess that was Web 2.0 days, but it’s so exciting to be here with you all and also hosted a Girl Geek dinner past when I was at Twitter. And it’s so great to be able to facilitate this online.
Jire Bademosi: As you all heard I’m Jire, I go by she/her pronouns and it’s so again, inspiring to see so many folks in the chat, sharing a little bit about where they’re coming from. I see there’s folks all the way from the Philippines to Kenya, to folks in Orange County, to Louisiana. Again, just so beautiful to see such a wonderful group and community come together for something so important such as this. So I’m excited to meet with you all, and hopefully we can kick things off. First off, let me start sharing my screen. So bear with me.
Jire Bademosi: All right. Let’s get started. What are you all in for today? One we’re going to welcome you all which we’re doing now, we’ll tap into Q&A where you’ll get to meet some of my wonderful colleagues and first, starting off with Beena Agarwal. One of our directors in engineering at Discord. Then we’ll move into lightning talks where we hope to impart some of both our knowledge that we’ve gained as women in technology, but then also reflections.
Jire Bademosi: And last but not least, we’ll turn it over to some other leaders at the company who are paving the way across our product, community, as well as engineering teams. Then I’ll pass it over to my other colleague, Lauren, who helps to oversee a lot of our technical recruiting work. And then we’ll also have some time for networking afterwards.
Jire Bademosi: Again, hi everyone. I’m Jire, I’m the senior manager of inclusion, diversity and purpose at Discord. And what in the world does that mean to you? Essentially our work fosters and activates a culture of inclusion and belonging in the workforce, workplace and marketplace.
Jire Bademosi: I’ve been at Discord for just over six months now. In my off time, I love all things art, culture, architecture, vintage treasures, hiking, and the occasional versus battle so hopefully I have some friends in the audience that I can connect with on some of these things that I’ve hold near and dear.
Jire Bademosi: But truly, I just love people and hearing their stories and I think that’s kind of the through line between all of my favorites and things to do. But you haven’t just come here to meet me, right? You all came to learn more about Discord so we can tap into that. So a little bit about Discord. Discord’s story begins back in 2015 when our founders really came together and we’re trying to think about how to create a place and a space to find belonging in their lives.
Jire Bademosi: And the hope with Discord is that it creates that place for you to be able to connect not only with those that you know, but also things that you care about and to be able to have genuine relationships based on the things that you care about with your friends and those communities that you hold dear, and truly be across the globe.
Jire Bademosi: I think it’s a testament to that to be able to see people truly from all over both the United States and even outside of the United States and in various continents all coming together, because we care about, Girl Geek X, and similarly, Discord wants to do that for you in the communities and places where you hold dear.
Jire Bademosi: And that’s really what I think makes Discord a really special place to work. So more about the metrics, we have about 150 million monthly active users, which really goes into the monthly folks who are coming across the globe and coming together with their friends, as well as communities.
Jire Bademosi: We have various servers, which really are those hubs of community and over 19 million, and I repeat 19 million are active every week. And there are over 4 billion server conversation minutes every single day. So just under, I don’t know, the population of the world, I guess, or so.
Jire Bademosi: Across this board, what actually powers this place are ton of wonderful, amazing humans and I want to break it down a little bit for you. We have administrative folks who really are that backbone helping to make sure that all of the folks are able to do their best work by providing that administrative lens.
Jire Bademosi: We have folks on the assist development who are making those connections with brands like you have, StockX if you’re trying to get the latest Yeezys, or if you’re trying to see what Gucci’s up to in their new time ball, all that’s happening on Discord.
Jire Bademosi: We have a customer experience team who’s paving the way by really with each and every single one of our users as much as they can. If you ever tweet them on Twitter, they’re pretty active there as well.
Jire Bademosi: We have a data science team, you will get to meet Nancy just later on. We’ll talk a little bit about some of the work that she’s leading. We have a wonderful design team that’s helping to bring to life all things [inaudible], which you’ll hear a little bit probably about later today. We have a wonderful engineering team who helps to build Discord.
Jire Bademosi: Finance is important, that they help keep the lights on and that they pay for all the wonderful things. I might be biased, but I think the people talent and five team is pretty darn cool and that’s our team that I happen to be on, which really works to, one, think of about employee experience end to end from the time that you’re considering working at Discord to the time where you maybe at the company itself.
Jire Bademosi: As well as our product team, getting in the weeds on all the PM stuff. And then legal, which keeps us honest and helps us make sure that we stay not in trouble. And then our marketing team really getting the word out.
Jire Bademosi: And last but not least is trust and safety, which really helps us try and build the right policies and processes to make sure that Discord can be a place for people to belong. So that’s a little bit about what’s behind the curtain as far as the teams that make our company a company.
Jire Bademosi: But I think what also is pretty awesome about Discord is that we have a total wellness program that really takes in to the fact that we’re not just one thing we’re not just a singular person, we’re a whole person. And that includes our physical wellness. That includes our mental wellness. And that includes our financial wellness, whether or that’s through services, such as Headspace to meditate, whether that’s modern health to provide, counseling sessions, coaching sessions. Whether that’s our gender affirmation fund to support our colleagues. Whether that’s carrot to support our colleagues in fertility journeys, or even thinking about financial wellness, especially when we think about inclusion for communities that may not have been provided these resources in the past.
Jire Bademosi: And so really thinking about it through three major lenses and even within each of those buckets, we have a number of traditional perks as well, whether it’s our desk fund or support for employees to be able to get their exercise on or what have you but all of that exists and more within Discord. That just a little bit, give you a little taste a little bit of behind the scenes of Discord thus far.
Jire Bademosi: And then I got to talk a little bit about inclusion, diversity and purpose. One, because I am passionate about it, but two, I think that’s what’s a special sauce about Discord and our team and what it really stands for. And within each of these buckets, we really try to dedicate intentional time, effort to bringing this alive.
Jire Bademosi: And so number one, within our workforce, we really want to build programs and pathways to attract higher and develop diverse talent. And really the why behind it is Discord again, is about belonging and to actually be able to do that, we have to start within and we have to be intentional about it and we have to communicate it and really build those programs to make sure that that’s successful. Then from our workplace, what about folks who are here and that’s where the internal inclusive culture development comes from.
Jire Bademosi: And so that’s everything from employee resource groups to our employee engagement team, to even employee giving and volunteering opportunities that we have for employees. And then last but not least is the marketplace and I think what’s so exciting about Discord is the reality that it really is a consumer facing product. And people, I’m sure, and I’m actually curious, I might even ask you all, how many folks in the chat, if you’ve ever used Discord before, if you’re using Discord, I’m sure I would see quite a few folks jump in and it’s important for us to have that inclusion diversity and purpose lens, as we’re thinking about the company. A
Jire Bademosi: And that’s where that marketplace work comes into contact with us. And so that’s just a little bit about Discord, but I will pass the mic. I think you all be seeing a lot of me today. So bear with me as we go along for this journey, but I want to welcome up my colleague Beena Agarwal, who is director of engineering at Discord. I’m going to stop screen share so y’all can actually meet and see Beena. All right, welcome. Hi Beena. How are you?
Jire Bademosi: Good. It’s nice to see you. Long time to see.
Jire Bademosi: Amazing, amazing. Well, I have to tell the rest of the crew here, since we have all these friends joining from truly all over and who use Discord daily like Nicole says, Nicole uses Discord every day. I see people saying really stanning Discord and so I think getting to talk to you is pretty exciting in the sense that you are in charge of really seeing how to drive Discord from a multimillion dollar business to a multibillion dollar business.
Beena Agarwal, Discord Director of Engineering, in conversation with Jire Bademosi, Discord, Senior Manager, Inclusion, Diversity, Purpose
Beena Agarwal: Hi, Jire, I’m good. How are you?
Beena Agarwal: Nice to see you too. I’m excited to be here.
Jire Bademosi: And I think it’s so exciting to see you in that position and I want to first start things off with folks who get to know you and learn a little bit more about who Beena is. So I’ll turn the mic over to you and share a little bit more about who you are and what brings you to Discord.
Beena Agarwal: Yeah, absolutely. I can start with my background and start from the beginning and then feel free to go into ask me for any details and I’m happy to go to that. I started out my career as a software engineer. A long time ago, I was at Symantec working on network intrusion detection systems. And after doing that for a while, I wanted something that was still just as challenging and more fun so I actively sought out the gaming industry and was at Electronic Arts as a software engineer.
Beena Agarwal: And then that’s where I got into management and I ended up leading a mobile studio engineering for a mobile studio at EA. And as part of EAs pivot to mobile strategy, I was working on casino games, which made a lot of sense, because they make a lot of money. And after about four years of doing casino games, I had to take a step back and think about what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. And I wanted to do something a little more mission oriented.
Beena Agarwal: I ended up starting my own education technology company. And I did that for a few years and then I was very curious about the intersection of technology and healthcare. I actively pursued some health tech companies and actually around the same times, I started conversations with Discord and I was completely blown away with everyone that I talked to here. It was clear that there was a very much a people first mentality in leadership style. And that really resonated with me.
Beena Agarwal: However, at that time I had actively gotten out of the gaming industry and also I was just one year into my health tech journey. So I decided to pursue health tech and give it a full shot. And then a couple years later, Discord had grown a lot. My manager reached out to me and a couple things that happened in that time, in those two years during COVID, Discord had actively expanded out of the gaming industry and this renewed mission of creating space and a sense of belonging for everyone really resonated with me.
Beena Agarwal: I pursued those conversations again and decided last year that it was a good time to join Discord. And so I’ve been with Discord for a year and so that’s what brought me to Discord. Outside of work, I am a new mom. I have an 18 month old so I spent a lot of time being a slave to a toddler. So any moms out there, if you have any tips, I would love to hear them. And I like exploring the outdoors.
Jire Bademosi: Amazing, amazing, and lots of congratulations as well in the chat, both for your career and as well as your little one. And I think you shared a lot about your career journey, both into entrepreneurship and also something that I think is something that we can all relate to, which is sometimes maybe it’s not the right time or, and then you find the right time and you still stay close and I think it’s so powerful to really think through that.
Jire Bademosi: And now that you’re a year into your time at Discord, what does your role really entail? I try to give a little bit of a tidbit, but I didn’t want to tell a full bit about your work, but can you tell us more about what you do at Discord?
Beena Agarwal: Yeah, absolutely. So here at Discord, I lead engineering for the premium products organization and that is really building revenue generating products for Discord. So what that truly means is overall Discord’s mission is to create belonging for everyone. And we, our teams exist to fund that mission by creating a sustainable business model for decades to come. We do that by scaling our premium products and ensuring that they truly align with the user’s interests. This includes the teams that work on a Nitro subscription products, a boosting subscription products, and the underlying platform that ensure that our products are robust and scalable.
Beena Agarwal: And my role in particular has evolved a bit for the past year. Truly, we just started focusing on scaling our business models early last year. So it was working with a lot of our counterparts to up with a strategy and clearly applying the goals for the organization and then making sure that we have the tools, the systems and the processes in place, and that we are building teams and setting them up for success to meet our goals.
Beena Agarwal: Since then, we have scaled the engineering organization here within premium products from 10 engineers, when I first started to about 36 engineers now and we have some audacious goals in front of us, so we are definitely adding more and scaling the organization to about 50 by the end of the year.
Beena Agarwal: And then it’s a large part of the role is also cross-functional, so as a core revenue organizations, besides with the product teams and the design teams and the analytics teams, it’s literally working with almost every team in the organization to make sure that we are working on the right things on the most impactful things.
Beena Agarwal: This include finance for all our revenue recognition, it includes partnering with business development to make sure that we are going after the right deals, it literally includes working with any team that is building features for Discord to make sure that we are also thinking about how we going to monetize things and making sure that everything aligns with the users’ interests ultimately.
Jire Bademosi: Right. And I think you say something really important and I think as a unique delineation for where Discord is, and it’s in that at the end, ultimately also about the user, which I think is such a unique lens to how Discord has conversations about monetization that I think is different than many platforms. I don’t know if you want to expand a little bit more on that philosophy.
Beena Agarwal: Yeah, absolutely. And we are continuously rethinking that and evolving that, but at the core of it, it is figuring out what truly engages our users, where our users’ interests are, and because ultimately it’s engagement that leads to conversion and we truly believe that. A
Beena Agarwal: And we are a very data driven organization and by data driven, I mean both from a qualitative perspective and a quantitative perspective. We are constantly doing user studies, looking at the vast amount of data that we have to really figure out where users are spending their time and what is it that they truly value in our products so that we can build upon that.
Jire Bademosi: I love that approach. And again, obviously I’m a little biased, but I think having that qualitative data that really dives into something that you can’t get in a numerical quantitative really allows for that balance to occur to hopefully help us learn more about our communities as well as the folks who come to Discord every single day. But I’m curious, what gets you excited in the morning? What makes you excited about Discord? What makes you excited about your role?
Beena Agarwal: Yeah, absolutely. I am definitely very mission oriented and that’s one of the reasons that I joined Discord. Helping Discord achieve that mission of creating belonging is truly what excites me. And within premium products, that really means how does our organization connect to that mission.
Beena Agarwal: We remind ourselves of that constantly, that we exist here to fund that mission of creating belonging for our users. Working on that is definitely very important and exciting. And then what that tactically means is we have some audacious goals in front of us. We are at 115 million monthly active use like you said, we are multimillion dollar business right now and we are constantly thinking about how we want to get to multibillion dollars in revenue and with a clear goal of getting to a billion dollars in by end of 2023.
Beena Agarwal: We are actively working backwards from that goal and that is super exciting for all of us to figure out how to get to that billion dollar goal. But it also means how are we scaling the organization to get to that goal. So I think about that a lot, making sure that we are bringing in the right people that embody our principles and values and empowering them to do their best work.
Beena Agarwal: And then also defining the culture of the org as we scale and grow. We really understanding what is it that we truly value where we have been a different size of an organization for a long period of time and there are certain things that we enjoy operating in a certain way. What are core principles that we want to keep? What are things that we want to evolve and how do we define the culture of the org as we scale?
Beena Agarwal: Those are some of the key things that are super exciting to me personally.
Jire Bademosi: Yeah. I think all of that’s very exciting and billion dollars is no joke and I think it’s so important and great the work that you’re doing and you’ve probably learned so many lessons along the way. Are there any that you can share with us?
Beena Agarwal: Yeah, sure. There is a book by Jim Collins called Built to Last, where he talks about time telling and clock building. The premises that often leaders spend a lot of time crafting a vision, building and bringing an idea or a product to life and he refers to this as time telling and in studies that he has done, what he found that truly visionary companies are the artifact of clock building.
Beena Agarwal: What that means is building an order company that can prosper beyond the presence of any leader and endure over time. The company and the organization is the true creation and the product and leaders are in service of that.
Beena Agarwal: And I think about that a lot and how that applies to my role here. So the reality is that we have to spend as leaders, we have to spend some time doing the time telling and the clock building, because in reality, we have a lot of audacious goals in front of us and we have to make sure we spend our time in those execution details as leaders and making sure that everyone’s working towards those goals and that we’re executing against those goals.
Beena Agarwal: But the true benefit is from that clock building, like building the org, building the culture of the org. So I’m constantly thinking about how, what is the right balance here? How much time should we be spending building that again? And how do we balance that with the execution details here? And it’s something that it’s hard to find that right balance and that’s something that I’m constantly trying to learn from and evolve.
Jire Bademosi: Absolutely. I feel like all of us in one way or another, I’m curious, I’m sure in the chat, there’s plenty of people who are trying to find balance myself included and especially when you’re a hypergrowth startup environment and really trying to make an impact in such a important way. I’m curious that you’ve worked at both startups and building a team there, you’ve worked within a company like a large one such as EA and you’ve also worked at Discord now for a year. And how have you found the leadership at Discord to be different than at other places?
Beena Agarwal: Yeah, that’s a great question. One thing I will say is that leaders here truly embody the people first part of the culture. And a lot of times when you go through the interview process, you learn a lot about the culture and then when you join the company, you find that aspects of it might be true and there are aspects of it that are not exactly be expected.
Beena Agarwal: And I will say in my one year time, year, I find that everyone has been totally true to everything that I learned as part of the interview process. The reasons that I joined Discord have totally held true. So what I mean by that is everyone is very true to the mission. Everyone really cares about the mission all the way from the individual contributors that I’ve interacted with all the way to the leaders, the senior leaders of the company.
Beena Agarwal: It shows up in a lot of different ways. All the way to how the CEO runs all hands and how transparent he is about everything that he communicates in these all hands. So we have a weekly all hands that is run by the CEO where he talks about things that are top of mind for him. And then we go through the different parts of the organization will also give updates and then in the end we have a Q and A section.
Beena Agarwal: And it’s amazing to me, how you ask any question, anyone can ask a question and the responses are always very thoughtful and how the CEO is very transparent by that. So that’s one aspect here, how leaders are truly transparent here. And then the other thing is, as far as the people first mentality goes, everyone really creates space for us to be our authentic self.
Beena Agarwal: One of the things that I was very concerned about when I was joining is… Joining company remotely during the pandemic is definitely not easy. Building a rapport with the team remotely is definitely not a walk in the park. And then also I was a new mom at the time I had just come out of maternity leave, my kid was five months old.
Beena Agarwal: There were a lot of things that were important to me, including nursing and it was very important for me for various reasons to continue to do that. And I was very upfront with my manager about all those things that were important to me and what I found that all of my apprehensions were totally, they weren’t a problem for anyone. Discord made it very easy to onboard, to build rapport with teams. They truly had frameworks around all of that.
Beena Agarwal: And then also, made space and time for me to take care of things as I needed, whether that be blocking time on the calendar or if I had to attend a meeting, being able to turn video off and nurse the baby as needed. It was also refreshing to see that there were a lot of male allies in the company, including my own manager who often during meetings would say that, “Hey, I actually need to go feed my kids. So I’m just going to turn the video off and make lunch for my kids.” It was really refreshing to say that, to see that and to normalize things and say that, “Hey, it’s okay. This is life in this world and it’s okay to do that.” It truly helped reinforce some of the decisions that I made and why I joined Discord and everything that I learned during the interview process and leadership here has totally helped me.
Jire Bademosi: I think that’s so well said. And I think that commonality is really around, one, the fact that we actually have those action points. Whether it be through the all hands, where our CEO literally every Tuesday really opens up, not only the floor to folks who may have been at the company, whether they’ve been there a day or they’ve been there since the beginning an opportunity to ask questions and to hear the responses live and really creating that community of transparency to talking about what it’s like coming back to a work environment and really having that holistic, whole person application of our values and our principal.
Jire Bademosi: It’s really cool hearing you share that. I know we don’t have too much time, but I’m seeing quite a few questions come in from folks. Maybe we could get to a couple of them with time that we have left. Let me see here. I see a question a little bit about more on our work culture, in particular. And I know we talked about it, but I want to respond to Anita’s question in that how would we describe Discord’s work culture? What are Discord’s future plans or collaborations in the next year? So maybe we could answer that from like an engineering perspective on your team.
Beena Agarwal: Yeah, absolutely. As far as the work culture goes, we definitely strive for excellence, but at the same time, we promote work-life balance a lot. Some of the examples that I give, they were truly important for me. I’ll tell you, from my own perspective, just in my entire career, until I had a kid, work-life balance was misnomer to me, pretty clearly, just because I enjoyed doing what I did and I just worked all the time, not because I had to, but because I really enjoyed it.
Beena Agarwal: When I had a kid, that changed and work-life balance was very important to me, and that was one of the things that I really looked into deeply when I joined Discord. And I can say that we definitely take that very seriously here, and we ensure that folks are not overloaded, that we do planning appropriately.
Beena Agarwal: We make sure we plan for projects upfront and ensure that we don’t have crunch times and avoid them as much as we can. So that’s one thing I’ll note in terms of work culture, from an engineering perspective, and then, Jire, feel free to add… You’re on the people team. You know a lot about this as well.
Jire Bademosi: Totally. Yeah. I mean, I think that was a really helpful example just around how Discord really takes a time to not just say, “Okay, you work at Discord and that’s it.” It’s really holistic, and I think it’s, one, seeing that the company has allowed people to do 80% of capacity, not necessarily saying you have to be at 100% capacity, which really frees up a lot of time.
Jire Bademosi: I mean, I have coworkers who are able to work at Discord and be in graduate school. I have coworkers who are able to be caregivers of children or of family members, et cetera. And so all of that not only is existing but is thriving.
Jire Bademosi: And I think that’s the really unique piece that I want folks to really take with them and that it’s encouraged, not only through the words that we’re saying but through the policies that exist, whether it be the parental leave that exists, whether it be the family leave that exists. We have unlimited sick time in case someone’s not feeling well. We have paid time off where you accrue it and so really encouraging folks.
Jire Bademosi: And even myself, my managers, you need to take time off, encouraging folks on the team to do that. And I think that, again, through actions versus simply saying it, I think really makes a difference between what I’ve seen at Discord versus at other companies. I think that’s really a testament to the work environment that we have here. Let me see if we might have time, Beena, for one more question, because we have to pass the mic and then we’ll come back and make sure to respond to as many questions as we can today.
Jire Bademosi: This question comes from Karen and a little bit more about some of the qualities that you look for as you’re expanding your team, if you could talk a little bit about that. I know teams are growing rather rapidly, but I’m sure folks are keen to hear a little bit more about the engineering process.
Beena Agarwal: Yeah, absolutely. And we have a very well-defined interview process. And as specifically the question talks about, outside of the job description, what are the qualities that we look for? During our interview process, we have attitude and values panel, where we really dig into some of those non-technical skills. What we really look for is folks that will embody our core principles and our core culture. And there is an awesome blog post on things that we value and our principles, so we really dig into those through those behavioral questions, and that’s what we really value besides the technical skills that we go through.
Beena Agarwal: Then, from a leadership perspective, in engineering managers in particular, we are, again, like I said, very much a people-first organization. We believe in growing and hiring really strong tech leads and giving them autonomy in terms of execution and leaving room for managers to really focus on career growth and coaching of individuals. That’s something that we value a lot. We definitely look for leaders that are able to focus on that versus the technical execution. You still have to be technical and be able to guide discussions, but we don’t expect you to focus more on coaching and career development.
Jire Bademosi: Wonderful. Wonderful. Wonderful. All right. I know we’re running up on time, and folks, we are going to get to as many questions as we can, so please bear with us. We also have some recruiters in the audience, but next up, I want to welcome one of my colleagues and fellow east coasters, Megan. Can we give Megan a big shout out for being off and wanting to do this presentation today? Welcome. Welcome. Megan, I’ll pass the mic to you. I’ll see you all in a bit.
Megan Zlock: Hello, everyone. Let me go ahead and get my screen sharing going. Okay. And pop out chat. Can somebody give me a thumbs up just to know I can hear and… you all can hear and see me? Okay. Sounds good. I’ll go ahead and get started. Just to do a little bit of an intro, hi, I’m Megan Zlock.
“Digital Accessibility: Ensuring Access to People with Disabilities” by Megan Zlock, Discord Software Engineer, Digital Accessibility
Megan Zlock: I’m a software engineer on the accessibility team at Discord. I’ve been at Discord for about out 6, 7 months, but I have about 10 years experience as a front-end and full-stack developer. So yeah, new to Discord, but not new to the game. And today, I wanted to talk about digital accessibility a little bit.
Megan Zlock: Before I get started, I want to mention, I know I’m talking to an audience of lots of folks, so this may not be new to a lot of you, but when I talk about accessibility, I tend to start from the beginning. It’s hit or miss. There are definitely tons of veterans out there who know all about this stuff. And then you have folks who haven’t really dove into it yet for one reason or another, so I start at the beginning. But hopefully I’ll have some resources towards the end that’ll be helpful for everybody.
Megan Zlock:Let’s talk about digital accessibility. What is it, what does it mean for engineers, and where do you start? I like to pull this quote… It’s just from Wikipedia, but I do like this particular quote, “Accessibility is the inclusive practice of ensuring there are no barriers that prevent interaction with or access to websites on the worldwide web, by people with physical disabilities, situational disabilities, and socioeconomic restrictions on bandwidth and speed.”
Megan Zlock: While that last particular point I do find incredibly interesting, I mostly focus on my job on folks who have physical or situational disabilities. That’s what we’re talking about today. How do we make our websites accessible for folks who may interact with your site in a little bit of a different way than other folks?
Megan Zlock: I also like this quote from Microsoft. They’ve got some really good documentation on inclusive design. So designing inclusively doesn’t mean you’re making one thing for all people. You’re designing a diversity of ways for everyone to participate in an experience with a sense of belonging, and we love that word belonging at Discord.
Megan Zlock: Basically, in practice, when you build for accessibility, it’s really interesting how a lot of folks get caught up on like, “Oh, I have to make one thing that works for everybody.” But really, when you get into the nitty-gritty of how to do certain new things, you really have to build in a couple of different ways of doing things, whether somebody’s using a keyboard or a mouse or a screen reader or something else. It’s really interesting when you start diving in and really connecting all of those experiences.
Megan Zlock:Why does accessibility matter? The first one I always bring up, as my Captain Obvious reason is, it’s just the right thing to do. Inclusivity is important. We want everybody to be able to use Discord. So why not? But if you need further convincing, it’s also our mission.
Megan Zlock: At Discord, we love to say that we create a world where everyone belongs. We love that word belonging. So it’s just part of our mission. We want to make sure that everybody, regardless of their physical abilities, can take part in communities on Discord. And then also, it’s the law.
Megan Zlock: If there was no other reason, there’s also that one. Especially as an international application… Lots of folks all over the world use it… we need to make sure that we’re passing and following all the criteria that we need to follow for disability law. To dive into that a little bit further, typically for engineers, that means complying with the WCAG. That is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
Megan Zlock: And just to go over that a little bit in my lightning talk, I don’t have much time, but basically WCAG conformance falls into three levels, A, AA, and AA. And this is an additive process. Any rules in A are also in AA and are also in AAA. Typically, conformance means complying with A. The AAA rules are very specific. They can be very specific to certain audiences. You may want to do some UX, see who you have using the site.
Megan Zlock: There’s one rule that says you can’t use jargon, but then that doesn’t work out so well when you’re doing like a medical site. So yeah, you have to pick and choose your AAA rules. In a lot of instances, it’d be very difficult to comply with all of them. And if you want to get started with WCAG, I really think the best place to start is the W3C. They have this really good quick reference guide, where you can do some filters. You can see what’s in A, AA, AAA, as well as a little bit of filtering based off of your particular role.
Megan Zlock: Just to keep going with that. So what goes into accessible product engineering? There is a complying with WCAG, but WCAG only gets you so far. When you start working in accessibility, knowing the fundamentals is really important, having really good HTML and CSS to start with sets you with a really good baseline, if you’re building a website.
Megan Zlock: Of course, if you’re doing React data or any kind of web app, you’ll want to be using the right components or views or accessibility attributes on those as well. And then you want to build on top of good HTML with Aria. If you’re not familiar with Aria, that stands for Accessible Rich Internet Applications. That’s basically extra attributes added to HTML to imply states or extra labels or extra accessibility information in hints. And it works just like HTML attributes, but it’s an added layer that works well with JavaScript.
Megan Zlock: And then, lastly, testing, testing, testing. I cannot advocate enough for testing, whether you’re trying out a screen reader yourself or just doing some keyboard testing, I would especially recommend doing some level of user testing.
Megan Zlock: I, as an accessibility engineer, am a fairly abled-bodied person. It’s really hard for me to know if I am building the right thing for somebody who natively uses these assistive technologies. So luckily, at Discord, we do have a bunch of volunteers who work with us and can user test with us.
Megan Zlock: And it’s an amazing resource to make sure that the stuff that we ship works how we intend it to. But yeah, just another note on the organizational level, it’s helpful to think of accessibility like performance or security. It’s an ever-present piece of maintenance that you have to do. It’s never done. You don’t just conform once and you’re done. It’s going to be something you’re going to be working on for a long time.
Megan Zlock: Accessibility at Discord, what does my job look like? A lot of it is bug fixes. I am an engineer on the team. A lot of the times I’m adding labels that were missed or reconfiguring some Aria attributes, things like that. Working on the design system, the accessibility team is really, really close with our design system team so that we can make sure that our primitives, or little components that we use everywhere, are very accessible.
Megan Zlock: We’re working on writing some automated testing to catch bugs so that it’s not just us working on accessibility at Discord. People can catch any violations as they’re working and take care of it for us. And then also we do some internal engineering training. My job isn’t just code. I’m also teaching engineers how they can work within our system.
Megan Zlock: Last off, this is a lightning talk. I only have 10 minutes. I wanted to leave you all with some tools so that you can dive in and learn your way around accessibility. And I really think the best thing that you could do is try out some of the testing things.
Megan Zlock: First off, start in design. To give some of the designers who may be present some resources, there’s the Able plugin for Figma. There’s the Stark plugin, which is available for Figma and Sketch, if you don’t use Figma. Color Safe is kind of an interesting tool that I ran into a while back for creating accessible color schemes. There’s Contrast Checker. It’s not a very pretty site, but it’s a nice way to see if your color contrast passes. Is white text on this blue background going to have enough contrast to meet the WCAG standard?
Megan Zlock: There’s also Color Oracle. This is a Mac-only application that I use occasionally that you can turn on, and it changes the colors on your screen so you can get an approximation of somebody with some form of color blindness might see. And then for an additional reading that I don’t have time to go into, Microsoft’s Inclusive Design is great. I really recommend it. And for longer-form reading, A Web for Everyone is a book. It’s got great personas and everything in it.
Megan Zlock: As you code, I recommend checking out Inclusive Components. I go back to it so often, especially for their recommendations on how to build a good card component. And then I really do recommend, while you code, to test with keyboard. Try that out as you’re building. It’s so easy to just hit the tab button and try it out.
Megan Zlock: There’s some tips for keyboard accessibility. There’s the accessibility inspector in Chrome dev tools, idev in Chrome. That’s right there ready to go. If you want to add things on to Chrome, you can add axe DevTools. It can be a paid product, but the free one does allow you to scan your page for any violations. You can get a get around with a free version. If you’re not using Chrome, I do also like the Wave extension. It does mess up your page a little bit when you run it, but you can find all the violations. And then if you’re working more in the app space, there’s the accessibility inspector built right into X Code. You can just turn it on now. And then Flipper is also kind of a nice one. I haven’t used that one much, but we do use that one at Discord.
Megan Zlock And then finally validate. A few things that we do, some testing libraries that I recommend axe-core, especially if you’re using axe DevTools, it’s nice to test with the same thing both manually and in your testing suite. And then I added a couple of other NPM modules that we use as well to check if things have accessible names and things.
Megan Zlock: And then, lastly, for manual testing, this is just a list of tips from WebAIM or from Deque. You’ll see a lot… or actually, I think their names pronounced Deque. Anyway, they’re a big accessibility presence. So a lot of these links have their resources on how to do gestures and all of that. If you’re new to screen reader testing, I kind of recommend starting out with a touch screen, because then you, as a sighted person, can see what you’re touching and hear what it says, but just to start out.
Megan Zlock: And with that, I think I will wrap it up. I like to start here. If you’re new to accessibility, it’s never too early or too late to start. It’s never too early because you’ll always save yourself some work later. And it’s never too late either. If you’re just picking this up…
Megan Zlock: I picked this up like six, seven years ago and it’s been a learning process throughout. You learn so much just diving into it and really just testing and trying to make it work.
Megan Zlock: Anyway, that’s what I’m going to leave it on. I don’t know if I quite have time for questions, but I’ll turn off screen share here and see if we do. Let’s see, chat was going pretty quick, so I wasn’t quite able to follow, but let’s see.
Megan Zlock: Okay. I see one question from the audience. “How often do you work with product designers/UI/UX designers to ensure designs are accessible?” The accessibility team has three engineers, including myself, and we do have one designer who helps us out with that. And that’s if you just count our dedicated designer.
Megan Zlock: Since we work so closely with the design systems team, we technically have access to those folk too, because the design system should be accessible to start with. Of course, they make sure that our color contrast passes all of the standards and things like that. And there’s some work to be done if you go and check there, but we’ve got a really good team on it.
Megan Zlock: Let’s see, so someone else asked, “How do you test for people who are deaf or have no limbs?” I’ll start with the no limbs. There are a lot of accessibility devices out there, and for someone’s who’s paralyzed or has no limbs, there’s single switch buttons, there’s head WANs, there’s eye-tracking software, things like that.
Megan Zlock: For the most part, all of that technology leads back to keyboard accessibility, and eye tracking’s going to be like a mouse. If you are making sure that your application or website is accessible for keyboard, you are covering a lot of folks, so that one is really important. And then for Dev, that one’s a little bit harder. I would just say, as long as as much of your website is text as possible…
Megan Zlock: Media should always have a text alternative and stuff like that. As long as there is some text equivalent, everybody can interact with your content somehow, whether it’s like read back to them or visible to be read and all of that stuff. Anyway, I should probably hand it off since we are doing lightning talks. I’m on the east cost, so sorry if I don’t join you all for social time later, but I will kick it over to Kelsey for the next lightning talk.
Kelsey Shuler: All right, there, looks like I am up now. Let’s see, I will go ahead and share my screen now. And let’s see, can you all see this okay? Actually, I can’t even see chat anymore. Okay. There we go. Cool. All right. So hi, everyone.
“How To Survive Making a Big Mistake at Work? Lessons and Reflections” by Kelsey Shuler, Discord Engineering Manager, SRE
Kelsey Shuler: My name is Kelsey, my pronouns are she/her, and I manage the site reliability engineering team here at Discord. My team is responsible for defending the customer experience, while making sure that we don’t just throw people at the problem. We want to make sure that we’re not sacrificing our engineers to get that done.
Kelsey Shuler: Who am I to talk to you about this? I’ve spent many years as an SRE. I’ve managed teams of SRE for several years after that. And I’ve definitely caused my own share of outages. In addition, I’ve mentored other people as they’ve gone through their first outage. For better or for worse, making mistakes is something I’m used to doing.
Kelsey Shuler: I would like to share with you a story for my very first and worst outage. A few months into my time as an SRE, I was working on a Friday during my company all-hands to upgrade the operating system on some of our servers.
Kelsey Shuler: At the time, this was a manual process. It required running a handful of commands by hand, but as all-hands is going, I see real key engineers get up and leave the room. I think, “Huh, that’s kind of weird, wonder what’s going on.”
Kelsey Shuler: But eventually, I also receive a page that goes to the entire on-call rotation that things are very, very broken. I’ve heard from people after the fact that it was maybe a little bit alarming to see the entire infrastructure team stand up and leave all-hands all at the same time.
Kelsey Shuler: Essentially, what ended up happening is I ran a command that ended up wiping a large number of live production databases, because I just dropped some quotation marks from the command. This ended up leading to a large outage that brought down different parts of the company for four days, led to 20 people working around the clock through the weekend. It was a substantial problem.
Kelsey Shuler: To add even more color to the degree to which things were broken, for years after this happened, this was one of only two incidents that my company continued to talk about. It was part of the new employee onboarding. We used to explain how we handled these sort of situations and was only one of two incidents that we actually gave special names to. This one was called The Last Outage or TLO.
Kelsey Shuler: Not only that, but of course on the anniversary of my outage, we decided to have a whole event for this, called it Trustworthiness Week. People got special stickers to put on their laptops. For years after that, I got to see stickers of my big mistake. And we had lots of conference rooms that actually ended up being named because of this outage.
Kelsey Shuler: Hopefully, I’ve given you an idea of what my credentials are. I’ll go back to the incident itself. As I mentioned, we paged everyone because our site is down. Everyone’s scrambling to try to figure out what’s going on, and I’m mostly just off to the side. I’m very junior at this point, and I’m just waiting around the off chance I can be helpful, but then I had my oh-no moment.
Kelsey Shuler: Someone mentioned something that sounded suspiciously close to something I’ve been doing during all-hands. My stomach had that big, heavy, awful feeling, and I just felt like I knew that somehow I must have done something wrong.
Kelsey Shuler: At this point though, I got one of the more senior SREs, told him that I felt like this might be related to some work I had been doing, and walked him through what I had been doing. He was able to grab other people. They were able to confirm that this was the root cause of what had happened.
Kelsey Shuler: And we used this, actually, work to help recover the site. For my particular [inaudible], It was really important that I worked to get the right people informed, I helped spread knowledge, and get that extra help.
Kelsey Shuler: The next day, I think, is something that you don’t necessarily think about or expect is how hard it is to go back to your job after a large mistake. For me, coming in that Monday was so difficult. I had an entire weekend of just thinking about how things were so broken, how there’s an entire team of people who had their weekends ruined, and everything was my fault. I felt like there was no way they weren’t going to fire me.
Kelsey Shuler: Even if they didn’t fire me, I didn’t know how I was going to keep doing my job, where it was dangerous and I could just drop quotation marks and everything would be broken again and then, of course, they would fire me. When I got in though, I had great people around me giving me the same advice. “It’s okay. This happens to everyone who works in our field. We shouldn’t have allowed the tools to allow someone to wipe the databases. Our backups should have been in a better place to recover faster, but most importantly, we don’t blame you.”
Kelsey Shuler: When it’s your turn, take these things to heart. Come in, but give yourself space and time to get back to normal. Find work to you that feels like it’s safe to be able to tackle.
Kelsey Shuler: Moving forward, for this section, I think it’s really important to talk about things that could be done by the company and by the individual. While an individual could take action that leads to something going wrong, ultimately, it’s the group that’s responsible for what happened.
Kelsey Shuler: Here at Discord, we make sure to adopt a blameless post-mortem process when something goes wrong. We shouldn’t be pointing fingers, but instead, every time that some major mistake happens, we should be learning from it. At every turn, we ask ourselves “What changes can prevent something like this from happening again?”
Kelsey Shuler: But this is only something we can do if people are safe enough to be able to be honest about what occurred. We don’t want people hiding or trying to avoid detection because they’re afraid.
Kelsey Shuler: As a leader here, I’m also that person to make sure that this can happen. I make sure that I help people bounce back from their own mistakes. I work to make sure that they feel understood and they’re not alone as they’re going through something like this.
Kelsey Shuler: For my part of the talk, I’ll leave you with one piece of advice. For you individually, though, be patient with yourself. Find out how you can learn and grow from your mistake and then come back better than ever.
Kelsey Shuler: With this, I have a couple of minutes left. I would love to actually have you all talk about your mistakes. Throw it in the chat, if you’re comfortable. I don’t know if we’re able to have you all come up and share, but I think that would be really amazing if anyone was willing to speak to a mistake that you’ve made. Let everyone know that it’s something that happens to everyone. If we can’t facilitate that, cool, but I think share this.
Kelsey Shuler: I think it’s really good for us to feel comfortable owning the fact that we’re going to make mistakes and we all do it. But yeah, that’s my talk. I’ll go ahead and call it here then. And I will go ahead and hand things over to Natalie to talk about product marketing.
Natalie Grant: Okay, can you guys hear me? Oops. Lost the window here, one second. Okay. Trying this again. How’s that? Can you hear and see me? Okay, great. Thank you for the people who said yes. I was kidding, chat. All right. Awesome. Hi everybody. I’m Natalie Grant. My pronouns are she/her. And I am a, oops. Hang on. Can’t see my screen. Okay, one second. There we go. Go. All right. I got it. Thanks everyone. Okay, I’m going to try sharing my screen one more time. Here we go. Okay. Got it. All righty. Thank you. Such a supportive chat. Thank you guys. Okay, so I’ll start over again.
“Product Marketing: Speaking the Language of Technical Storytelling” by Natalie Grant, Discord Developer Product Marketing Manager.
Natalie Grant: Hi everyone. My name’s Natalie Grant, and I’m a product marketing manager for Discord developers. Those are the people who build apps and bots on Discord using our API. And today, oh no. Are people still having trouble? Okay. Some people can see, some people can’t, I’m not sure why. Okay. I’m going to keep going. But if someone wants to let me know a tip here, I can adjust. Okay. Yeah.
Natalie Grant: I’m a product marketing manager for Discord developers, those are the folks who build apps and bots on discord using our API. And today, I’m going to talk a little bit about what product marketing is and why I love it and how to approach technical storytelling.
Natalie Grant: In a nutshell, you have a product organization with someone who’s managing the product, and you have a marketing organization with lots of subject matter expertise. I’m going to give a quick caveat, lots of companies are different. I’m going to share a high level example of how you can think about it based on my experience. You’ve got a PM and you’ve got lots of subject matter experts who specialize in specific things. And what product marketing is… Oh, good. Someone’s interested in this role. Love to hear it.
Natalie Grant: What a product marketing manager does is connect these groups. Partnering really closely with product to identify the right people who are going to enjoy that product the most. We call that a target audience. And then, you work with the whole marketing organization to make sure that all of those subject matter experts can help you reach those people, which is what they do best.
Natalie Grant: In addition to working out what a target audience would be for that product, some other big things you’d work on are positioning, writing messaging, sometimes the name and the price of something. You get really close to customer feedback. Running qualitative and quantitative research, and just generally being the source of truth for that narrative about the product.
Natalie Grant: A PM and a PMM are really close partners. And a lot of the skills are very similar. Some companies don’t have both, and I’ll come back to that in a second. But first, I wanted to dive a little bit more into what a PMM does, because there’s a lot of acronyms and a lot of buzzwords. I’m going to use metaphors because we all love a good metaphor.
Natalie Grant: The first one is a center of gravity. Subject matter experts that you work with in a marketing organization and all of your cross-functional partners, they work on a ton of products. When you’re the PMM, it’s your responsibility to sort of bring them back continually to a source of truth about what the benefit of the product is and who the target audience is and represent that every single day.
Natalie Grant: And the other thing you want to do is, this is a metaphor that a mentor of mine used many years ago, and it might be my favorite because I still use it all the time, is I think about it like an orchestra. Your marketing partners are all the best at that instrument and they specialize in specific channels. For example, social media marketing, or email marketing or web marketing, PR and comms. And as a PMM, you need to make sure that they’re all in sync together. You need to make sure they’re using the same songbook and you need to make sure that things sound good for all the people who are listening.
Natalie Grant: I kind of think about it like being a conductor of an orchestra and really listening to what needs to happen and make sure everyone’s working together really well. You need to connect a lot of dots. Things like policy and legal and customer support. You obviously need to be really good at communicating, but specifically, you need to work on interpreting different technical information to who you’re talking to, depending on what it is they need to know. And then kind of clear everything else out of the way for them, because people need to know very specific things to do their job, but they don’t need to know everything.
Natalie Grant: Part of communicating with them is interpreting the most important information that they can bring your message out to all of your users. And then this was a bit of a spoiler because it was the title of my talk, but storytelling is very important, too.
Natalie Grant: You need to paint a picture. It’s not just what something is called or how much it costs or when it’s available, it’s really more about why they should care, why it will or won’t make their life better. Will it save them time, will it make them laugh? And there’s internal storytelling as well, pitching ideas and making those ideas resonate with people.
Natalie Grant: And actually before I was a PMM, I was a writer. That’s actually my background. Storytelling is my favorite part of the job. And so, I’m really lucky that I get to do it every day. And then the last one, which is kind of funny, but it’s true is a little bit of matchmaking. You have users who have a bunch of unmet needs and you have really talented engineers that can build all sorts of solutions.
Natalie Grant: When you’re working with technology, a lot of it truly is just matchmaking. Problems and solutions, people, and the solutions that will meet those needs. And so that’s a really fun part of the job as well. I’m rattling off a lot of skills, I do just want to kind of call out one thing, which is hard skills and soft skills are equally important.
Natalie Grant: If you have a hard skill like knowing SQL or getting certified in an analytics tool, or if you have an MBA or you can do strategic planning, you might also have soft skills like influencing and being curious and learning quickly or having executive presence so that you can represent your side of the business well when you’re talking to other teams. If you’re really strong on hard skills, but you don’t have a lot of soft skills, you can do really great work, but it’s harder for people to see it and appreciate it.
Natalie Grant: If you have soft skills without a lot of hard skills, people love you, but you aren’t adding as much value or driving impact. And as a PMM for many years, I really feel this equally, they are equally important and it is a continual practice to build them. And if you’re someone who is curious and likes learning new things, PMM-ing is definitely a great job for you because personally, I feel like almost every week, I’m learning a new skill or practicing a skill that I haven’t used in a long time.
Natalie Grant: If that sounds enjoyable to you, which it is for me, then definitely consider PMM-ing as a career.
Natalie Grant: Going back to these metaphors, I wanted to kind of emphasize some things to keep in mind about when you’re playing this role with all of your internal partners. In order to be the center of gravity, to maintain that source of truth for everybody you’re working with, you need to stay curious and you also need to be comfortable not fully understanding all the technology every day.
Natalie Grant: You kind of need to get to the heart of it, get to the benefit of it, and be able to assess risk mitigation, but you don’t necessarily need to program it or understand all the complexities involved. And that can sometimes be a delicate dance to do with yourself when it comes to confidence and learning things quickly. It’s a continual practice. You also need to be really good at listening and influencing and syncing people up.
Natalie Grant: Sometimes we call this driving alignment. It’s kind of a buzzword-y thing, but it’s true. You need to spot patterns and solutions when you’re talking to multiple people. You might start to hear themes pop out. And so, if you’re able to recognize an ongoing challenge that multiple people are flagging to you, you can then go back to your product team and see if you can build a solution to address all of those at once.
Natalie Grant: Getting comfortable, thriving and ambiguity, as they say. And then, I did mention research, qualitative and quantitative research when you’re getting to know your customer, your target audience. It sounds kind of obvious, but you need to care about people.
Natalie Grant: You need to empathize with people, especially if you aren’t personally in that target audience. And that’s something that I like calling out because I think it’s easy to forget that at the end of the day, when you are a PMM, the power of empathy, the power of putting yourself in someone’s shoes.
Natalie Grant: This was talked about a little bit in the accessibility lightning talk as well, is a really, really important thing to maintain. If you care about people and you like hearing what their needs are, again, might be a good candidate for a PMM. I wanted to bring it back to this image here and end with a little bit of advice for people who are thinking of interviewing for a PMM role or thinking about being a PM or PMM, which not all kind companies have both. I mentioned this earlier. It’s really awesome when they do.
Natalie Grant: I love it when they do, Discord does, but some questions to think through when you’re interviewing for a PMM role.
Natalie Grant: INumber one, ask about the company’s philosophy on product marketing, because companies are different. Some marketing teams are very brand focused, some companies are very and driven, and a PMM being that center of gravity really needs to have a robust understanding of how to be successful in that company. Definitely ask about that, directly, I would recommend.
Natalie Grant: And number two, pay attention to your PM partner when you’re interviewing, because you’ll probably be working with them every single day. And I’m super lucky, we have fantastic PMs at Discord and I love working with every single one of them. And I actually knew that from my first interview because it was something I was specifically looking for.
Natalie Grant: And then the third thing is, like I mentioned, you got to be comfortable with ambiguity. Nothing is ever constant. Things are going to change. Companies grow, people come and go. The world is also unpredictable. You just kind of have to be flexible and jump in and just kind of always think of it with a curiosity mindset and an openness. Personally, I have been in situations at past companies where I didn’t have a PM at all. And I had to step into many aspects of that role until we got someone in place, which brings me to my final point, which is…
Natalie Grant: Many skills overlap, especially the research, communication and influencing part. It’s not uncommon for PMMS to move into product management and vice versa. And at Discord, actually last year, one of our PMMS moved into a PM role.
Natalie Grant: Becoming a PMM opens up a lot of doors for you because you get exposure to all sorts of roles and functions. And this works with the subject matter experts as well. I’ve had friends that started as a more generalist and then worked with all these subject matter experts, the people playing all those instruments, the best at what they do, and were just drawn to one of them. I really just love this person who does paid media or PR.
Natalie Grant: And because you work with all those people, you can kind of see the benefits of being in that position and then you can make a career condition. And I also have a good friend who went the other way. I knew someone who was a social media marketer, worked with me as her PMM and then said, this looks really interesting. And she became a PMM eventually as her career track. It does happen.
Natalie Grant: You get a lot of great exposure being in this role. And I just kind of wanted to emphasize that if you’re curious and you like learning new things and you’re comfortable working with technology and explaining technology to people and telling stories, then you’re a prime candidate to be a PMM. I hope that was helpful.
Natalie Grant: And maybe someone watching just got convinced that this might be a good part of their career. If that’s you and you’re listening, go do it. I wish you all the fun and fulfillment and adventure. I think I’m going to hand it off to Nancy next.
Nancy Liu: Hello. Can you guys see me and hear me? Awesome. Yeah. Thank you so much. This is Nancy and I feel really, really excited to be here and meet with you in this event. And also, thank you so much in advance for your time with me today.
Nancy Liu: Just to share a little bit more about myself, I joined Discord about five months ago and I’m a data science manager supporting the marketing data science team. For today’s topic, I will talk about marketing incrementality test. Let me quickly share screen. Can you see my screen well? Okay, awesome. I understand this topic could be a little bit too technical, so I will try to provide as much context as possible and also speak from high level, hopefully to make it easy to understand for everyone here.
Nancy Liu: Before getting started, I want to briefly share my opinion on how I think data science team can add value to marketing in general. I think, Natalie just gave us a really great talk about product marketing, which really resonated with me really well.
Nancy Liu: And I feel really excited about what our marketing team is doing and how data science team can support marketing as well. In my opinion, I think data science can help marketing from many different areas, especially in two areas.
Nancy Liu: One is targeting, one is environment. Targeting means who we should target with our marketing programs. For example, which users should receive our marketing notification or which countries should receive our marketing campaigns. Environment means how do we qualify the impact from our marketing programs? The marketing incrementality test, which we are going to talk about today, is about environment piece, the second piece.
Nancy Liu: I will first talk about the marketing incrementality task in general. Then I will share a real example about how we measure brand marketing using geo test. Give me a second. Let me try to find my slides. I can only see the screen share for now. Yeah, here we go.
“Marketing Incrementality Test: Mathematical Approach to Measure Incremental Lift” by Nancy Liu, Discord Data Science Manager Marketing Data Science & Analytics
Nancy Liu: First, let me explain what is a marketing incrementality test. This is basically a data science approach that measure incremental lifts to show the true impact of our marketing campaign. You basically have test group and a control group. You can spend your marketing dollars or marketing efforts at a test group while do not spend your marketing dollars or marketing efforts as a control group. You measure the difference between the two in the end. This is called incrementality test.
Nancy Liu: Why is incrementality test important? First of all, it tells us how effective the marketing efforts is. It can also help us understand whether our marketing return is worth a marketing investment, which can help us to optimize the allocation of marketing dollars and marketing budgets. Oh, you cannot see the share screen. Is that a problem for everyone?
Nancy Liu: Oh, awesome. Thank you. There are two general approach or methods we can do to measure incrementality. The first method is called A/B test. Second one is geo test. I just want to highlight that A/B test and the geo test, they are not really alternatives to each other because they’re actually applied in different scenarios or different situations.
Nancy Liu: Let’s talk about each of the methods one by one. First A/B test. I’m sure a lot of people might already be familiar with A/B test. Basically, you define a group of users as the audience. For example, if you work for social media company, the group of users you define could be all the daily active users in US and Canada. And then you can randomly place the users into test group and control group and spend marketing efforts or dollars in the test group. In the end, you compare the difference between the test group and the control group. And that gives you the incrementality.
Nancy Liu: Second, let’s talk about the geo test, which is shown on the right side of the slide. Unlike A/B test, geo test is now looking at individual user behavior. Instead, it’s looking at each geolocation to define test and control. For example, test group could have 5G locations and the control group could have another 5G locations.
Nancy Liu: If we compare the difference between A/B test versus geo test, the biggest differences are that first of all, geo test is not really reliant on the ability to track individual user behavior. And Discord does care a lot about user privacy.
Nancy Liu: On the other side, there are only so many geo locations we can test with. According to news and definition, there are only 210 DMAs, which means designated market areas in US. 210 is really a very small simple size. And what comes with that is there’s always some natural differences between two geo locations.
Nancy Liu: The challenge of geo test is that because of the limited number of geos, geo test actually lose a lot of statistical power to reach stats significance, and cannot really control external factors very well. It’s really hard to say there is a perfect apple to apple comparison between test group and control group. Not as a challenge for geo test. However, given this challenges, there are still several scenarios we have to use geo test and cannot really apply A/B test.
Nancy Liu: The first scenario is that, for example, you want to test your SEM budget. SEM means search engine marketing, which means you increase the visibility of your company in search engine results page, primarily through paid ads, for example, on Google. Because we cannot really control who will search on Google and who will be exposed to search engine marketing, so we cannot really apply A/B task at user level very well.
Nancy Liu: The second scenario that we cannot really apply A/B test very well is about doing a test in non digital world. For example, you set up an ads on TV, or you set up a billboard in a train station. You cannot control which users will see the billboard in train station, right? That’s why you can not really do A/B test very easily at user level.
Nancy Liu: And in these two scenarios, we should consider geo testing instead of A/B test at user level. How do we do the geo test considering the challenge we mentioned earlier? In order to address challenges in practice, what we already do is call a match market test. In a match market test, we carefully select and match the geolocations based on their similarities to form pairs of regions.
Nancy Liu: For example, in a slide here, you can see that there were two orange pairs and two gray pairs. You randomly select one region in orange pair to control group and the other one in test group. And also you select one region in gray pairs into test group, while the other one should go to the control group. And your launch share marketing budget to the test group, and then reserve your marketing budget in the control group. After a while, you’ll compare the difference. For example, new user registration between test and control to conclude your incrementality.
Nancy Liu: We have talked about both A/B tests and the geo test. Now let’s switch the gear a little bit and talk about a real example of how we can measure brand marketing impact using geo test. This is also my last two slides for today.
Nancy Liu: Brand marketing is an upper funnel of marketing, which tends to focus more brand awareness. It’s unlike performance marketing, which is on the bottom funnel marketing and has direct impact on registration. Brand marketing does not really have very direct impact on KPIs, therefore it’s more difficult to measure the impact compared to performance marketing. In order to measure the impact of brand marketing, we do geo tests, use the match market test.
Nancy Liu: For example, we first select a few pairs of geo regions and assigned some to test and some to control. And then we spend the brand marketing dollars to test group only, while reserve the brand marketing dollars in control group. The statistical method we use is called BSTS or business structural time series. The series, not very difficult to understand. It’s just to predict what registrations will look like for the test group without brand marketing. I think Google created a very useful package, our package called causal impact. I also linked it here in case there is any interest to take a look into this for more research.
Nancy Liu: After doing the causal impact analysis with BSTS, you can just compare the counterfactual prediction, which means what registration will look like without brand marketing versus the actual performance on new user registration. The difference between a counterfactual prediction and actual will be the causal impact from brand marketing. That’s basically what I want to talk about for our marketing incrementality test.
Nancy Liu: Thank you so much for listening. Hopefully that’s easy to understand, even for the audience who is not that close to a marketing or data science world. Thank you so much. With that, I will hand it over to Jire.
Jire Bademosi: Thank you so much, Nancy. And thank you all for being here and getting to learn a little bit from some of the leaders at our company. I think we’ve talked about data science with Nancy, we talked about product marketing with Natalie, we talked about making mistakes with Kelsey, and we also talked about accessibility with Megan. And I’m curious, just in the chat, what are folks learning? What are folks feeling? How are we doing? Let’s see, oh, I hear from Felicia that has been wonderful. S
Jire Bademosi: hout out to everyone thus far, but I want to also introduce you to some more amazing leaders at the company. We’ve been so honored to see so many wonderful questions, comments, folks reaching out even on LinkedIn and sharing how this event has been really impactful for you. May want to continue that with this next portion of the event.
Jire Bademosi: I want you to help me welcome with a virtual hello and a virtual warm welcome to Evelyn Masso, as well as Mindy Day. I think Chloe as well will be joining us momentarily, but at least let us welcome a few folks for now. Hello, hello. Oh, there it goes, Chloe. Okay. Now we have a trio.
Discord leadership panel (Clockwise from top left: Jire Bademosi, Mindy Day, Chloe Shih, Evelyn Masso).
Mindy Day: Hello.
Jire Bademosi: All right. Y’all have seen me, kind of gotten to meet me before, but I feel it would be nice to meet some more folks from the Discord team. Maybe what we can do is just quickly start off with just our name, the team that folks are on. And then we really want to use this time to really benefit y’all and hear the questions that you are interested in hearing from. I’m going to just popcorn it around and I’m going to start off with Evelyn.
Evelyn Masso: Hey everyone. My name’s Evelyn, excited to be here. I’m the engineering manager for presentation frameworks. And my pronouns are she, they, and I think I forgot the last thing I was supposed to say or was that it actually?
Jire Bademosi: Well, you shared a little bit about your work so that’s good.
Evelyn Masso: Yeah. I’m the engineering manager for presentation framework, which includes the accessibility team, the design systems team and the foundation and performance team. Lots of UI infrastructure stuff is the part of the area that I work with.
Jire Bademosi: Amazing.
Evelyn Masso: I will go ahead and pass to Mindy.
Jire Bademosi: Awesome.
Mindy Day: Hello. Can you hear me? Test, test. Yes. Okay. Hi everyone. My name’s Mindy. I use she/her pronouns and I am the senior manager of community at Discord, which is on the marketing team. We really focus on surprising and delighting the discord community as well as creating programs for specific segments of our community like our partner program. And I’m excited to be here. Yay.
Jire Bademosi: Amazing. And Chloe, share a little bit about you.
Chloe Shih: Hey, y’all.
Jire Bademosi: I think we’re kind of matching, by the way. I’m noticing Chloe and I are matching, Evelyn and Mindy are matching. Totally uncoordinated, but coordinated at the same time. I love it. Okay. Sorry. Go ahead, Chloe.
Chloe Shih: No, not at all. I am a sub, so I’m a last minute addition to this panel. I feel I’m not ready with the cool backgrounds, but hi everyone. I’m Chloe, I’m a product manager on the community’s engagement team. We’re working on making Discord the home for your community and we are coming up with all kinds of features to make it easy for people to interact with each other and gather online. A few things we on are events and stages.
Chloe Shih: And if you have seen on my LinkedIn, I’ve posted about some new form type features that we’re testing out. It’s just really neat. Yeah, that’s my team.
Jire Bademosi: Amazing, amazing. Wonderful. Well, I think we have quite a few questions that have already come in, but I want to start with one that I think might allow us to learn a little bit more about the teams that we are part of and follows on the initial conversation that I had with Beena, where she talked a little bit about the people first mentality around how Discord treats both its employees and the environment that it creates.
Jire Bademosi: And this question from Karen asked how does Discord also create collaborative environments? We are a people first company, but really how do we create that collaboration?
Mindy Day: I could start. I think there’s kind of two types of collaboration that comes to mind. There’s collaboration within the immediate team. And so, making sure when we’re going to kick off new work or we get direction about a new area that we want to go, that everyone on the team has a chance to get informed about this work, and we give everyone, no matter your role, a chance to give feedback, brainstorm, because we know that good ideas can and often come from all across the business.
Mindy Day: Then the other part of collaboration that we do is cross-functionally. So not just even within our own community team but making sure that we collaborate with friends across the business and they get looped in with plenty of time to make sure whenever possible, we’re not surprising them with any last minute requests, and they can embed our plans in their plans.
Mindy Day: I think working for Discord and using Discord all day also facilitate that. We’re really casual. We’re always happy to jump into voice chats, to just hash things out with each other. And even though we are working remote, I think Discord really encourages that sort of collaborative environment, which is really fun.
Jire Bademosi: Amazing. Oh, go ahead, Evelyn.
Evelyn Masso: Big plus one on all of that, really. [inaudible] my answer.
Jire Bademosi: Fair enough. Now I’m kind of curious. I know we got straight into what is Discord and the collaboration that happens. But I also am curious just because we have so many folks from different parts of the company. So right now in this conversation, we have, Mindy from the community perspective, we have Chloe from the perspective of product and we have Evelyn from the perspective of engineering and all in different aspects, but all are part of that same unifying factor of what is Discord. And obviously our day to day look totally different.
Jire Bademosi: I’m curious, what is a day in the life of each of you? I know they could be very different but I think the folks want to know. I mean, I also selfishly want to know, but I think the folks as well, that are here would also to know more. Maybe we could start with you Chloe, not to put you on the spot but I am kind of sort of, yeah.
Chloe Shih: Oh man. Wow. It’s been so busy lately but I think right now we are in testing mode to see if this new big bet feature for community is going to work. And I think every morning I come into an inbox of a bunch of DMs from admins, community creators, and I try to get their feedback on what they want to see. I know that the world is moving virtually and we’re building these communities online.
Chloe Shih: We’re connecting online through interests. So how do we make that easy for people and safe and have authentic conversations and get people to connect and do it in a way that’s really natural for everyone? And I think trying to create that is really hard because there’s not a really great way to do that today. And Discord is the default for a lot of communities. So every morning I’m just tackling that question.
Chloe Shih: And then I go to stand-up, I work with all my engineers, I’m a designer. And then we do this thing called bike shedding, where we explore all kinds of different designs, how users might react to it if things don’t look right. Any wild ideas that we want to throw out. We also have couch time, which is unstructured time together to just sit, kind of co-working spaces. We sit together and if anyone has something they want to bring up, they can bring it up during couch time.
Chloe Shih: And then we have tactical meetings throughout the day, with data, with the community team, with Mindy’s team and with design and other leads and engineering. So lots of different meetings just to get to that next step of what do we need to do next? Are we solving the problems for our community members and hopefully have time for hangouts and getting boba with coworkers. Yesterday I had a coworker send me boba and I was like, “I love you.” So yeah, that’s I think the day of my life, yesterday, today combined.
Jire Bademosi: Amazing. That’s pretty awesome. I think that really brings into what the magic of our wompers world of Discord. I’m curious, Chloe, what is your day in the life like snows giving post or pre?
Chloe Shih: Wait, sorry, me?
Jire Bademosi: Mindy. Sorry.
Chloe Shih: Oh, okay. Yeah.
Mindy Day: Yes. I was just looking at my calendar because I was like, what do I do all day? A lot of meetings as well, similar to Chloe spend time meeting one on one with members of my direct reports. One-on-ones with key folks across the company to make sure that we’re staying aligned and we’re on the same path as things do develop very quickly and rapidly. A quick 30 minutes once a month with some people can go a long way and making sure we’re not veering off path.
Mindy Day: Definitely agree with making space for casual collaboration. We have a server where everyone on my team has a voice channel that’s their desk. So like Mindy’s desk. We can say things like, “Oh, meet me at my desk,” but we also have a Boba Guys voice channel. It just kind of makes it feel more fun when we can hang out in those voice channels.
Mindy Day: But yeah, truly a lot of meetings and desperately trying to find unblock off two hour chunks of focus time. Because I think two hours is the minimum amount of time that you need to really deep to then be able to write up strategies, the notion docs, to then hopefully have sources of truth for other people to reference and make sure that we know what the biggest strategy is and the vision.
Mindy Day: I truly love it. I think my career has developed where I’m not spending as much hands on time within the community and more of my focus is on the strategy. So that’s been a shift for me throughout the last couple years.
Jire Bademosi: Very awesome. I might have to take some of these ideas and perhaps bring them into the people talented vibe. I that idea of the desks as well. And next up, Evelyn. I’d love to hear from you a little bit about what you’re up to.
Evelyn Masso: Yeah. I love some of those ideas that I’m hearing too. I’m going to steal some these for sure. So yeah, I mean I’m also a managers, so meetings with one-on-ones usually every day or every couple days a week with folks on my team. All the teams that I work with do stand-ups every day. So there’s a couple stand-ups that kind of kick off my morning usually.
Evelyn Masso: And then since I’m engineering manager, a lot of my work has to do with coordination and project management. And also goal setting and kind of checking in on where we are in reaching those goals with different projects. And that also includes personal goals for people that I’m working with directly as well. One thing I was going to call out is… Yes, I’ve also been working with a larger usual team on a larger than usual project lately.
Evelyn Masso: There’s been a lot of coordination. We have something pretty interesting and exciting happening in a lot of six weeks or so. So there’s just been a lot of… The last couple weeks have been, especially cross-functional I would say, which is really fun. It’s great to have all that energy coming together as we have a project coming towards its completion, its launch.
Jire Bademosi: Very cool. I love the element of anticipation. Everyone heard that little nugget of-
Evelyn Masso: I can’t talk about it for sure. So, sorry.
Jire Bademosi: You can’t talk about it but let’s just keep our eyes peeled for the next six to eight weeks. Some news I guess, will be coming down the pipeline. I have a question specifically for you Mindy from Suzanne Guzman. How are you liking the shift from more community facing to larger strategizing? So more of the leadership role that you’re taking on within your team?
Mindy Day: Thank you for the question. It’s really rewarding. It was definitely a little nerve-wracking because I’d spent… So much of my job satisfaction and joy was getting to help those community members interact with them, build those relationships and hear firsthand the impact of our product on the community. But it was a shift that I had been wanting to make in my career. And a lot of the fulfillment now comes from enabling the members of my team to do that work successfully.
Mindy Day: And the strategy, the work that I’m doing at a higher level now should hopefully be driving a bigger impact for the community. So learning I’m one person, I can never do it all, but if I can shift my focus into build those relationships and securing more resources, we’ll actually be able to have a lot more value for the community. That’s kind of where my passion still drives is serving our community and treating them humans and being playful, but having a bigger picture and a bigger vision about what that could look in the future.
Jire Bademosi: Yeah. I feel there’s a lot of really good nuggets there, especially around moving from an individual contributor to more of a management role and still at the end of the day that core around really putting the users first is such a unique and important lens. And that’s important to recognize as we start to move within different roles within our respective careers.
Jire Bademosi:I know Evelyn not necessarily on the community side, but even on the engineering side, as you’re growing your team a lot even this year, how you’re starting to also think about how to build a team, well also maybe not doing the hands on work that you were doing probably earlier in your career.
Evelyn Masso: Yeah. That’s going to be easier because I’ve been doing management for a minute and I’m not as good as a quarter than I used to be. Part of it is just literally not being able to do it as much anymore. And also I’ve been at Discord about six or so seven months now. And while I’ve worked in tech stack that are similar, previously in my career, I haven’t really worked very much in the Discord code base itself.
Evelyn Masso: I rely on members of the team a lot when it comes to actually getting things done on the engineering side of things. As we think about growing the team and having more folks come on one of the big things that I’m, I guess working through with the teams and with myself is like, “How do I hand off more of the running the team parts too?” Kind of taking it even more of a strategic, further step back over time.
Evelyn Masso: That’s really helping me lean into my skills around coaching and mentorship, which are pretty big reasons why I became a manager in the first place, but those are things that I to do anyways. It’s really just kind of doubling down even more on those skills.
Evelyn Masso: And I think an important part of that is also learning what I need from folks that I work with directly to trust them and build trust with them and what they need for me to have trust in me. I can earn and build that trust reciprocally, and kind of having an active dialogue about what those things are and understanding those things take time too.
Jire Bademosi: Absolutely. Time. I feel that’s such a important phrase to really close with and thinking about how important that is when we’re thinking about this work. I just saw a note here and a question from Des, specifically for Chloe.
Jire Bademosi: And the question is, Chloe, what do you do to organize your time? You seem very busy and I guess Des wants to hear all the code, all of the awesome hacks that you might have in order to stay organized with all of the work that you’re leading.
Chloe Shih: Oh my God, I am the ultimate organizational catfish. It’s not true. I think that I struggle with this a lot, because there’s simply way too many things. And I think in product, there’s way too many priorities and everyone is asking you to do… Pull you in different directions. And you also interface with all kinds of teams and there’s little tasks to do all the time. I think that at the end of the day, there are a lot of different prioritization hacks.
Chloe Shih: You can use the Eisenhower decision making matrix, figure out what’s your high priorities. What’s urgent. There’s so many frameworks decide whether something should be done first or not. You can use task may management and to-do lists, but I’m really simple brained. And I just have a very… If I can only do one to three things today, what are those things?
Chloe Shih: And then I need to sit down and do it. I might also think about for the tasks that can only be done by me, what are those things? And for every anything else, can I delegate to someone else and parallel process the tasks and not let myself be the bottleneck?
Chloe Shih: Otherwise, I feel really bad about myself and my productivity, but I think the answer is setting boundaries and expectations on what should your scope of work be. Yeah. I think the answer is not to do everything and not to do everything as fast as you can is just picking out what to do as the art, which I’m still figuring out. But I think everyone struggles with it. Yeah. Everyone has their own strengths. But if anyone on the panel has crazy life hacks, I am all ears-
Jire Bademosi: Listen-
Chloe Shih: Looking for advice.
Jire Bademosi: You and me, both Chloe. You and me both. I might actually pop that question over to Mindy and Evelyn in case y’all have any hacks. I know Mindy you all use Asana really well on your team. And I think is a really good hack, but not to frame your question.
Mindy Day: Code lifelong struggle as well. I do think, yeah. Plus one to all the things that Chloe said, and so often we do put off the most impactful work in favor of just busying ourselves because it’s always so many other things to do. It’s so easy and comfortable to just let yourself be like, “Oh, there’s no time to do that thing that I kind of don’t want to do,” even though it might be the most impactful.
Mindy Day: I think once a quarter we try and do this little exercise where you just make a grid. Most impactful, most effort, least impactful least effort. And it’s a really just brutal way to just assess the facts about sometimes the high effort things that we are doing, even if we love doing them, aren’t having the most impact. And it’s just a way to kind of review that and reviewing your calendar too, to see where you’re spending your time.
Mindy Day: These things are good practices to start doing to just assess because you got to focus.
Jire Bademosi: Yes. Yes to that. And tomorrow is Thursday at Discord and Thursday everywhere else in the world. But on Thursdays we have a no meeting Thursday which started off as a pilot as a way for us to really try to have more, both autonomy on our schedules, but also thinking about how we might be able to prioritize. I will be the first admit that sometimes end up scheduling a couple meetings here or there, but for the most part, it’s a pretty cool practice. I think just emphasizes that hopeful practice of being diligent with our time.
Jire Bademosi: Evelyn, not to put you out there too, but I’m curious if you have any hacks where the folks who are curious.
Evelyn Masso: Yeah. It’s really a simple hack. I use a paper to-do list and I just cross things off as I do them. And then if I haven’t done something for a while and it’s way back at my to-do list, I will ask myself like, “Is this actually important? Did I not do it because it’s not important or it can happen later or am I avoiding it?” And then I can kind of think like, “Okay, no, you really have to go do that. You’ve been avoiding it for 10 to do items.” Or be like, “Okay. Actually that wasn’t something that you really needed to worry about.” But for some reason, for me, having it be written on a paper and getting to cross things off and just have it go a forever list kind of has been really helpful.
Jire Bademosi: Absolutely. And as I think about all of the lightning talks that we had today, where we were able to hear a little bit from various parts of the company. I think something that resonated with me was also hearing Kelsey’s talk around mistakes or lessons that we might have learned in our career, whether it’s either currently or in recent past or a long time ago or early on in our careers.
Jire Bademosi: Are there any lessons or words of wisdom that you’d to leave the folks here with? I think it would be great to hear from each of you because you have so many different perspectives that could really resonate with folks as we bring our leadership panel to a close today. I’m happy to start as well.
Mindy Day: Yeah, you start.
Jire Bademosi: Okay. Perfect. I mean, I think for me some of the lessons that I’ve learned or one, my mom always told me this, but from a very early age, the worst they can say is no. And that really has helped me a lot, especially when I was starting a non-profit organization out of my college dorm room. Everyone was starting actual for-profit startup. And I was like, “Oh, I’m going to start a non-profit.” You automatically have no money to be made.
Jire Bademosi: I think knocking on doors, figuring out how to get through all of the no’s really taught me a lot and built a thicker skin in me as far as what’s possible and what’s not. And then how I apply that in a corporate lens is sometimes that really gives me some strength as far as like, what is and isn’t possible.
Jire Bademosi: And I always say that, especially in the tech world, it’s Disneyland, it’s make believe and that none of these companies existed when I was five years old. So all of what we can do is really up to us and our innovation and our persistence to be able to really reach what it is that we want to. I feel those are some of those lessons that even from a young age that I still apply to myself today. Go ahead.
Chloe Shih: I can share, I guess a nugget of wisdom. I guess I’m trying to frame it as if I were to tell my younger self, give her some advice, what would it be? And I think that for so long in school and college and how I viewed the world society and work, I’ve always kind of acclimated towards the societal norm. And I always said, “I need to do that because everyone’s doing that.”
Chloe Shih: I think that I was so obsessed with someone else’s system of beliefs that when I finally went to go explore the things that I really enjoyed, and I discovered what I did and didn’t like, and I found my own voice. I just wish I didn’t blindly follow as much. And I wish I questioned more.
Chloe Shih: I wish I challenged myself to really think whether I like what I’m doing and whether it’s the right thing and what it gives to myself and every day is really precious. And I know that some exploration, it requires some exploration for myself to get to that point of deciding what something means to me. But protecting my time and protecting my intentions and how I want to develop and protecting who I want around me and the problems I want to face every day, I wish I took more intentional steps earlier. Yeah.
Jire Bademosi: All great advice. Curious, Evelyn and Mindy, any last words, or if you were to speak to younger self or other lessons along the way that you’d to share with folks? All right. Well-
Mindy Day: Oh, sorry.
Jire Bademosi: Oh, go ahead.
Mindy Day: I was trying to give Evelyn… Evelyn wanted to go. Younger self…
Mindy Day:I think in tech things move very quickly and you finish one project while you are working on another and encouraging yourself just to pause and reflect on far you have gone and how much you have learned even in a month, six months, 12 months, just to give yourself some grace and some kindness with learning new things constantly. It’s very tiring.
Mindy Day:And I think burnout is so prevalent in tech. So making saying those boundaries like Chloe mentioned, reflecting on truly how much you have learned even though you are moving so quickly. And then some of the things that I have written on a sticky note, just remind us for myself every day is just to have fun.
Mindy Day:We get paid to work on these problems together and challenges and anyone who can make each day coming to work a little more fun, makes everyone’s job a little easier.
Mindy Day: Saying no and remembering that you are the expert and they hired you for a reason and they’re paying you for your time and your expertise. And to just be more confident in what your gut is telling you, because so often even now after doing it for 10 years, I still feel an imposter or question whether I should speak up and I need that daily reminder to trust myself.
Jire Bademosi: Amazing.
Evelyn Masso: One other thing I’ll add too which is, I feel a lot of time in my career I’ve been focused on what is the problem? Or what is broken that I need to work on to fix? Whether at work or something I’m working on for myself and a big part of things recently for me have been…
Evelyn Masso: That’s a way to approach things but also making more space for being grateful and appreciating the things that are good or okay, as well alongside of things that you want to change or dig into more. So having a little more space for that is something I think is really important.
Jire Bademosi: Amazing. Well, first off, I just want to thank you all for the time that you’ve shared with us. The gems that you dropped. To all the folks in the audience, major thank you for being here today with us. The time for our leadership panel has come to a close. So big thank you, Chloe, Evelyn and Mindy for your time today.
Jire Bademosi: However, we have a few more things in store and that’s one introducing my colleague in bringing up Lauren to the stage. And then I believe after that, there is a networking session that Andy will be talking a little bit about later. But again, thank you, Chloe and Mindy and Evelyn for your time. And I will be passing the mic over to Lauren. And I think this also ends my monopoly of the microphone today, but thank you all for having me and hopefully I’ll get to see you all. (silence).
Angie Chang: Hi. It seems we’re waiting for Lauren or I could find her. Okay. We’re waiting for Lauren to join. There we’re. All right.
Jire Bademosi: I think we might be having a few technical issues with promoting Lauren up, but I think we can at least do our best and see if we can try and bring her up again. But I don’t see her in the attendees. So Angie, maybe we can quickly tag teams so that we can at least open up the networking rooms while we have folks.
Angie Chang: Okay, cool. So I guess what I could do is say thank you for joining us for our first virtual Girl Geek X virtual event. Jire you are an amazing host. Thank you so [crosstalk] all the things. And first of all, tell us about Discord and then hosting Beena and having a panel and just entire event was this is amazing.
Angie Chang: I think we all can feel the warm energy of the Discord women. So I think everyone’s energized to learn more about working at Discord. We’ll be emailing out jobs to everyone who’s registered as well as a link to a survey. So be able to look out for that.
Angie Chang: We enjoy having Jire, Beena, Megan, Kelsey, Natalie, Nancy, Evelyn, Mindy, Chloe, and maybe Lauren will be joining us to talk about recruiting. But in the meantime, we will be having some networking. Starting now we will be putting people into breakout rooms.
Angie Chang: We’ll be hopping off this webinar and going into Zoom breakout rooms where you’ll be meeting four to six, maybe other girl geeks. Whoever can stay for another half an hour or so. And we’ll shuffle the rooms three times. So you’ll be in each room for about 20 minutes. And you’ll see a one minute warning when it’s time to wrap up and we’ll be putting the link into the chat that you can click on and go to the Zoom meeting. And that way we can see you on the other side and where you can be in your rooms.
Angie Chang: You can have your own little name that you change to say whatever we wanted to say. And yeah, will, you’ll just see you in that Zoom meeting. And if you can hang out with us, please do. If not, if you’re on the East Coast, you can go to bed. You’ve had a long day. So thank you so much for being with us. And we will see you in the Zoom breakout rooms, if you would to continue chatting with girl geeks. Other than that, yeah.
Jire Bademosi: Thank you so much, Angie. Thank you to the Girl Geek X community. We’re incredibly honored to be here with you all. You will be hearing from us. If you are interested in roles, we really would love to meet you and get to know you and hear your stories and hope to find a role that’s right for you.
Jire Bademosi: We have curated a few roles that Angie will be sharing with you all in the next day or so as well as an open opportunity. Maybe you don’t see the role that you’re really passionate about. That is totally fine. We do have an open ended roles so we can make sure to hopefully engage as many of you as possible. But again, thank you so much for your time. We hope you learned something new.
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Team “Magic School Bus” (pictured, above) demo their mental wellness app to Girl Geek X volunteer experts who braved a rainy commute to CCPA school in Oakland, California for a memorable volunteer activity on December 15, 2021.
Girl Geek X community volunteers were warmly welcomed to an incredible interactive event at CCPA school, and provided with instructions and goals for the event, along with a summary of projects.
CCPA educator Claudia Walker said, “The volunteers spent about 50 minutes with two groups of seniors and provided invaluable feedback about the students’ app ideas and research methods. It was especially nice to hear them share their experiences in industry and give insight on what it takes to build an app and pitch a new idea.”
Students received feedback from Girl Geek X community members – all subject matter experts who volunteered their invaluable time and expertise for project teams demoing apps and presenting their projects.
Girl Geek X volunteers were asked about their experience mentoring and advising the talented seniors. Lively conversations sparked and built rapport between students and volunteers.
Girl Geek X community volunteer Kelly Kitagawa (pictured, above) gives students in Project team #6 feedback.
Overall, Girl Geek X volunteers shared unanimous feedback about how impressive, creative, resourceful, and well-guided the student projects are progressing.
Project team #4 “Lucky 6ucess” (pictured, above) impressed Girl Geek X volunteers with their ECO app project actively combating climate change and bringing reform.CCPA staff and Girl Geek X volunteers debrief to provide insights to help CCPA staff refine their instruction.
This guest blog post was written by Girl Geek X community volunteer Annie Chang.
