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Technical Recruiter Amrit Bhatti welcomes sold-out crowd to Postmates Girl Geek Dinner in San Francisco, California.

Speakers:
Amrit Bhatti / Technical Recruiter / Postmates
Allie Morse / Director of Launch & Expansion / Postmates
Heather Pujals / Growth Product Manager / Postmates
Samantha Phillips / Product Manager / Postmates
Christine Song / Software Engineer / Postmates
Bianca Curutan /Mobile Engineer / Postmates

Transcript of Postmates Girl Geek Dinner – Lightning Talks:

Amrit Bhatti: Thank you, ladies, and thanks, Angie, for helping organize all this. We are really excited to have you all here. This is me. I’m Amrit Bhatti, I’m a technical recruiter here at Postmates. I’m super excited to have you all here. This is just amazing seeing you all. A huge roomful of ladies. All these faces that I don’t know, this is something that we always want to see here, which is amazing to be able to actually make it happen.

Amrit Bhatti: Being in recruiting here, a big thing that we care about at Postmates is diversity and talent, specifically when it does come to women. Being able to partner with Girl Geek and do this for the first time is amazing. We are really excited and thank you guys all. I know that this is a huge thing for not just the recruiting team but for Postmates in general. Bastian, our CEO, this is one of his biggest priorities as well.  Thank you. Hope you guys have a good night.

Amrit Bhatti: A little agenda about what to expect. We will do some talks with these lovely ladies over here, some lightning talks. After that, we will do Q&A, so please hold your questions to the end. Following that, we will do dessert. We have dessert and some wine at the end and we will also be giving out swag bags, so make sure you grab something at the end. But prior to actually diving into all the talks, if you haven’t heard of Postmates, wanted to give you guys a brief little introduction before we start the talks.

Amrit Bhatti: Postmates, if you haven’t heard of us, we are the leaders in on demand. Our mission is to get you anything, anytime, anywhere. A little history about us, we were founded back in 2011. We launched in San Francisco in 2012 and we started expanding after that.

Amrit Bhatti: We’ve been growing really rapidly since then. We’re in about 550 cities in the US. We’re in Mexico as well, which is awesome because one of our lovely ladies over there helped us make that happen. We’re at the point of fulfilling about 3 million deliveries, actually more than that a month and 4, all right, we had 4, 4 million deliveries a month. Always growing. Now, we’re at the point of actually giving people access to over 200,000 merchants on the platform. The growth has been insane in the past few years.

Amrit Bhatti: We’re continuing to grow and we couldn’t have done that without all of the talent that we have here, including the people that we’re about to hear from. First of, will be Allie Morse.

Director of Launch and Expansion Allie Morse speaking at Postmates Girl Geek Dinner.

Allie Morse: Thank you. Awesome. Well, thank you guys so much, all of you, for being here. As I said, this is awesome. It’s so incredible to see so many faces, especially women here at Postmates tonight. My name is Allie and I lead Launch and Expansion here at Postmates. That basically means that all of the new cities, the new geographic expansions that we do both domestically and internationally fall under the purview of myself and the stellar teams that I get to work with every day. I personally feel super honored.

Allie Morse: We have many, many incredible leaders, female leaders especially, here at Postmates and we want more. Yeah, I’m very excited to talk to you guys about this today. It was funny. I was like, “Okay, getting inspired for this talk about leadership. You know, maybe I should start with my slides.” I was like, “All right, what am I going to put on my slides about leadership?”

Allie Morse: I decided, I don’t know how many of you guys are familiar with some of those free stock images sites, so I went to pexels.com and I typed in leadership and this was one of the first photos that showed up. I was like, “Cool, cool, all right. He’s a dude. Could be your dad, maybe your grandpa. Very authoritative, cool, corporate dude.” This was another one of the photos. I’m really into this guy’s mustache. The whole, the red tie, I’m like, “Okay, he’s got it going on.” To be fair, there were a few other photos but this next one was my absolute favorite. Legitimately, there’s someone, either the photographer, whoever was categorizing these photos that thought that a photo of a dude’s crotch would be a really good representation of leadership.

Allie Morse: Anyways, kind of to start us off on this note, I love this quote from Sheryl. She gets a lot of exposure and not everyone loves everything she says but this is one of my favorite quotes. “In the future, there will be no female leaders. There will just be leaders.” I don’t know about you guys and the women in this room but at least for myself, when I wake up and I go to work every day, I’m not like, “Ooh, I am a female executive going to work.” I don’t really think of myself as like, “Ooh, a woman in the workplace.”

Allie Morse: Sometimes I think about that when I’m 1 of 10 people in a room and I’m the only woman or like 2 women in a meeting of 10, 15, 20 people. But I don’t know about you guys, on a day to day basis, I just try to be me and that’s what serves me the best, actually. I have a broad crazy career. I won’t go too much into it but I studied actually international development and public policy, a Master’s in Human Rights, always thought I’d work for the UN and then fell into working in tech.

Allie Morse: About six, seven years ago, building an online real estate classifieds out of Africa with Rocket Internet and then, moved to the Bay Area about three and a half years ago. It’s funny…

Allie Morse: I get sometimes questions, either at events like this, “Allie, how did you climb the corporate ladder to success in tech?” For me, I mean, I think that question’s quite funny. I definitely did not climb any corporate ladders. I kicked it and burned them down. For me, it’s all about being authentic. Right? I don’t always wear pink. Only on Wednesdays but I love that you guys got that joke. But sometimes, I mean, I was at a conference a few weeks ago and it’s like a sea of dudes and they’re blue and black suits. I’m like, “I’m going to wear orange because that’s just obviously, I’m going to stick out anyways. I’m one of the only chicks in this room, so I’m just going to wear a bright color.”

Allie Morse: Again, this is very stupid token, you can wear whatever the hell you want to work is one of the nice things about working in the valley but I think the whole point is just being you. People might not like you all the time but they’ll definitely respect you and if you get shit done, they’ll want to work with you.

Allie Morse: I’d say that would be one of the major takeaways for me in my career. The second being mentors and that means formal mentors. I’ve been really fortunate to work for some incredible people, some incredible managers and bosses that really took a deep investment in my personal and professional development, as a person and as a professional.

Allie Morse: Again, you’re lucky, I think, if you can, at some point in your career … Someone gave me this advice when I was 23 and I had a Master’s in something I didn’t want to do and they said, “You know, be sure to work with somebody at some point in your career that really wants to make you better.” They said, “Especially in the next 10 years,” which again, I think is sort of a moot point but the idea of something as basic as how you write emails, how you lead meetings, how you structure your thoughts and communicate. I think those things are incredibly important and I think a lot of us, when we’re working at startups, we’re building the plane as we’re flying it, so it can be really difficult sometimes to build feedback into your cultures but it’s incredibly important. It’s not just about feelings, right? It’s a huge opportunity to get that feedback from above, beside, below.

Allie Morse: I think that, again, the role of formal mentors and then, also thinking about a mentor community in more informal ways, right? Peers, colleagues, friends, people that can sort of fill some of that place for you when it comes to solving a really difficult part, problem, obviously, different career changes, I think that’s incredibly valuable and something that’s really been super important for me. Lastly, I think it’s interesting and I got asked this question a little while ago and I thought it was such a cool question. This young woman asked me, “How do I ask for more responsibility at work? How do I get a promotion? How do I sort of step up to the next level?” I think, obviously, the going and talking to your manager and saying, “Hey, I’d love some feedback about how I’m doing, how I can grow and improve and this is what I would ultimately would love to do in my career. These are the kinds of problems I think I can solve at this company.” Asking for that kind of feedback and I think simultaneously, stepping into the job that you want, right?

Allie Morse: Seeing a problem that you know how to solve, I think there’s Postmates example, there’s examples of this all across the board. People that stepped into problems that they know how to solve and then, it’s like all right, you prove it, you can do it and they let you do it. That was certainly very much the case with … I have a counterpart here that we launched Mexico together last year and none of us had really any idea what we were doing, but we figured it out and it was fun.

Allie Morse: Then, of course, very importantly, once you’ve stepped into that and you’ve proven your value, obviously, making sure that you’re getting the recognition and then the compensation that comes along with the new role, the expanded responsibility, and the value that you’re bringing. That’s incredibly, incredibly important. It’s called asking for it and stepping into it and then making sure that you’re getting the recognition that you deserve. Without going over time and they’re going to have to plane me off, I’m very excited to be here, excited to hear your guys’ questions and I’m super excited for our next speaker, Heather on growth, to take it away.

Growth Product Manager Heather Pujals speaking at Postmates Girl Geek Dinner.

Heather Pujals: Thank you, Allie. Yes, we need that. Hi, everybody. Like Allie said, my name is Heather. I’m a Growth Product Manager here at Postmates. Being a Growth PM is a little bit different than being a PM on a core product team, so I want to talk to you guys today about what I’ve learned from working on a growth team, what that discipline looks like at a high level and then, how I’ve been able to turn that into a mindset, not that it’s my invention, but how I’ve applied it to my personal life and hopefully, that’s helpful to you.

Heather Pujals: Let’s get oriented. Growth, like I said, is a discipline. It’s massive. When you’re trying to grow a business, you have a lot of tools in your toolkit that will help you do so. You have things like app store optimization, brand partnerships, email marketing, social media, just to name a few, and all of these things to add on a layer of complexity, can be used as switches. They’re off, then you turn them on. Very simple. That’s usually when you don’t have a lot of resources or your company’s at an earlier stage. But you can also use all these tools as dials that can be very finely tuned and can take a lot of time and can be very intricate to work with.

Heather Pujals: How do you actually become an expert in all of these things? Whether they’re switches, whether they’re dials, these millions of tools in your growth toolkit, the answer is, you can’t, predictably. The point is to not get overwhelmed. Right? Oops. There we go.

Heather Pujals: You can pare down this whole discipline of growth into this one neat little cycle of four stages. Research, experiment, learn, and iterate. It’s a little bit different from the core product cycle of build, measure, learn, which a lot of you have have probably heard.

Heather Pujals: The research phase here, when you’re … Excuse me. When you’re trying to grow a business is about looking at context, like where do you stand now? From a quantitative standpoint and a qualitative standpoint. This includes looking at your conversion funnel. Where are your customers dropping off, where are they converting and comparing that with how your users are actually interacting with the app on a human level, so you can do things like user interviews and usability testing.

Heather Pujals: In an ideal world, your quantitative and qualitative data will align and be able to present an area of opportunity for you. One example of this is let’s say, we’ll use Postmates as an example and your customers are going through this whole session, they’re opening the app, they’re looking at a merchant, they’re adding things to their cart and they get to checkout. People are disproportionately just abandoning session. Why is that happening?

Heather Pujals: This leads you to the experiment phase. Now that you’ve identified an area that you want to improve, you can set up different tests to explore what tweak can I make here or there, that will actually move this metric that I care about. Let’s say I want to add a, that take a picture of your credit card feature. That should simplify things. Let’s say we’re just trying to knock out some work that people do and my hypothesis is that if I make it easier and faster to check out, more people will do so.

Heather Pujals: I set up a test, run it for a while, some people are in a control, some people are in a test. In the learning phase, I’m going to go in and compare my results of that experiment with my hypothesis. Did things go as I expected, were they totally unexpected and from left field or were my results inconclusive? In the latter case, maybe I need to run the experiment again, instead of continuing. But let’s say we learned something and this improved. This test that I ran, my changing that credit card feature, improved conversion by .5%. That kind of sounds like nothing but in the growth world, that can be huge. What we’re going to do now is we have the power to go and change our product if we want to.

Heather Pujals: Sometimes in growth, sometimes we’re more of a consulting team to a core product team and we aren’t actually changing the product that much ourselves. Sometimes the things we experiment on are what paid advertising channels are the most cost efficient. What are the best times to send emails? All of this stuff we’re putting through this growth cycle and learning about how to optimize all of these metrics exactly the way we want to.

Heather Pujals: What does this mean for us as human beings outside the workplace? It means that you now have a framework for going through life and solving your own problems. It means that if you’re looking at the research phase on a personal level, you are someone who likes to ask questions, you’re concerned with what’s going on around you and why, you like to know what’s going on. Like with the election yesterday, you know, we didn’t have our heads buried in the sand. Right? We’re following along.

Heather Pujals: Then, in the experiment phase, this means that you are open to trying new things and taking risks. That’s cliché at this point. but it rings true for a reason. Right now, I’m up here running an experiment and talking to you guys. My learning phase will look like going through the reel that we have here and finding out if I spoke decently. There you go, fourth wall.

Heather Pujals: After the learning phase, then you go to iterate. Once I’ve figured out what I can do better, I’m going to practice and try it again. You know? I’m not assuming this is perfect, but you have to go through these motions in order to grow and learn and you can ultimately do this in perpetuity. I hope this was helpful for you guys. I don’t want to go over time. If I had more time, I would talk more, but I’ll be here for Q&A and I’m happy to exchange LinkedIns or Twitters with anybody after this. For now, I’d love to introduce my colleague Sam Phillips.

Product Manager Samantha Phillips speaking at Postmates Girl Geek Dinner.

Samantha Phillips: Hi. Okay. Good evening my fellow geeks. My name is Sam and I’m a Product Manager here at Postmates. My topic tonight is going to be about volunteering and leveraging whatever cool unique tech that your company is building for maybe something that it wasn’t originally intended for.

Samantha Phillips: About six months ago, I started at Postmates and one of my first company meetings was actually a presentation given by Disney Petit, who is our head of civic labs and she gave … Yeah, ooh. She gave this awesome overview of all of the volunteer projects that Postmates had been a part of and facilitates over the first half of the year.

Samantha Phillips: The second part of that was that she was introducing these new concepts that she wanted to carry out over the second part of the year. I just sat in that crowd and I was so excited just listening to her talk about this and as my previous roommate pointed out to me tonight, I did not have a history of volunteering at that time. But just hearing her speak about it was really inspiring and one of the ideas that she had was something that I was interested in. Afterwards, I immediately ran up to her and I said, “I have three weeks of Postmates experience and I would like to be on your volunteer team.”

Samantha Phillips: Thankfully, there were a bunch of other people that were interested. We got together and started thinking about how we could use the Postmates business model for this new idea. That idea is called FoodFight. What did we want to do? We set off to combat what’s been referred to as the world’s dumbest problem which, is food waste. If, as an exercise, if you guys just want to think about how many restaurants in the SoMa area and then, also, how many people you might have walked by just today on the street that are clearly in need of food, it is the dumbest problem.

Samantha Phillips: There’s probably restaurants that are throwing out food and they have people sleeping in front of their doorstep. I don’t know why but we haven’t been able to figure this out as a society and so, it’s something that we wanted to start tackling. I don’t know if you guys are familiar with Postmates, but we are really good at getting one thing from point A to point B and for me, personally, that’s my favorite Indian food restaurant in the Mission to my apartment. Shout out to Pakwan. They’re now our partner in Postmates.

Samantha Phillips: This business model was perfect for what we wanted to solve for actually getting that surplus food to the people in need. What we actually did was we set out to leverage all the existing tools available to us. We use our delivery API product and we use our restaurant partners and we also use our awesome Postmates which without any of this dream would be a reality and what we did was we actually built a feature in the merchant app in this tablet that all of our restaurants have in store today and through just the click of a button they can actually request that a courier come to their store and pick up that surplus food. Really, the goal here was from even in my personal stint working in restaurants, you’re so physically and emotionally tired after that shift. Nothing extra is getting done. You cannot wait to go home. A lot of this food ends up just being thrown out for that reason. What I knew we needed to set out and think about was how do we make donating this surplus food as easy as it is to throw out.

Samantha Phillips: We worked on this design. There’s a group of us. there’s a blog page you guys can totally read about it. But there’s a group of us that came up with this design and this concept and what we wanted to do is just at the click of a button, you can just have someone come and take that surplus food for you. What we do in the background is we dispatch our Postmate. They go to that restaurant. We know where you are based on that tablet. We actually pass through the address of a shelter in that neighborhood that we know is taking donations.

Samantha Phillips: I’m super happy to say that after many long months, we are at a point where we’ve launched FoodFight to 250 participating Postmates partners in the LA market. Yeah. The real MVP. We have completed 45 donations to Midnight Mission in downtown LA. We’re obviously hoping to expand this as well.

Samantha Phillips: To recap, the four things that really stuck out to me about why we can make this a successful thing, one is company values. I have to plug Postmates here. I had never even heard of Pledge 1% before working here, but it’s something that we’re a part of.

Samantha Phillips: You can go to Pledge 1% and find out more, but it basically facilitates businesses that can sign up to donate 1% of their equity, product, time, or people, and Postmates is heavily involved in that, which is why we even get to have a civic labs department here. If your company hasn’t heard of that, maybe pass on the world. Sorry, that’s too soon. Thinking I had more slides. The second one is just about finding time, which you don’t work short days at Postmates but we actually do get 24 hours of volunteer time and you can always do things outside of working hours, which is what a lot of us decided to do for this project. Number three is deadlines. We actually worked back from when we knew we wanted to launch this program.

Samantha Phillips: People have really busy schedules. We all have volunteer time but it was just mostly about making enough buffer, so that everyone can get their piece done by the time that we wanted to launch and communicating that Then, step four was proof of concept. This platform is definitely usable. It is not yet scalable but we’re been able to prove its worth and I’m happy to say that we’ve gotten some numbers and good feedback and we know the iterations we want to make and we’re going to be prioritizing that in our roadmap for next year.

Samantha Phillips: Yeah, this is my shout out to encourage everyone to think about the tech that you use on a daily basis and how else could that be used in and around our community to do something better. I will leave you with my favorite motto which is, “Ask forgiveness, not permission.” Obviously, up next is Christine.

Software Engineer Christine Song speaking at Postmates Girl Geek Dinner.

Christine Song: Thank you, Sam, for that introduction. My name is Christine Song. I am a backend engineer here at Postmates, and today, I’ll be talking about learning how to learn.

Christine Song: When you look up learning how to learn on the internet, you get a lot of really cool techniques to hack your brain. You get things like, “Growth mindset versus fixed mindset.” Thank you, Heather. You also get things like, “The difference between diffuse attention and focus attention. The difference between long-term memory, short-term memory. How to keep things like mnemonics. How to keep things in your brain.”

Christine Song: But I think that the precursor to all of these learning how to learn techniques is the idea that you have to change your relationship with your brain.

Christine Song: I started learning how to code about a year and a half ago. When I had first started learning how to code, I came from a purely non-technical background. I was working in a restaurant industry about five years before this. That entire time, nothing that I did had immediately transferable technical skills over to coding, so when I decided, “Oh, I want to learn how to code,” this is kind of what my brain, up here on this slide, told me.

Christine Song: My brain had a … this little human up here is the electrical impulse that represents the electrical impulse that travels to my brain as I think and the moment it thought of engineering, it thought immediately of math. Historically, my experience in math is not the best. The moment I associate anything to math, my brain kind of went into a haze and it started thinking, “Oh, incompetent because you never in your past have ever been good at math, so why do you think you can do this now?” Which immediately leads to, “I can’t do this.” I’m going to have to find out where it is that I’m pointing to. Cool.

Christine Song: When I realize that I can’t do something, I like to default to three different modes to alleviate my stress, which is either, one, “Screw this, I’m going to the woods and live off the land.” It’s a very real feel guys. I’m not kidding right now. Or, “I’m going to meet up with friends,” or, “I’m going to go on a Netflix binge.” For the sake of this example, let’s assume that I decide to screw this. I’m going to move to the woods and live off the land, which inevitably leads me to, “YouTube rabbit hole on survival strategies,” which ultimately ends in me crying myself to sleep. If you’re curious about what happens with the other two options, they’re not that much better. I complain about my life. “I wish my life was like a movie,” and ultimately, I end up crying myself to sleep.

Christine Song: When I first decided that I’m going to learn how to code, I kind of put a pin in it and I decided, “You know what, I can’t do it.” Obviously, because this is kind of what I ended up doing but then, I had another hard day at the restaurant I was working at. I was out there, I was sitting in the parking lot. I wasn’t even in my car. I was on the sidewalk. The sidewalk was covered in trash and people’s spit from smoking cigarettes. I was sitting there very dejected and I was thinking very nostalgically, “Hey, remember that time a few weeks ago when you thought that you could be an engineer, you’re going to learn how to code?” I thought about it and I realized, like, “Oh yeah, you know, that was such a failure. You really suck.” Then, if I thought back to my actions then, I realized that I didn’t even try learning how to code.

Christine Song: What I did was I bought a multifunctional hatchet off the Amazon and then, I hung out with my friends for three weeks. I did nothing. I took no actionable steps to actually learning how to become an engineer. This, in of itself was a really big wake up moment for myself.

Christine Song: I realized that I let my brain tell me what it is that I can and cannot do. I didn’t realize that my brain was a tool in which I could use to learn things but up until this point, I have always thought what my brain told me, it had the culmination of all of my experience that I’ve ever experienced in life and up until this point, everything that I have learned up to this point was I use my brain to learn all these things and so if my brain was going to tell me I can’t do something, it’s probably right. Right?”

Christine Song: Wrong. Your brain is a tool. It’s not something that can tell you what it is that you can and cannot do. What you do with your brain is you learn how to learn, which is why there are so many cool techniques about hacking your brain, thinking about the ways that you can hack your long-term and short-term memory using mnemonics to remember things. Like Heather said earlier in her presentation, it was about learn … Wait, no. Learn, research, experiment and iterate. That is how you grow connections in your brain.

Christine Song: I try to begin. I was like, “All right. Look, what I’m doing right now isn’t really working, so I’m going to try and equate engineering with something that I’m very familiar with.” Up until this point in my life, in college I majored in philosophy and my emphasis was in logic. I was thinking, engineering has a lot of problems with words. Problems with words, essay questions, computers. It doesn’t really compute all the way through because I wasn’t actually tackling my fear of being afraid of math and thinking that anything to do with math, which is what society had told me up until this point is that if it has to do with math and you are a woman, you cannot do it.

Christine Song: It is the worst thought process think of and eventually when I realized that, I ended up discarding the general thought process that I had, the habits that I was so used to thinking and I confronted my fear of math. Math, I realized how I’ll do questions, input and output and the thing with majoring in philosophy was that my emphasis was logic. Logic, if you guys haven’t taken a logic course before, it looks just like math. You do proofs with Greek symbols and variables and you do proofs much in the way that math teachers do proof. But in my head, I was able to do logic because I equated logic with philosophy and not logic with math and therefore, I never had that fear of learning how to do logic.

Christine Song: Once I realized that my fear of math was completely irrational because like I said, your brain is a tool. What you practice thinking is what becomes true. I ended up learning more about computer programming and I ended up being able to eventually make the various slow and tenuous connections into logic and computer programming but eventually, I ended up as a paid engineer in the field in San Francisco. Thank you. Now, I’m a backend engineer here in Postmates.

Christine Song: My point is this. You can look up how to learn and you can look up what it means to hack your brain and figure out the best way to do things but before you do that, you have to change your relationship with your brain. If you don’t recognize the habits that your brain takes and you think that … like you let your brain tell you, “Oh, anything to do with math, you cannot do,” it is a habituated thought. Your brain is very much like a muscle. If you keep thinking these things, you’re going to be very good at talking yourself out of doing anything that has anything related to math.

Christine Song: However, if you realize, if you can take a step back outside of your brain and maybe draw a mind map much the way that I did while writing this talk. You realize that the things that you think that you are doing, the things that you think that you are capable of doing, if you keep thinking those things and you get power to dictate your actions, it will become true. But if you are able to take a step back and realize that isn’t the definition of who you are and you can do whatever you want because you do with your brain what you wish to do, then, you can, like me, go from a completely non-technical career into being an engineer in the field. Thank you. Up next is Bianca.

Mobile Engineer Bianca Curutan speaking at Postmates GIrl Geek Dinner.

Bianca Curutan: Hi everyone. Oh, that was loud. My name is Bianca. I’m a Mobile Engineer here at Postmates. I’ve been here for about one and a half years and in that time, I’ve worked on the Fleet iOS and Android apps as well as recently, the buyer iOS app. Prior to Postmates, I used to work at Fandango and Warner Brothers, where I worked on Flixster iOS and Rotten Tomatoes web.

Bianca Curutan: The point I’m trying to make by listing all these historical data is I work with product. I’m not a product manager, in case my product manager is somewhere around here, but I do work with product. A few weeks ago, I was on a panel from the Modern Product Engineer because like I said, I know product. It’s something I’ve worked on for years, it’s something I like to think I’m good at and it’s something that I can talk about.

Bianca Curutan: When I was asked to speak at this event today, I was like, “Of course I’m going to talk about product engineering, especially product engineering at Postmates.” But I guess I’m kind of jumping ahead, though. The first thing I should clarify is what is a product engineer. When most of us think of software engineers, we might think of full stack, which by definition, is the capability to execute something across the stack. Product engineer, on the other hand, is also about capability, but focused more on the end goal, the product.

Bianca Curutan: Moving on from there, at a lot of companies, especially bigger ones or some with more corporate culture, the process tends to look like this. The first step, of course, is requirements. The product manager will go to the different teams, collect their requirements, write a doc and then, deliver it out to the team.

Bianca Curutan: The next step is design. You may think of design in terms of software such as systems design or you might think of what the end user sees, like UI design. Either way, there’s not really any coding done in this phase.

Bianca Curutan: Next step is, of course, coding. Coding happens in the development and implementation phase and then, there’s testing. Testing can be internal or external. Maybe both, maybe some combination. You never know. Then, once the product is deemed complete or at least deliverable, then it is delivered out to the end users and after that, it comes back to the engineers for any bug fixes but hopefully not. Maybe just more feature additions or improvements.

Bianca Curutan: This is all well and good, but you might not be able to tell from this circular shape, but it’s more of a waterfall method, meaning it’s sequential. It doesn’t give you a lot of opportunities to jump back to previous steps or jump ahead to the next step without completing the current one and it also doesn’t provide a lot of opportunities for feedback.

Bianca Curutan: At Postmates, we like to think differently. Something that Allie mentioned is getting feedback as you grow your career, but we also like to apply it to this process. As you can see here, on a high level, it looks the same, but there’s also that inner loop for the feedback loop. Ideally, with this feedback loop, you’d only want to jump back one step or so, trying to get feedback as early as you can in the process. However, something nice about startup life or Postmates life is you have the flexibility to jump around. You might go requirements, design development, oh wait, there’s something that needs to change, and jump back to the requirements phase. That’s totally fine. I think.

Bianca Curutan: Some examples of how to provide feedback at Postmates might be through discussions, it might be through commenting on poll requests or request for change or like I mentioned before, requirements if you want to try to grab those changes early. It could also include just improving features and reporting bugs.

Bianca Curutan: The nice thing about this feedback loop is between product and engineering specifically, there is ideally agreement between the feedback that you want to provide but sometimes, there’s disagreement and that’s totally okay. That disagreement provides healthy tension between the product and engineers, which in the long run can make the team more effective and more productive. At Postmates, the product teams are fairly small, so how we deal with that healthy tension can actually make a really big impact on the team and on the company.

Bianca Curutan: The last change I made here was measuring outcomes. Delivering a product is all well and good. We believe in it. We think it’s cool, but what do the users think. It’s really important to measure the outcome to be able to plan for the future and iterate on it. Again, speaking to the previous speakers. Oop, that was it. Okay. Sorry. Back for a moment.

Bianca Curutan: I ask you again, what is a product engineer? Earlier, I just defined it as the capability to deliver an end product. However, now, I’d like to clarify that not only is it the ability to deliver an end product, it’s also the contributions to be involved in the conversation that helps shape that product.

Bianca Curutan: Okay, so before I go, one last thing I’d like to mention is open source. Contributing to open source can be done in two ways. You can either start a project yourself and open it up to the community or you can contribute to an existing project. There are so many benefits to contributing to open source, but among them, of course, is gaining experience. You can deepen your understanding of the technology, you can gain morale and you can improve your reputation in the tech community or build a reputation in the tech community.

Bianca Curutan: Luckily, at Postmates we have or have had software engineers and other contributors who do do that. Some of them have since started their own projects, to which I have a link to here. I do encourage you all to check it out, maybe contribute on your own. No pressure, either way.  Yeah, that’s it. Thank you for giving …

Amrit Bhatti: Yeah, go ahead and take your seats, ladies. Anybody have a question because I can start walking over now? It doesn’t matter who it’s to. We can figure it out. All right. I’m going to need that hand again because I don’t see you. There you go. Thank you. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

Audience Member: Really good slides and very engaging. All of you did a really good job. I was wondering if normally, the slide decks are shared from the Girl Geek Dinners? Yeah.

Amrit Bhatti: That is a good question. I’m not 100% sure. Angie or anyone from Girl Geek, do we typically share these slides after the fact? Okay. I think we probably just need to sync up with Postmates to see if we’re open to sharing everything that we have on them and then, I can always blast it out to everyone that RSVP’d if we’re okay with it. All right.

Audience Member: Thank you. Thank you guys all for chatting. That was lovely. Allie, one of the things you mentioned was that it’s really important to be your authentic self. Have you ever run into a time where being your authentic self has worked against you and if so, have you had to adjust?

Allie Morse: Well, I know it’s shocking to think that somebody might not like me. There’s totally a few people. Yeah, that’s a great question. Damn it, Belle, I thought you’d give me an easy one. No. It’s really funny. I definitely have had the experience where … Yeah, actually, most certainly, where there was something that I thought I really wanted in my career, for example, a certain position or a certain amount of responsibility or something specifically around, “Oh, this is going to be so amazing. Once I get here in my career,” right? Where you feel like you can’t be authentic in order to get there. It’s funny. Once you get there, you’re like, “Well, this is what I thought I wanted and this is actually not what I want at all. I don’t like this at all.”

Allie Morse: To be honest, I think even when sometimes it’s more difficult, actually, having to maybe be something that’s not the right fit, either a role or a company or a team and say, “You know what, this actually isn’t going to work for me.” It can be really painful and really difficult, but I think it’s so worth it because if you’re yourself, even if it takes you longer to get to the “place” you want to go, it feels so much better once you’re there because you’re yourself. Right? That’s the greatest gift, I think, I could ask for is getting to wake up every day and show up and be myself instead of pretending like I’m someone I’m not.

Audience Member: Hi, I liked your answer by the way. This is for Heather. You talked about all of the traditional levers in growth hacking that you can pull but I’m wondering where you get inspiration for new ideas and pushing the envelope in your products.

Heather Pujals: Thank you for the question, first of all. Like I touched on a little bit in my talk, what I really like about gathering insights is that perfect marriage of quantitative and qualitative data. I think, one faux pas that a lot of teams accidentally take part in is leaning a lot more on your quantitative data. It’s really easy. It’s very accessible nowadays. Anyone can look at it and start making assumptions but I think it’s really important to actually listen to your users. Again, that’s cliché. Everyone says, “The user is our number one thing.” But actually going out and doing user testing and observing people interacting with your product, whether you’re recording sessions just watching them use it, I think that is how you get a lot more insight and you can actually tackle things that are really, really relevant and ultimately move numbers as well as provide a better experience. Thank you.

Audience Member: Hi, thank you guys for all speaking. It was a really interesting and diverse set of experiences. This question’s actually for Christina. First of all, I’m a USC alum also, so fight on. I also just recently graduated from a coding bootcamp. Given that this is your first, it sounds like it’s your first job as a software engineer, how are you dealing with the feelings of impostor syndrome in your first role?

Christine Song: Yeah. Absolutely. I think that impostor syndrome is something that specifically plagues bootcamp quite a lot and I think that a lot of what it is, is knowing what it is that you have to focus on. If you’re at a software engineering company, you’re assigned tickets. Forgetting all of the outside pressure that is applied on you, just focus on what’s in front of you. Your only focus and your only job is to do the things that you were assigned to do to the best of your ability, so that when people do ask you a question about your work, you can answer those questions and you research everything so thoroughly that you’re confident in what you’re saying. I think that when you take a step back and you think of the bigger picture and you’re like, “Oh, crap. I’m a woman, I’m in a tech company. Oh crap, how did I get here?” Because my background wasn’t technical in any way whatsoever.

Christine Song: The only way I am able to get through that fear, “I don’t belong here or I’m not good enough for this,” is just looking at what it is that you’re doing and just focusing entirely on it. Don’t let the outside influences distract you from what it is that your job is. Don’t let anyone tell you what you can and cannot do. Just focus on what you’re doing and you’ll be fine.

Audience Member: Hi. Thanks everybody who spoke. I want to find about FoodFight. If there’s a way that we can help amplify that when it’s time to spread the message, I’m connected to several cities and several countries, and would love to make that available and accessible.

Samantha Phillips: That’s awesome and it also puts a little bit added pressure on us too. Like I mentioned, that scalability comment earlier. No, but I would love to talk more. I’ve actually had a couple of people come up and speak today to me about something similar and I know that this concept is floating around a lot and there’s a couple different players in that space. I think that there are a few different mediums that people are doing. Sometimes, people are just doing the deliveries and sometimes people are offering moving those products from place to place but yeah, would love to hear more because I think that obviously, we all want to grow this concept and the concept of hunger is everywhere. Yeah, please come find me.

Audience Member: Hi. Thank you to everybody who spoke. I found all your stories really interesting. This question’s specific for Christine. I loved your mind map. It was a really great personal way to understand your journey. I’m curious, what was the original spark that made you think that you were interested in doing engineering and doing coding in the first place? Where did that spark come from to get you into the spiral of, “Oh my God, I can’t do it?”

Christine Song: Right. I majored in philosophy like I said and as my emphasis was in logic, we took a lot of advanced logic courses in my senior year of college. I was the only philosophy major in my class, which was surprising in and of itself because I didn’t know any other majors that studied logic. It turns out, everyone else in my class were Comp Sci majors.

Christine Song: Through some conversations asking my classmates why are you guys taking this class, what is the reason you’re here? They told me things like, “Everything in computer’s programming relies on the very basic fundamentals of logic.” Everything you do is with logic gates. I was just super excited to find something I could do with my major because otherwise, I was going to end up in the restaurant industry for the rest of my life and that’s not what I wanted.

Christine Song: That’s what began my journey into the coding industry. That’s what sparked my interest and then, after doing some research on boot camps and getting those initial assessment tests to determine whether or not you’re good enough for software engineering. That’s kind of where I started getting my fear of, “Oh crap, this is way too much like math. There’s no way I can be able to do it.” From then, it was the entire journey that I had described earlier. But yeah, it was primarily from my major.

Audience Member: Hi. Thank you so much for awesome presentations. I have a question for Samantha. My question is about, as we all know, Postmates operate in a very competitive environment. Anyone who Googles a restaurant and try to order a delivery or saw a long list of similar services, you as a Product Manager, how you build your product vision in this highly competitive environment to make the product stand out, come out with new features. Maybe you can share your experience. Thank you.

Samantha Phillips: Yeah. No, that’s a great question. I do do other stuff outside of FoodFight for Postmates, so thank you. No, it’s something that I think we’ve all touched on a little bit, like Heather most recently. Understanding what that differentiator is because like you mentioned, there are some other delivery services out there and what sets you apart and what makes you different and I think that my personal story for Postmates, I think I was one of the first adopters. I thought the concept was incredible and was the first one that I had heard about. For me, it was always a dream to work at a company that I absolutely loved using the product on top of everything else. I think that you’re always looking at that.

Samantha Phillips: I previously was on the merchant team. I just switched over into other one, but most of my experience here is on merchant, which is a team that’s dedicated to focusing on those relationships with the restaurants. It’s something that is important to us and has a lot of other benefits for the product on the line. You hear a lot of feedback from those restaurants when they finally know that, “Oh, that guy that keeps coming in to ask for an order, he’s actually not eating all that food himself. He’s working with Postmates. You start to hear a lot of the feedback and you start to understand, there’s these restaurants down there working with four or five different delivery service partners. You go into their store and you see five different tablets set up. They are the best people to go and talk to, to get that information.

Samantha Phillips: Actually, another Product Manager, Sharon, who also works at Postmates has been going into those stores and talking to them about the what the difference is between those different tablets and getting that direct feedback. I still think that, that’s one of the best ways to understand what your product roadmap is.

Samantha Phillips: You also, I will say, what the caveat … This is a long-winded answer but the caveat there is you don’t want to just be building your product for exactly what people are telling you about because you’re going to end up only building your product for your existing customer base. You have to continue to think about what is the next step. What are people going to want? We solve this one problem and that’s awesome. We’re happy today but why will they be upset tomorrow and you kind of have to try to look around that corner and think about what’s going to come in the future and what people will want to have solved next.

Audience Member: Hello. Thank you again. This question is for Allie. I would like to know more about, you mentioned about mentorship, which is very important. I would like to please identify one situation or some example how you identify a mentor, how you would approach and how that person has helped you throughout your career.

Allie Morse: Yeah, absolutely. It’s funny. I think one of the most formative for me was a boss that I had previously when I worked, as I said, at Rocket Internet. What was so interesting about him, so he had come from a very strong culture of feedback. Again, it wasn’t my first job but you know I’ve been working at least four or five years, but he responded to some emails that I was writing and was like, “Allie, this is how exactly how you want to write an email.” I know this sounds so ridiculous but it was very, very helpful. He helped me with some really basic tools around structuring your time, around structuring your thoughts, being very, very clear in meetings and in presentations. It was funny, though. I never thought of him as sort of a mentor beyond a manager and he was a great manager and a great boss but I didn’t necessarily think like, “Okay, when I leave, this guy’s going to be on my side,” but I was really, really almost pleasantly surprised when I left that role and that company, yeah, just how generally supportive he is. The one thing I would say too is like sometimes, I won’t talk to him for over a year. We live on different continents.

Allie Morse: It’s great if you have a mentor, where oh, you go and you have coffee once every six months or something like that but I think kind of being realistic that, okay, that was a more formal relationship, right? He had been my manager. Now, if I genuinely have a question or I mean, obviously, references he’s really great at but beyond that, right? Just knowing that, that’s there and then trying to cultivate that relationship and just sort of letting them, I think, happen a bit more naturally as opposed to thinking like, “Okay, a mentor is somebody. I’ve got to find them this and then, we’re going to go for coffee once a month and they’re going to do all these things for me,” having those expectations. I think, letting it happen naturally has worked for me.

Audience Member: Thank you. Besides hyper local problems that you’re solving for on both sides of your marketplace, are there any other overall trends or any other key factors that Postmates tries to solve for in new products.

Bianca Curutan: Trends. What kind of trends we try to solve with new products? I feel like this is more of a product question but, I don’t know. The trends are always changing. It might be difficult to answer that one because we always try to stay modern, we always try to get feedback from the users to see what they want.

Samantha Phillips: This is going to be a three-part answer. I would say that one of the … That was a tough question, to be fair. One of the trends that I’ve seen is this concept of the last mile and Amazon talks about it a lot but these giant companies, they got really, really good at moving an item from the east coast to the west coast in the speed of light. They get to these giant warehouses and then the efficiency stops. It’s getting it from that point to the actual person’s doorstep that you are starting to see a lot of that trend come up and you’re starting to see the Amazon lockers at Whole Foods. These areas where you want to be able to just go pick up your item.

Samantha Phillips: I think that one of the differentiators of Postmates is that we have this incredible platform for the delivery API like I mentioned before where we can actually leverage the really efficient algorithms of our fleet to actually move any product from one place to another. We all know it very well, I’m sure, for getting our dinners delivered, but we do a ton of other delivery just from point A to point B and moving products that, it’s just that final mile to get it to the end consumer. I think that’s an area that we’ve been focusing on a lot too.

Heather Pujals: Sure. I’ll add to it. Might as well make it three parts. I think as far as oncoming horizons go, I think a new area that Postmates is looking into heavily is expanding our subscription service. The cool thing about working at Postmates is that we aim to be not just a product, but a lifestyle. We are here for you whenever you need us, whatever you happen to need, whatever time it is and wherever you are. I think other companies have done this very well like Amazon Prime. I’m sure a really good portion of you guys are Amazon Prime subscribers and you probably use it all the time if you’re like me. I don’t know.

Heather Pujals: Postmates is trying … One of our big goals for the next year is to grow our subscription service. You may have heard of it. It’s called Postmates Unlimited. Here’s a little plug here. For $9.99 a month, you can get unlimited deliveries and you won’t pay a delivery fee. For us, being able to get customers bought into this ongoing subscription model means that it’s more than just a one time thing. You’re not just interacting with Postmates once every few months when you remember that it’s possible. It’s, “I need something now. I can get it. I need a new T-shirt for … Well, I guess not a T-shirt. A blazer for an interview I’m going to because I am a blazer wearing person.” Or you need food, or you need an iPhone charger, whatever you need, it’s not just food. It’s not a one-time use thing and I think Postmates is really leaning into this and this is how we aim to expand and take on a lot more of the marketplace.

Audience Member: I guess this is for product and engineering but one of the demands of working in a startup is producing quickly from a product standpoint and at the earlier stages, you’re trying to do anything to satisfy your first existing customers. I guess, how do you produce quickly but also listen to existing customers but also produce proactively for all the new prospects?

Bianca Curutan: That’s a problem that we are tackling daily. On the team that I’m on, fulfillment, it actually solves all of those or works towards solving all of those. It’s a larger team, so we split up into pods exactly for that reason. One of the ones you mentioned was for onboarding new users. One pod is totally dedicated just to that. For onboarding and for whatever other features they build, that is the goal they’re working toward.

Bianca Curutan: Then, you said also listening to feedback. Depending on what the feedback is, that will go to the different pods that would be responsible for it or spread responsibility. Yeah, I don’t know. [inaudible]. That’s across all teams. That’s only one side. That’s the courier side of the business, but then, also the merchant and buyer side have similar structures that we try to listen to the feedback and we try to measure the priorities based off how important is that versus this other feature that we’re working.

Audience Member: Hi. I’m very inspired by using technology for good, especially for FoodFight. I was just wondering, how did the business case got brought up to scale because I’m assuming … Well, this is a big assumption. Might be wrong, but restaurants by the end of the day, they usually call Postmates to pick up their leftover food for the day and that’s sometimes clashes when people are getting dinner or getting things delivered back home when they’re off work. Just wondering how that whole business case came to be about and how the product was tweaked as business cases would come along with it.

Samantha Phillips: Yeah. No, that was a very real thing that we were thinking about. Just a little bit of context for what our tablet app looks like. Every restaurant gets to set what hours they’re open and then, when they’re set to be closed, we don’t just turn the tablet off. We obviously use that time to show various other things. One of the, we call them, close [inaudible] cards to whatever, too similar. But we use that for multiple different things, like we show you your stats for the day. We can post just an informational card up there and so, we wanted to take that route and just make a new type of card that actually, that’s what I showed up on that screen. That purple card that just has a button on it to request that Postmates. We had a link on there to learn more, so it could take you to the help center if you wanted more information.

Samantha Phillips: A couple of reasons we wanted to do that. One, exactly as you mentioned, you don’t know if you have surplus food at the end of the night and if you do have surplus food at the end of the night, you might want to reconsider how often you’re ordering food. But the second item is also we didn’t want to interrupt those orders that are coming in and we want the merchants to be focusing on those new orders and preparing them. We wanted to at the time make sure that it was after they were closed, after they had taken stock of everything that they had left over and after they were no longer accepting orders, then they could evaluate and make that decision then. It shows after their closed hours, so usually after business.

Amrit Bhatti: All right, so for sake of time, we’re going to be able to do two more questions and then, have to wrap it up because we do still have dessert and networking hour after the fact. One and two, and then, we’re going to have to wrap it up there unfortunately, but we’re all open to talking after, during networking hour, so you can just find us. We will be here. Sorry.

Audience Member: Hi. I think this one’s for Heather. I had a question on growth. When you’re looking in growing into a new market … Or could be for Allie. I think, you’re in growth as well. What are more of the merchants and what are things you’re looking for in a merchant that would signify that they’re a quality merchant?

Allie Morse: Sure. Yeah, it’s a great question. I think, so, obviously, merchants have very, very important part of our marketplace. We’ve got three-sided marketplace. The buyers, the merchants, and the fleet. For us, it would be we know what the general, how popular these merchants are before we even get there, right?

Allie Morse: What their web presence looks like, how popular they are, those kinds of things. We try to understand, all right how popular they are in terms of their sit down as well as their take out if we are able to ascertain that, as well as potentially the delivery and then, obviously, once we launch the new market, we know how high up they are in terms of the order volume. That helps us prioritize as well.

Audience Member: Hi. My question is for Bianca and Christine. I was wondering as a student and as someone who isn’t majoring specifically in computer science or engineering, when was it that you guys knew that you were ready to start applying for jobs? Yeah, that’s what I’m interested in.

Christine Song: I would hesitate to say that there was a very specific moment where I was like, “Oh my God, I am a software engineer. I know what I’m doing.” I think, honestly, building my first full stack application from back to front was when I started realizing like, “Oh, what computer programming is, is building a website where you pass data around and you serve up data to specific URLs.” It took, I guess, learning that I was able to do these things and understanding that people prior to me, who have also been in complete non-technical backgrounds were able to do these things was really what bolstered my confidence but it’s honestly a work in progress. The more you do, the more you learn and the more I learn, the more I know how little it is that I actually do know. But honestly, the entire process has been really exciting and I would say that if there is ever a moment where I’m like, “Oh my God, I’ve made it as a software engineer,” maybe it was getting my first job, but I don’t think that I’ve fully been there yet. I’m still learning a lot. Honestly, there isn’t a moment where you reach the goal but I think the entire process is learning. [inaudible].

Bianca Curutan: I agree. It’s kind of hard to say at what moment you feel like you’re a software engineer. If you’re asking more about interview prep tips, I’m happy to talk about that after this, but as for how I decided like, “Okay, I’m ready to start applying for jobs,” I wasn’t. I actually just kind of fell into my first software job right out of college and I wasn’t really looking for a coding job but it was an office job and they happened to need a programmer. Sometimes it just kind of happens by accident. In the end, it is just learn as much as you can. Ready or not, just jump in, see what happens and learn as you go.

Amrit Bhatti: All right. Well thank you all for the questions. Again, thank you ladies for speaking and everyone for attending and Girl Geek for partnering with us on this. As I mentioned earlier, we will do some dessert after this and we are giving out swag bags, so make sure before you leave, you grab a swag bag. But also, as I mentioned, we are hiring. The biggest thing that makes us successful here is our talent, especially the diversity that we do have in talent and the powerful women and these men, everyone that are attending here, so if you are interested, feel free to talk to anybody in a white Postmates T-shirt, any of us ladies and then, there are a handful of other people attending that are engineering managers. They have their hands up over there. Go ahead. They are excited. They want you guys here, so hang out with us and again, thanks. Have a good rest of your night.

Our mission-aligned Girl Geek X partners are hiring!

• See open jobs at Postmates and check out open jobs at our trusted partner companies.
• Find more Postmates Girl Geek Dinner photos from the event – please tag yourselves!
• Does your company want to sponsor a Girl Geek Dinner in 2021? Talk to us!

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

• See open jobs at GroundTruth and check out open jobs at our trusted partner companies.
• Does your company want to sponsor a Girl Geek Dinner in 2021? Talk to us!

GroundTruth girl geeks: Carol Chen, Lauren Stephenson, Alicia Huang, and Sarah Ohle give talks at the sold-out GroundTruth Girl Geek Dinner in Mountain View, Caliifornia.

Speakers:
Sarah Ohle / VP, Marketing Insights / GroundTruth
Alicia Huang / Senior Product Manager / GroundTruth
Lauren Stephenson / Director, HR Business Partner / GroundTruth
Carol Chen / Senior Director, Software Engineering / GroundTruth

Transcript of GroundTruth Girl Geek Dinner – Lightning Talks:

Our mission-aligned Girl Geek X partners are hiring!

• See open jobs at GroundTruth and check out open jobs at our trusted partner companies.
• Does your company want to sponsor a Girl Geek Dinner in 2021? Talk to us!

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

• See open jobs at Branch and check out open jobs at our trusted partner companies.
• Does your company want to sponsor a Girl Geek Dinner in 2021? Talk to us!

Speakers:
Mada Seghete / Co-Founder & Head of Marketing / Branch
Zeesha Currimbhoy / Director, Engineering / Branch
Deepikaa Subramaniam / Senior Software Engineer / Branch
Javeria Khan / Systems Engineer / Branch
Ann Massoud / Strategic Partner Growth / Branch

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

Mada Seghete: I’m Mada. I’m one of the founders of Branch, and I’m incredibly excited for our panel tonight. We have three amazing engineers and myself, a quasi-engineer. I used to be an engineer, and now, I kind of … I don’t do engineering anymore, but I’ll tell you about my story from engineering to where I am today. Yeah.

Mada Seghete: We’re going to have four talks and then a Q&A session and then some more mingling after. We start with Zeesha, who’s our director of engineering, and she’s incredible. Can’t wait for you to hear her story.

Director of Engineering Zeesha Currimbhoy speaking at Branch Girl Geek Dinner in Redwood City, California.

Zeesha Currimbhoy: Great. Can everyone hear me okay at the back? Thumbs up if you can hear me. Great. Thank you. I’m Zeesha. I’m one of the directors of engineering here at Branch. Who am I? I thought I’ll start off with a little blurb about who I am.

Zeesha Currimbhoy: On a more professional level, I’m currently a director at Branch where I run part of the engineering team. I’m responsible for the product backend team. I am running a search and discovery initiative where we’re basically building a pretty cool search product. I’m also responsible for part of the most of the data science organization. I’ve been at Branch over two years now, worn multiple hats just like you would at a startup, been in several roles, worked with a lot of different people. I think Branch has given me everything that I’ve been looking for so far.

Zeesha Currimbhoy: On a more personal note, I’m a daughter. I’m a wife. I’m a philanthropist by heart. I’m a mother of two adorable children, Sarah who’s four, that little one there, and Rehan who is a little over a year old. Fun fact, I had both of my kids while working at startup, so if ever anyone’s curious or is trying, just planning to start a family and is in engineering or is in a startup, feel free to come chat with me later. We can discuss everything around that.

Zeesha Currimbhoy: Last night, I was basically thinking about what I’m going to talk about, and I was reflecting on my career, and I said, “You know what, what’s kind of gotten me here? What’s made me successful?” The thing that resonated the most about this, about my journey and the thing I wanted to share with all of you is I truly believe that the thing that stands between each one of us, everyone in this room, me and every human, the thing that stands between us and success is really the fear of failure.

Zeesha Currimbhoy: The fear of failure prevents us from taking risks. It prevents us from exploring new opportunities. When I talk about failure, it’s something as simple as being scared to raise your hand in a room full of men and being able to ask that question that’s been nagging you right through because, well, you fear sounding stupid.

Zeesha Currimbhoy: How many of us have been in that situation? I most definitely have. I don’t know how many of you all have, but it’s the most common thing ever, is the fear of perception, of how people perceive us, holds us back from actually being ourselves and actually being successful.

Zeesha Currimbhoy: A little bit about my background, I was working in Evernote a long time ago, probably eight years ago and was incredibly successful there. I used to run … I was the technical leader, very comfortable in my role, and then all of a sudden, I decided I’m done with this company. I want to basically work on a product that I can impact many people’s lives. I want to work on something that people can relate to. I want to point to something and say I built that. I interviewed at only one company or a couple of companies, but I decided to take up an offer at Evernote. I was going to join their backend team, which was my experience and expertise.

Zeesha Currimbhoy: Then, a day later, the manager who I was going to report into the calls me up, and says, “You know what, we’re starting this new team. It’s called the data products team. It’s like an AI team, and we want you to be the first engineer on it.” I was like, “Oh my God, I’ve never done that before. Don’t know the space. Never done mobile development. Not worked with any Mac clients or iOS clients.” Very out of my background. I was almost going to say no. I actually said no to him. He called me a day later and said, “You know what, you interviewed really well with us. We think that you have great potential. This is an opportunity for you. Don’t let it go.”

Zeesha Currimbhoy: I thought about that, and I was very afraid to take that risk, right? It’s completely out of my comfort zone. I was going from 100,000-plus-person company to like now, a 50-person company and the first engineer of a team that they’re actually building out a strategic arm around, but I decided to take the opportunity.

Zeesha Currimbhoy: I decided to overcome that fear because I asked myself one simple question. What’s the worst that can happen? What’s the worst that’s going to happen if I take this role? The more I thought about this, I kept asking myself. I said, well, you know what, I can get fired. I can lose my job. So, what? Well, then, I’ll be out of a job. So, what? I’ll find another job, but if I don’t take this, I wouldn’t know what is on the other side, and so I decided to take that. I ended up running their search team. Eventually, I built all of their Mac lines search out right from iOS to Android, and it was an opportunity that I never regret having taken.

Zeesha Currimbhoy: Similarly, a year later from their … A year or two later, the same manager who I reported to who decided to take this risk on me, he got me in a room with the CEO and said, “You know what, we want you to actually be the VP of the augmented intelligence team, the team that we’re betting the whole company on.” I sat there looking at him and said, “You got to be crazy.”

Zeesha Currimbhoy:  It was such an incredible opportunity. I’m pretty sure all of you are thinking, “Well, why would anyone say no to that? That’s such an amazing opportunity,” but what it meant for me was being an engineer, having operated in a leadership role, I would now be responsible for strategic direction, vision, planning, road mapping, responsible for the career of 20 plus people who are all researchers, PhDs, machine learning engineers, a skill that I didn’t have. I could sit there and find 100,000 reasons why I shouldn’t have done that because I just felt that I wasn’t qualified for the job, but someone took that risk on me. Someone put that bet on me. Someone said that, “You have the potential to do this, and you can do it, and we believe in you.” Then, why didn’t I believe myself?

Zeesha Currimbhoy: I decided after many conversations with my manager at that point, he was the best manager I ever, ever, ever reported into, I decided to take that opportunity. The path forward was amazing. It was challenging. It definitely had its share of challenges. There were several products that I led from ground up, came up with … If ever any of you all have used the Mac line, a lot of their intelligent products were things that I had come up with, but behind all of those products, there were several failed attempts. Those are the ones that people don’t realize because they fail, people don’t even know they exist, and then you find something else.

Zeesha Currimbhoy: Behind each one of those, behind each one of those stories was a failure, a story of failure, a story of hard work, a story of determination, a story of grit. I can stand here, and I can tell you that take every single opportunity you get and run with it because if you don’t, you won’t know what’s in the other end. You won’t know what you’re missing out on. What’s the worst that can happen? I can sit here and literally, for every single problem you’re facing, I’ll tell you 100 reasons why it’s not going to work. I’m sure each one of you will come up with 100 reasons why it’s not going to work, but if there’s a single reason, if there’s a single reason that it might work, take it, and don’t look back. You might fail, but you know what, you might succeed. You might learn a lot from it, and it might make you a different person than you are today.

Zeesha Currimbhoy: The golden door is what stands in front of you. What really stands in front of you, what kind of stands is the fine line between you and success is that fear of failure. That’s what’s always helped me in every role that I’ve taken. I’ve worn several hats. You won’t even recognize the opportunity in front of you if you’re afraid, so don’t be afraid. Each one of us is afraid about every single thing. It’s normal. Being scared is very, very normal. I get scared every time I come up here and have to talk to an audience, I get scared. It’s a normal feeling, but you got to overcome your fear, and you got to take that opportunity because if you don’t, you don’t know what’s ahead of you. I’m going to let Deepikaa go next. Deepikaa is an engineer on our product backend team. She runs a lot of our different systems and a lot of works and a lot of our engineers. I’m super excited to hear her story.

Senior Software Engineer Deepikaa Subramaniam speaking at Branch Girl Geek Dinner.

Deepikaa Subramaniam: Thank you, Zeesha. It’s really weird to use a mic, but hello, everyone. Welcome to Branch. It’s really amazing to see so many women from the tech space gathered here today. I’m Deepikaa. I’m a senior engineer in the product backend team at Branch. Today, I’m going to use my time to actually give a higher level overview of what the product backend team at Branch does, the components we manage, and also, a little bit about the technologies that we actually use in the backend team.

Deepikaa Subramaniam: Branch, on an average, actually, any given day it gets, it receives about seven billion events. When I talk about events, it ranges from anything like a Branch link click or an in-app activity, an app that has partnered to use Branch SDK, so when the app gets installed through the App Store or when the app gets opened or any purchase activity that happens within the app, the partners uses our SDK to send an event to Branch.

Deepikaa Subramaniam: It’s very critical to handle these events real-time because apart from deep linking, Branch is into mobile attribution, so we have to … When we see a conversion event like an install or an open, we have to determine at that point if the user has decided to actually install the app or purchase a particular product in the app by clicking on an ad.

Deepikaa Subramaniam: The product backend team is actually responsible for this entire attribution flow. As you can see, when an event … Let’s say an install event from the App Store comes into our backend service. It immediately gets inserted into our Kafka topic.

Deepikaa Subramaniam: Kafka’s actually a messaging broker. It consists of producers and consumers, so the producers … It has multiple event topics, which has producers and consumers feeding into the topic. Servers can actually feed the event into a … become a producer and insert an event into a particular event topic.

Deepikaa Subramaniam: We can have multiple consumers actually feeding on the topic, so they receive events from the particular topic. Our event processor does a lot of the backend, has a lot of the backend logic. What the event processor does is it actually listens on one of the event topics. It consumes the event, and then, it calls on to all these attribution networks, so Facebook, Google.

Deepikaa Subramaniam: These are all self-attributing networks, so if a partner has integrated with Facebook or Google as their ad network, and when we see and install event, what we do at that point is we call out to Facebook or Google and see and ask them, “Hey, did you see a particular click associated with this user for this particular app?”

Deepikaa Subramaniam: If we get attribution information at that point, we add it to the event. We call it like decorating the event, so we actually add the attribution details to the event. What happens if the partner does not have any of these self-attributing networks integrated, so what we have is a user store.

Deepikaa Subramaniam: For every user, we aggregate based on the app the last clicks that they’ve seen, and all these attribution information gets appended for the user. When a conversion event like install, open, or purchase comes in, we query this user store. The user store is actually … The backend is Aerospike. Aerospike is a NoSQL database. We query our user store to see if there was any event that has happened that we can actually use to decorate this conversion event.

Deepikaa Subramaniam: Once we find a winner from all these attributed networks, then we actually publish the event to downstream to again to Kafka topics. Why we publish these events to other Kafka topics is we have a lot of internal applications that actually consumes data from these Kafka topics. They consume the data, and they run through a lot of analysis. They power our dashboard, and also, we have a service called Webhooks, which the partner actually …

Deepikaa Subramaniam: Webhook is nothing but a partner-hosted API endpoint that they provide to Branch. Branch, when it sees an event, it immediately fires a webhook saying, “Hey, I saw an event. I saw a user interacting with your app, and this is the revenue or this is the impression or ad that they viewed or to do this particular activity.”

Deepikaa Subramaniam: This is kind of our attribution flow on a very higher level. I joined Branch actually four months back. Before Branch, I used to work for a company called Citrix. My background was, there, I used to work with C#, dotnet, and completely Microsoft all. Actually, when I was looking for a job change, most of my … Companies that have resume filtering with Java on it might assume even … didn’t even actually make it through because I refuse to add Java just for the sake of having a language in my resume. Luckily, I ended up in Branch.

Deepikaa Subramaniam: Branch is like one of the best things that happened to me. I’m saying this because a programming language should never be a barrier in our career to get into a company or into any position because it’s something that we can always pick up. The challenges that we face in learning a programming language is like the best kind of challenge we can have because we are learning, and we are growing.

Deepikaa Subramaniam: And I think that’s it. I would like to introduce Javeria. She’s a senior systems engineer at Branch, and next up.

Senior System Engineer Javeria Khan speaking at Branch Girl Geek Dinner.

Javeria Khan: I’m Javeria, and I’m a senior system engineer here at Branch. By degree, I’m an electrical engineer, and I started off my career as a hardware engineer. I’m also a chip designer. I later moved to the software domain, and I’ve been now in the software and systems domain for the past five years. What’s cool about what I do here? Systems, in itself, is more about a breadth of knowledge over multiple engineering domains, and it is about depth at any one of them.

Javeria Khan: What that means is we get to work with everything from databases to networking to security to CI and many more. All of those cool products and features that Deepikaa and Zeesha’s teams create, we make sure that they get deployed to the CI and that they keep running smoothly through our monitoring infrastructure and that they have the resources that they need. My team, which is the infrastructure team is also the first line of defense for any infra issues, so we make sure we have the monitoring tools in place to detect and to be able to solve those problems easily.

Javeria Khan: What are the main focuses of my team? My team is, one of our main things we’re responsible for is making sure of our scalability and our reliability. We learned a lot of hard lessons here, so we host all of our infrastructure on a public cloud. Public clouds can have incidents, and they can have outages. Those affect us, as well, where we also go down for a few hours.

Javeria Khan: What we learned there was that we needed to make sure that our infrastructure was resilient enough to such kind of events, so we started a project to make sure that we were truly multi-region and which we redid everything we had done on the infrastructure side over the past two years in a new region. What that provided us with was we’re now able to failover traffic to any active region if any one of them is having an issue.

Javeria Khan: While doing that kind of project, which took about six months in the making, and other similar projects that we do on the infrastructure side, because we have to do a lot of provisioning, we have to put a lot of machines. This sort of racks up your cloud bill.

Javeria Khan: We have to also manage for costs and manageability, so that’s also one of our main goals. Besides that, one of the other things is we have to make sure that our data is fast and accessible. One of the metrics that we do hold ourselves accountable to is latency on the infrastructure side. These are just some cool numbers from our infrastructure side like Deepikaa mentioned earlier.

Javeria Khan: We do process seven billion requests a day. Branch has seen tremendous growth over the past three years where we’ve seen almost a 70% increase year by year. We’ve even seen up to 90% increase over two successive quarters over the last year. We also have three billion user sessions that can come in in a day, 100k requests.

Javeria Khan: Our data pipelines also see 10 terabytes of data per day, so with that tremendous kind of growth, what are the challenges that it brings in? The challenges on the infrastructure side are mainly to do with outgrowing your databases, making sure your apps scale well enough, also putting in a sensible auto scaling policies, and making sure that you’re appropriately provisioned for any kind of high volume traffic events.

Javeria Khan: Two such interesting events I’ll just mention here, we get a lot of these, but on the top left, HBO is one of our customers. This was the season premiere for a very famous, a very popular TV show with dragons and ice walls. When they had their season premiere, on the eve of that premiere, this is the kind of traffic we saw on infrastructure, but we were anticipating it, and we made sure that we were scaled appropriately for it already.

Javeria Khan: The bottom right one is from about two months ago during the FIFA World Cup, and we sort of saw spikes especially during goaling when somebody scored a goal for like some of the popular matches. It’s usually when people were sharing links or sharing links to the app, and people wanted to check scores. Such kinds of events, which are sort of relatable in the real world, we have to make sure that we cater for them. That’s what my team does, so that’s about it. I will now hand it over to Mada who is our amazing co-founder and also the head of marketing. Thank you.

Co-Founder and Head of Marketing Mada Seghete speaking at Branch Girl Geek Dinner.

Mada Seghete: Thanks, Javeria. Okay. I don’t have slides. I have one slide. That’s me. The most important parts of my life was getting born, then graduating. I did the engineering, so I was also Computer Engineering, and I was training processor design, but I never did it. I went and worked as a software developer. It’s my first job out of college. Then, fast forward, I ended up starting an app with my co-founders here at Branch. We failed a lot. Then, we started Branch.

Mada Seghete: I think what I wanted to talk about was my journey into my current job, which is both being a founder but also doing marketing. I started being really good at math. When you’re really good at math, you’re kind of pushed towards doing engineering.

Mada Seghete: I remember, I felt this expectation that because I was good at math, that’s what I should do, and I really wanted to be creative. I would draw and paint and do things that were on the more creative side.

Mada Seghete: My mother, in a very Romanian way, would say, “No. You are not good at this. This sucks. You’re good at math. Just stick with math.” I was like, “Oh, God.” I went, and then when I got the scholarship to Cornell, and I remember I wanted to study architecture, and my mother was, “No. You can’t do architecture. You’re good at math. You have to do engineering. You have to the hardest engineering possible,” so I did it. Although she was in Romania, she still had a big influence on me.

Mada Seghete: I started Computer Engineering. I minor in CS, but I did take animation courses, and I actually animated a few movies in Maya, and 3D Studio Max, which is really cool. That was kind of when I started realizing that I really loved doing that more than I loved doing engineering.

Mada Seghete: Then, the story after that was very interesting. I worked in engineering, and then I had an issue with my visa, which meant I had to go to school. After school, I would explore something new, so I explored being a consultant and learning the business side of things.

Mada Seghete: I realized that I hated being a consultant. I was very good. I was actually at the top of my class, but I kind of realized that I love doing things, not telling other people what to do, and sometimes, they would never actually do it. As a strategy consultant, you don’t really do that much.

Mada Seghete: Then, I really wanted to do marketing. There was a practicing in Deloitte that did marketing, but they didn’t want to take me because I always got assigned to the technical projects. I then got the job. A startup came up to me and wanted to hire me, and because I had business experience, they put me in the business development and product because again, I was more technical. I ended up doing that for a while. I learned about being in a company and being in a startup. I decided I want to start my own.

Mada Seghete: Then, when we started working together, it was like, okay, my own company, I can do what I want. I want to do design, and I want to do marketing, so I started doing that from the very early days. I designed our app and did all the marketing for it. Then, when Branch came along, and Branch came from all the failures that we had as app developers, we decided to build Branch to solve all the problems that we had. That’s when we basically started Branch, and I started doing marketing.

Mada Seghete: I think the moral of the story is sometimes, you can be very good at certain things, but they’re not necessary … I actually think that at the end of the day, I’m a much better marketer than I was a software developer because I love it so much. I love promoting things. Marketing is all about numbers. I love numbers, but I can be a lot more creative. It just, it was an interesting journey. I run marketing at Branch, but I don’t have as much experience as probably other people of my age who lead marketing teams because I’ve only had the experiences in product and engineering.

Mada Seghete: The moral of the story is that you can start again. I’ve started again many times, and I was able to get to a point where I do something that I’m good at and I love. Don’t settle, I guess, to doing what you are good at. Try to also go for something that you’re good at but you also love, and believe in yourself.

Mada Seghete: I think the story that Zeesha said earlier … I would still remember the moment when I decided I was going to start my own company. I was at Stanford. I actually went twice. Every time my visa got denied, I went back to school. The first time after my interim began and I went and did the MS&E program, I was part of design school.

Mada Seghete: I was working with all the startups, and I was … This professor who’s also an investor, Michael Dearing, and I was helping him take stuff to his car one night after class. I remember telling him how much I loved working with these startups but that I would never start a company myself because I don’t think I could do it. I mean, who am I to start a company?

Mada Seghete: He stopped, and he like dropped what he had, and he looked at me and he said, “What do you mean, Mada? If you’re not going to do it, who do you think will? Of course, you can start a company.” I was like, “What? Oh, my God. I never thought about that.” That was a moment that I’ll always remember, the moment where something shifted. Then, I just went and worked for a startup. I quit consulting, went and worked for a startup, but it all started in that moment. I think for all of you, all you have to achieve any of your dreams, is kind of what Zeesha said, all you need is to believe that you can do it and to have tenacity and keep going after it and not be … It’s okay to fail.

Mada Seghete: We failed three times before Branch. No one would give us money. No one would talk to us. They keep saying … We tried Fitbit for dogs, photo book printing app, and then a printing SDK. Our name is still Pawprint Labs on some. No one wanted to talk to us. Then, the same team then ended up raising money and building a company, but it’s okay. It’s okay to fail. Just try again, and you will succeed. I promise you.

Mada Seghete: Okay, that’s it. I got to introduce Ann.

Strategic Partner Growth Ann Massoud speaking at Branch Girl Geek Dinner.

Ann Massoud: Hi, everyone. I’m Ann Massoud. I’m on the partner growth team at Branch, so you’ve heard from a lot of very technical folks here, but if you have any questions about the sales or business side, feel free to come find me after. We are hiring, but we’re going to do a slight intermission, so feel free to help yourselves with snacks in the kitchen or drinks or anything while we get everyone up here for a panel, so you guys can ask questions.

Ann Massoud: Okay, so we’ve heard some very inspirational stories from some really incredible women. Let’s give them all another round of applause. Perfect. All right, so we wanted to open the floor up for Q&A. We know that everyone’s come here with specific agendas, so we’d love for you to ask any of the women up here anything about their stories, their current roles, their career paths. Basically, anything’s on the floor, so go for it. Okay.

Branch girl geeks: Ann Massoud, Zeesha Currimbhoy. Javeria Khan, Deepikaa Subramaniam, and Mada Seghete answering audience questions at Branch Girl Geek Dinner.

Audience Member: What’s the percentage of women in engineering at Branch?

Ann Massoud: The question was, what’s the percentage of women in engineering at Branch?

Deepikaa Subramaniam: Monica probably knows the answer to that.

Monica Cuyong: About 20%.

Javeria Khan:  20%.

Ann Massoud: Perfect. Any other questions from the audience? Okay, over here.

Audience Member: You all kind of talked about your unique journeys. Can you talk about the most challenging leap you made or maybe the most challenging job that you took and why was it the most challenging when you took the change?

Ann Massoud: The question was, can you please talk about the most challenging leap that you took when you made this change for those who had to make different career path decisions?

Zeesha Currimbhoy: I guess you already heard my story on the most challenging thought, but I think for me, the most challenging one was when I moved from an engineer kind of in leadership role to actually running an entire organization with people who were once my peers, now being my direct reports, and people who had years and years more of experience than me, researchers, PhDs, definitely more skilled specialists who now reported into me, and I had to figure out how to provide them the growth opportunities and the mentorship while also planning out the entire roadmap of a strategic arm of the organization. That was by far, and with zero mentorship because I reported directly to the CEO, who had no time. It was definitely by far, the most challenging jump I’ve had to make in terms of different roles.

Zeesha Currimbhoy: I think that in the beginning, like the initial part of that journey was the most challenging because I couldn’t find my bearings. As an engineer, I still very much gravitated to an IC. I wanted to just go and code, and I wanted to fix things, and that was not my role anymore. I still very often found myself just wanting and itching to write the code and getting the credit for it because as a manager, you got to give the credit. It’s your team’s work. You’re responsible for growing the team and getting out of their way as quickly as possible.

Zeesha Currimbhoy: I think the first couple of months in my new role was the most challenging until I figured out how to get the mentorship I needed, and then make sure that I was very open and honest with what I could or could not provide the team. I could not directly tell a machine-learning engineer how to actually build their models because I didn’t have the experience myself. I couldn’t figure out, “Oh, you should use XGBoost versus something else,” and so I figured out how to get them the mentorship that they needed for them to be successful so that they could still respect me as their manager, and I could take care of the other things for them. That was the most challenging thing I had to deal with. Anyone else wants to add?

Javeria Khan: Sure. For me, it was when I switched from hardware into software. I had already been working for three years in hardware design, and I had also actually just gone and done a master’s with specialization in circuit design. When I switched over to software, because all the hardware tools at that point are basically for Windows, I had never really used Linux before, so I guess I started from my first RM and LS commands to actually doing programming for Linux. That was hard also because when you’re switching fields and you have people that are younger than you, less experienced but they’re farther along because they’ve been doing it before, but I guess technically, that was a challenge.

Deepikaa Subramaniam: For me, I think when I started off my career, I actually did an internship at a startup, which got converted as a full-time. As Zeesha mentioned, at that point, it was a great opportunity, but most of the time, I was so afraid because in a startup, it was a very small startup. Every opportunity that came your way was like you had to own the projects, you had … like from scratch design and interact with PMs.

Deepikaa Subramaniam: Since I was starting off my career in that particular company, everything was new, and most of the times, I approached the projects with a tremendous amount of fear, which was actually pretty much like as Zeesha mentioned during her talk, it was like setting myself up for failure, but I had a really great CEO and CTO who encouraged me a lot. They made me take up … They voluntarily made me take up a lot of projects, and that’s where I learned how to interact with PMs, how to own, how to design something from scratch.

Deepikaa Subramaniam: Also, it’s not just designing, right, like as a developer. You have to be responsible for what you do, and also even after you push the project, you have to be responsible for any issues that comes along extra [inaudible]. That was very challenging, but that was the most I learned in my career. I think it’s helped a lot.

Mada Seghete: I think for me, I was similar to Zeesha. When I had to transition from being just an IC at Branch and doing … I was doing all the marketing to hiring a team and learning how to manage people. I didn’t have any mentorship either. I just remember the first person I hired didn’t work out, and it was one of the hardest things I have to do to let the person go after … I think it was very fast. After like three weeks, it was very obvious. I realized that I didn’t know how to hire. I didn’t know what the team needed and kind of figuring that out, and then figuring out in time how to scale the team was probably the hardest thing learning. I guess, that transition to becoming a manager especially in a very high growth business like Branch was at the time.

Ann Massoud: Any other questions from the audience? Oh, perfect, right in the front.

Audience Member: I just started my own company, and one of the challenges.

Ann Massoud: Congratulations.

Audience Member: One of the challenges is mentorship. Zeesha and Mada, you both mentioned being in positions where you didn’t really have anybody to mentor you once you are at the top, so could you tell me a little bit more of where you ended up seeking mentorship when it wasn’t directly above you or anybody who was immediately available to you, and how that works out in terms of building your leadership skills?

Mada Seghete: I can start. There’s this great website called Female Founder Mentor Hours started by one of my friends. They have, I think about 300 women founders at all different stages who we all do at least one hour or two of mentorship a month, so I highly recommend trying that as one. Then, the other one, I think I really looked for mentors, I realized I needed mentorship in being a marketing leader, so I actually went my board, and I admitted that I needed help. They introduced me to a few CMOs of companies that were way further along than Branch.

Mada Seghete: One of them, Megan from MongoDB, is now one of my mentors. I really do run to her. Now, there’s some issue. The board wants me to show some new numbers, and I went. I just had a call with her for 15 minutes. I had her mentor me, but I actually had her come and talk to the whole team a few times and give advice in how they do things. They’re already IPO. They’re a lot further along than we are. I realized that I needed help, and I went asking for it, if that makes sense.

Ann Massoud: Awesome. Over here, question? Yep.

Audience Member: I have a question for Mada. How important is it to have a group of like-minded people along to create a startup and to try out ideas? If you were going to do it alone, can you do it on your own, or is it important to have like-minded people?

Mada Seghete: You can. I have founders, friends. The question is, how important is it to have like-minded group of women or either founders around you to start a company? I personally don’t think I could have done it alone. I think it depends on who you are as a person. I don’t think I could have gone through the hard times on my own. I mean, it was really hard. I wanted to quit sometimes, and I think having my co-founders there to keep me going, I would have never been able to build Branch on my own. I do have other friends who are founders and solo female founders who are successful. I do really think it depends on the business, on the type of business and the type of personality that you have. It’s definitely not impossible. It’s way harder.

Mada Seghete: I invested in and I mentor one of my friends who’s doing a company by herself. Man, she messages me a lot, because, I think, she’s by herself. She doesn’t know where to get advice from, and she has a group of other female founders. It’s not just me. I think she pesters all of us to ask for advice and support. I never needed that.

Mada Seghete: I think in the early days, we relied on each other, so if you do it on your own, make sure you have a very strong support network. If you can have co-founders, I think having at least one person that’s you’re other person … It’s so hard at the beginning when you keep failing, and when you get to our stage now, it’s different. We have amazing other leaders in the organization. We can rely on other people, but in those first two years when it was just us failing over and over again, I would have quit, I think, if it was just me.

Ann Massoud: Karen, I think you had a question.

Karen: [This is] mostly for the engineers in the group — how do you balance company objectives, getting new features out, building stuff with the tech background that you have now versus learning new things because sometimes, it feels like it’s two full-time jobs, staying on top of what’s new, and then expanding your skillset versus actually doing stuff with what you already know?

Ann Massoud: To repeat the question, it’s how do you manage learning new things and still doing your day-to-day?

Deepikaa Subramaniam: I completely agree. Actually, this has been a constant challenge in my career as well. One of the things throughout my career I’ve tried to actually build is, it’s very hard to be motivated to learn something that’s outside your work unless you’re building your own company and constantly put in time to build that and learn through that project, right? What I try to do is I try to find, like if you can build a good rapport with the product managers in your company and try to figure out like something that’s not very high priority project that’s very interesting, and at the same time, it’s not something that aligns with your day-to-day work.

Deepikaa Subramaniam: Here at Branch, when I presented one of the major components that I work with is the Aerospike store and how the services interact with it, but I’m super interested in learning about Kafka and Spark consumers and Apaches, how they all interact and work together. I’m constantly trying to find time and maybe do a POC like figure out if there’s some small project that you can work on, which involves a technology that we don’t know and probably build our expertise on it.

Zeesha Currimbhoy: You want to go?

Javeria Khan: Sure.  Personally, I think I’ve gotten better about this over time. I always have a list of things that I want to look at or read up about. What I do is I try to set aside half an hour every day to sort of go through articles or things that I’ve sort of pinned aside. Also, when it’s not too crazy, and it’s not supposed to be always crazy … You have days where you don’t have that much work to do. You can get more reading in. You can get more exploring stuff in. I think it’s up to you to set those goals and to sort of make lists for yourself and know when to go through them.

Zeesha Currimbhoy: My answer is more a managerial standpoint answer. A, know the technology and know the space. Even if you want to learn something, I would suggest everyone set aside, like Javeria said, set aside some time for yourself. It can be one in the morning when you’re having tea or coffee and just chilling at home. Set aside some time to read through articles that you care about that you’re interested in. Get to know the space. Get to know what you want to do.

Zeesha Currimbhoy: Second, be very open and have a conversation with your manager. It’s very hard to do it yourself. It’s very hard to try to make time for this for yourself. You’ll never find the time. To be honest, you’ll just never because there’s always other things to do. There are always business priorities. Be open and have a conversation with your manager if you’re working about things that you want to learn, areas that you want to start exploring because chances are that there will be something that you will either get to learn by maybe spending some time in another team or maybe there will be a new project that comes along that will need the application in there. I think that the best way to actually get that time is to make your goals and objectives clear.

Zeesha Currimbhoy: Another asset is if you’re a part of a company like Branch where we’re constantly … the way we build technology is we don’t just take the latest, greatest, and then go and play and tinker around with it. We’re trying to build a sustainable company, and so business objectives matter a lot, but we always are aware of the trends in the industry and whenever we’re faced with a difficulty like Kafka’s falling over, we say, “Okay, what else is around? Let’s go investigate. Is there something else that we can use? Let’s play around with it and see if it’s going to solve our problem.” We always evaluate technology in the context of a problem that it’s going to solve, but that’s always an opportunity for something new to be introduced into the stack.

Ann Massoud: Any other questions from the audience? Perfect. Right in the front.

Audience Member: I actually had a question a little bit more about your origin story. You talked about you’ve done a bunch of startups before this, but how did you and your co-founders actually get the idea to do Branch? What was that process like?

Mada Seghete: There’s a story we tell, and then there’s the real story.

Audience Member: Real story.

Mada Seghete: The story we tell is that we started building Branch for our own app, and then, we ended that we saw there was much bigger. The true story is really that we got to a point where we realized that printing wasn’t going to be a big thing, and we had tried. I think Alex, our CEO, is very good at seeing the future in some ways. He was always the first one who would notice that, okay, this is not going to work.

Mada Seghete: We got to a point where I think we were about to graduate from business school, the app was still live. We were selling photo books, but it wasn’t doing that well. Then, we had tried his printing SDK. When we were trying to sell the printing SDK, people would say, “We don’t care about monetizing our app. We care about growth.”

Mada Seghete: One Sunday, Alex was like, “Who has time to brainstorm an idea?” It’s like this printing thing is not working, so I went to his place, and we sat in his kitchen. We started thinking about, what was the biggest problem that we had and what was the one thing that if we solved would have made our lives better?

Mada Seghete: The previous months, I was trying to build for the app. I was trying to build a referral program and a sharing program. If I invite a friend, they should get a free book, and I would get a free book. Then, if I share, if I start a book and I share it to the friend, and they installed the app, they should be taken to the book that I shared with them and then add more photos and then send to print.

Mada Seghete: It was impossible. To me, it was crazy. I kept bugging Alex and being like, “No, there must be a way.” I would go to Stack Overflow myself and be like, “Oh, Alex maybe doesn’t have time for this. I’ll try to figure out the technical side of how to do this.” Same with ads, on Facebook. I would run ads, and I would want to know when someone installed the app which ad that came from. I was crazy. I would actually go to friends that work at Facebook, and I was like, “It’s an ID. Can you send me this ID?” They’re like, “No, we don’t do that.”

Mada Seghete: When we were sitting at the table, I came, I said, “How about this referral thing?” and then he’s like, “Yeah, you’re right. That could be a thing. Let’s figure out if other people have the problem.” We actually called four people that worked at other companies, one that worked at Van Gogh, which is the first app that used Branch, one that worked at GoGoBuy, then one that worked at Zynga, and one another classmate that worked another gaming app. We asked them all, “Hey, was this a problem? Did we just not figure it out because we didn’t know?” and they’re like, “No, this is why …” The guy from Zynga was like, “That’s why Zynga didn’t grow, because referrals were so well on Facebook, and you could just invite a friend and get five gems when they were into the app, but you couldn’t do that with apps because you couldn’t pass any parameters to install.”

Mada Seghete: At that time, I think Alex was like, “We’re onto something.” Then, I think as we started building this, he realized that there was more than just referrals and sharing.

Mada Seghete: These links could be what powers … this idea of deferred deep linking could be used in all other channels, and that’s how it started. It really was from a problem that we faced. I wouldn’t say that we fully started to build it for ourselves. We were thinking. I mean, he had investigated a way to build it, to solve the problem that I kept bringing to him. I was like, I was basically reading growth and trying to grow the app.

Mada Seghete: We did decide that we needed something new. We realized that the business we were in wasn’t going that well and that we needed a new idea, so we probably would have never found Branch if we weren’t like working in the app space for like a year and a half beforehand.

Audience Member: That’s cool.

Ann Massoud: Any other questions from the audience? We have two. Go for it.

Audience Member: I have a comment. If you’re a woman and a mom and you feel a little bit isolated, there’s a fabulous Facebook group called Moms in Technology, and they’re very supportive. I really recommend it if you’re a mom in technology.

Zeesha Currimbhoy:  Yeah, it’s great.

Ann Massoud: Thank you for that.

Mada Seghete: Zeesha also wrote a blog post about being the first mom on Branch that I highly recommend on Medium.

Ann Massoud: You had a question? The one on the side. Yeah. Yeah.

Branch girl geeks: Ann Massoud, Zeesha Currimbhoy. Javeria Khan, Deepikaa Subramaniam, and Mada Seghete speaking at Branch Girl Geek Dinner.

Audience Member: I wasn’t sure if you were [inaudible]. Thank you for sharing all your stories today. It was really inspiring. My question is for Mada. You alluded to advanced degrees that you had to pursue, but I’m just wondering if …  The rhetoric that I’m surrounded with today is very much that if there’s something that you want to learn, if there’s someplace that you want to be, you learn the skills, you get there, and you don’t really need a degree to do that, but I was just wondering since you’ve had multiple experiences of advanced degrees, are there any tangible or intangible benefits to kind of going through that process and getting you to where you are today?

Mada Seghete: We would not be where we are today if we hadn’t gone to business school. It’s not because of the things we learned in business school — it’s because of everything else. I think you are … you go and you are surrounded by all these people, and it’s the same with my MS&E degree.

Mada Seghete: I was an engineer and going to MS&E changed me into being able to think more businesslike. I met different people. I think in business school, it was very much like the type of people that were there were very different. There was this idea that you could do anything, and I don’t think I’d learn … I mean, maybe I did probably learn from classes because most classes were a case study with an entrepreneur from there who came and talked about their failure, their successes. They kind of gave me this belief that I could do something.

Mada Seghete: I think all of us had very different stories. For me, I don’t think I had the belief that I could start something myself. I kind of believed it, but I also needed a team, and I found Alex and Mike. Alex came from doing semiconductors. I think he really learned how to be like a business leader. He had a mind shift change in a way. Mike came from Minnesota where he was just working for 3M as an engineer, and I don’t think he wanted to come to Silicon Valley. Alex and Mike didn’t really have a network. I had.

Mada Seghete: I was in BD, and I knew some people. A lot of the original deals came from me because I had the strongest network, but they didn’t have that. Going to business school helped them build that, and it also gave us this credibility when we went and raised money. It did open doors. When we’re doing the Fitbit for dogs, people took our email. I mean, most times, they didn’t give us a meeting, but they did like say, and sometimes, we did take a meeting, and they were like, “You guys are smart guys. Work on something else.” They did, and we’re like, “No.”

Mada Seghete: I mean, we only lasted like maybe three months, the Fitbit for dogs, but even if printing. We would get a lot of meetings because we had a really good app, and people will be like printing sucks. Get out of printing. We’re like, “No, we’re going to do it differently. We’re different,” and then eventually, they were right, but it does.

Mada Seghete: Business school gives you … I think an advanced degree gives you certain things, but you’re right. I mean, it’s not like a lot of the actual tangible things, we could have learned from books, we could have read, but I don’t think you get to meet the type of people you meet. You don’t get the environment, so there’s a lot of intangible. I don’t think we would have been where we are today. Maybe one day, we would have gotten there, but I think it accelerated our path.

Ann Massoud: On the left.

Audience Member: Thank you for sharing your stories. I was curious if you’ve ever been overlooked for a promotion or even just what you said for being a woman.

Ann Massoud: Question was if you’ve ever been overlooked for a promotion just for being a female.

Audience Member: That’s great if you haven’t.

Mada Seghete: I mean, I’m very aggressive. I’m like a little … If I feel I’m overlooked, I just go and fight for it like crazy. I mean, I think it’s possible. I don’t think so. I think I was very lucky, and also, I think my personality. I’m like very aggressive, but yeah, I think I was probably more discriminated around my career for being Romanian and having an accent than I probably … I probably felt more insecure about the fact that I was an immigrant than I felt for being a woman. People didn’t want to be my partner because I was a woman in Cornell because I think they thought I was dumb in computer engineering, but I think that’s probably the most I felt it. I don’t know if you guys have stories.

Javeria Khan: I don’t have a story, but I think the industry is better about it generally. I mean, this is maybe something that happened more frequently about 10 years ago, but in the past five, six years since I’ve been working, if you do what you you’re doing well, I don’t think there’s actually any sensible manager out there that would actually overlook you just for being a female. In most companies, Branch included, obviously, what they’re looking for is talent and what they’re looking for is good workers. Perhaps, I’ve been lucky to be having worked in such good companies that I never felt having experienced those kinds of things simply because of my gender, but I think maybe it’s not as common as we think it is.

Audience Member: One, I’m a hiring manager, and what I see is a lot of female engineers, they don’t ask for the salary, but male engineers are. Just as a general comment, if you have that experience, if you’re good enough for that job, make sure you know your value and you’re asking for the right salary.

Javeria Khan: I agree. We tend to be more shy and introvert than our male counterparts, but that’s something that can fix on our own.

Mada Seghete: I think that’s true. As a manager, and my team is pretty much half-half, men are more likely to ask. I mean, I give promotions even when people don’t ask, but usually, with the women on my team, they come from me versus in the past. I’ve definitely noticed a trend especially with a team that’s pretty half-half.

Deepikaa Subramaniam: Sometimes, I feel like when you’re a [inaudible] engineer, you don’t think about moving forward, progressing in your career. Title doesn’t … That was my attitude in my previous company. Well, how does our title matter? Actually, how do I put forth, like she mentioned, how do I put forth asking for more salary and stuff like that, but I agree with Javeria. That’s something that we should build on ourselves, build by ourselves. It’s not actually an issue with the people that we work with. It’s our issue. I think we should think about it more and fix, act on it.

Zeesha Currimbhoy: I think the main question that was being asked was, how do you know what to ask for? How do you know the amount to ask for? I think that the way is the first most important thing is to know your worth, is to always know there are several sites out there that’ll tell you what does a senior engineer make, or how much is someone going to make, but I also think that making sure that you’re trying to work at one of those good companies that’s fair.

Zeesha Currimbhoy: It’s harder to know which are the good companies that are fair, but one of the things that I encourage a lot of people that I mentor to do is to speak with enough people.

Zeesha Currimbhoy: When you go on the on-sites, speak with enough people, speak with the panel to make sure that you get a sense of what the culture of the company is as well. You should be able to sense that this is a company that I want to work to that respects individuals, that respect people. Through your questions, kind of try to get a sense of that.

Zeesha Currimbhoy: I think that the other thing is also, in an interview, when you’re interviewing, it’s fair to ask, what is the band that you have in mind for this position? That’s one way for you to ask upfront, which is before you disclose the number you want, is try to get a sense of what is the band that is being offered for that position.

Ann Massoud: I think a good way to vet companies is to look for companies that have diversity inclusion working groups, different employee resource groups, and that’s a great way to know if the company respects individuals like Zeesha had mentioned.

Audience Member: Can I just add a word? If you’re in product management, there is a Women in Product group. It’s global. It’s not just San Francisco Bay Area. People have seen demand from all over, from countries, Turkey, U.S., UK, everybody asking questions, mentoring, salary related, how they are switching from one job to the other, so it’s a great resource group. It’s on Facebook. You can join, and it’s very well structured through. The founders are also VCs, former product managers from Facebook and so on.

Audience Member: The other thing I wanted to add on the engineering side is there’s a group called Systers. It used to be very popular before when I was in engineering. It’s run by the Anita Borg Institute as well. It’s one of their original arms. It’s a community, again, a community thing run by women for women in engineering. It’s so old. I think it’s probably from the late ’90s. It’s still very active. It’s very simple mailing list. When I went from engineering to business school, I was struggling with that transition, and I posted, and I got a lot of help from the women. I would say, you have all the portals, but it never is enough. How much you need, you do your own research and that one on one is where you will get the confidence to actually negotiate as well. There are women out there who will do mock interviews, who will help you do mock salary negotiations because that’s where the rubber hits the road.

Ann Massoud: Perfect. This has been a very amazingly passionate crowd, so thank you very much. We only have time, unfortunately, for one more question, so hope it’s a good one. No pressure. Perfect.

Audience Member: This is sort of a different angle. It’s actually a follow-up question to the one I asked Mada, but I actually want to ask you, Ann, because you said you’re on the sales side.

Ann Massoud: Yes.

Audience Member: I was actually curious, like can you give us examples of who are the profile, who are your customers or partners that you go after, and then, what is the value prop? What is the key thing that makes them sign up for your service?

Ann Massoud: I’d need like an hour with you, but essentially, for the … The key customers that we go after is essentially anyone with an app. I’m on the more strategic enterprise side, so we’re going after apps that have very high MAU, so that’s monthly active users, so people that are constantly going to their app on a monthly basis are typically the people that I would personally target. In terms of our differentiators or why someone would work with us, essentially, we’re going to help them with their mobile growth, so being able to drive people into the app, give them a very seamless user experience, and then most importantly, being able to tell these enterprise companies who these people are, how they’re interacting with the brand, where they originated, how they continued to interact with these marketing channels, and then ultimately, what led them to convert.

Audience Member: Thanks, Ann.

Ann Massoud: No problem. All right, everyone. Well, thank you so much for coming again. We’re super happy to have you. Another round of applause. Again, if you have any questions for any of us, please feel free to come back and ask away. Branch is hiring, so we have tons of open reqs at branch.io/careers. If you have any specific functions that you’re interested in, I’m sure anyone up here would be happy to talk to you about them. Have a good night. Enjoy the rest of the snacks in the kitchen, and I think there’s some drinks left. Good night, everyone.

Mada Seghete: Thanks for coming.

Ann Massoud: Thank you.

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Sumo Logic girl geek speakers: Shea Kelly (VP People), Bret Scofield (UX Research Team Lead), Riya Singh (Senior Software Engineer & Team Lead), Stacy Kornluebke (Training & Documentation Manager), and Jen Brown (Compliance & Data Protection Officer) on September 10, 2018 at Sumo Logic’s Redwood City headquarters in California.

Speakers:
Shea Kelly / VP, People / Sumo Logic
Bret Scofield / UX Research Team Lead / Sumo Logic
Riya Singh / Senior Software Engineer & Team Lead / Sumo Logic
Stacy Kornluebke / Training & Documentation Manager / Sumo Logic
Jen Brown / Compliance & Data Protection Officer / Sumo Logic

Transcript of Sumo Logic Girl Geek Dinner – Lightning Talks:

Shea Kelly: Is that working? Am I on? Welcome, everybody. Happy Monday, or as we say in my household, and everyone knows this here, happy day. How many people watch Sponge Bob? Then, you know what I’m doing. Listen. I really, I want to reiterate what Angie said. First and foremost, we are actually just thrilled and delighted that you’re here, and I mean that. We have been talking about doing an event like this for a while, but it’s always so backed up, the schedule like when can we get and do one?

Shea Kelly: We’re thrilled to do it for a couple of reasons. One is probably the obvious — we’re a growing business. We’re very deliberate and intent about wanting to continue to expand and diversify our company with rock star talent, and so, at a minimum, we want to expose and have people get greater awareness of Sumo, who we are, what we do, but obviously, the biggest thing, I’ll be honest, I think we have joy today in having some of our fabulous team members, who are all smiling at me now, share some of what we do.

Shea Kelly speaking at Sumo Logic Girl Geek Dinner.

Shea Kelly: You can get some insight into, aside from Sumo, I think it’s an industry that we’re in that’s pretty darn exciting and interesting, and we hope you get some good things from it. It’s a big week for us because this actually is the week of our second annual user conference. We have some 600 people registered to be at a hotel in Burlingame later this week. We don’t do anything small, so we thought in the same week, let’s have a board meeting, and let’s do a Girl Geek Dinner and just six other things. It’s like, but we like to go big or go home as they say, so again, welcome. I do want to also tell you, in case you didn’t notice, when you leave later, there’s a gift bag for you up front with a little bit of what we would call Sumo schwag. You cannot leave without a Sumo squishy. In the bag is a Sumo squishy for those … So many people are like, “Are we going to get a squishy?” You’re getting a squishy. They are so popular. Go on a campus, and it’s like they look at you, go, “Hi. What are your jobs? Can I have a squishy?” It’s like, “You don’t want to work for me. You just want a squishy.”

Shea Kelly: Okay. I am only going to take a few minutes here before the main speakers. I am not the main speaker. Take a few minutes. Just tee up a little bit about Sumo Logic, who it is that we are, what we do. I don’t know how many folks are aware of us, so I’m just going to do a quick welcome and intro there. The welcome, I think, is done. Then, we’re going to shift to our presenter. Bret is going to focus as we’ve talked about the whole, how we enable customers to be super successful in using our product is, we’re coming at it obviously from different ways — we come at in terms of the user experience and the design and how do we think about what customers need, and how they use the product, and how do we build that into the product, which then leads to Riya, who is going to talk to us about from an engineering and development perspective, how do we do that? How do we continue through the process? It is literally non-stop, and you’ll see that and hear that in what we talk about today. How do we infuse that into our development of the product?

Shea Kelly: The third piece is learning. Stacy is going to talk about the tools and all the things that customers need, and whether it’s docs and it’s training and it’s certification. They need to be enabled, so they’ll use the product, right? That’s pretty obvious. Oh, lights are out. Okay, so we’re into a groovy mood here. Okay, this is good. No, I like this. Okay, thanks. We do it right here. Then, the last piece, Jen’s going to speak to down here at the end is security and privacy. I mean, it is obviously, you can’t pick up a newspaper or see anything or think about your own data, personal data, but companies are migrating, as we’re going to talk a lot about, their data to the cloud. That has with it inherent, oh my gosh, how do I make sure that it is secure, it’s private, and that we have all the compliance and regulatory things in place? Jen’s going to talk a bit about that. Then, at the end, we’re going to open it up for discussion. I’ve already had a few questions that have been raised that will feed into the discussion later. Into that mix, we’re going to add the lovely Mary Ann O’Brien who’s sitting here who leads a big team for us in sales, and she can also bring a bit of perspective in terms of how we go out and speak to customers, okay? You can always throw a question out in between. Otherwise, I think what we’ll do is save a lot of it for the end. Sound good? Happy Monday? We’re still good? All right, you’ve had food. I hope it was good.

Shea Kelly: Again, I’m just going to go through this quickly, but if you think about and say, “Well, what does Sumo Logic do?” what we would say our tagline is, is Sumo Logic is a machine data analytics service that helps companies to build, run, and secure their modern applications. You say, “Okay, what does that mean? What does that really translate into?” If you think about the path over the years, the transformation from, I guess what I call the old school with data centers and on-prem solutions where data actually is stored and housed, and the transformation, as you know, this digital transformation we’re living in and will continue is to the public cloud.

Shea Kelly: What the natural outcome of that is that we’re building a different kind of software, and it is a software that is always on. It’s a software that, in many cases, or these modern applications that result from that are customer-facing. They are revenue-generating. Those are new aspects of something. It’s a 24-hour if you think about it in terms of availability. Take out your phone. Think of the things that you take for granted now, and all of that data has to somehow, in the private cloud, in the process, be built, run, and secured in that manner.

Shea Kelly: To us, that leads to three things, and I hope this translates. If not, sometimes, the … I don’t know if the white on white is looking good here, so the very first thing is obviously the cloud. Data smog rating, you know this. It’s going to continue too. It’s going in a rapid phase, and it’s going across industries and verticals into some of the sectors that before, would have been hesitant to, into banking and in insurance. You’ve got that migration happening pretty quickly and pretty voluminously, if that is a word.

Shea Kelly: What that second part of that is it leads to this notion of continuous delivery. It’s always on, and that’s where it translates to the humans, to the people who are building and running and securing these apps because they’re not doing it the way they used to do it before. Now, if you think about it, and you think about the old way of developing software, the old … What do they call? Waterfall, so you would have an idea. You’d put it in development. It would go through a whole bunch of steps, and at some point later, something would spit out on a disk, and you’d take it somewhere. That’s not what happens anymore, right?

Shea Kelly: here’s a different way of architecting these modern apps, and so, what has to happen and has to follow that is we have to have a supporting mechanism for these teams who do it. For us, we say, okay, if it’s all going in the cloud, and it’s continuous delivery, it’s always on, that’s where Sumo Logic comes in. What we do is we provide a product that’s called continuous intelligence. What that does is it gives these teams who are having to architect those modern apps in a different way and who have to manage and do things in a different way as teams, it gives them an analytics product that helps them to again, build, run, and secure those apps in a way that meets these modern needs.

Shea Kelly: Just quickly, we are about now eight years in business. I think our founder might still be over here, so I’m going to have him give a wave. Christian Beedgen. Should I tell the story of how Sumo came to be? I won’t do that, but anyway, it’s a dog. It’s not Sumo. Catch me for the story. Anyway, so, Christian is our founder. Bruno’s still here. He’s our founding VP of product and strategy, and so, eight years in business, we are now some 1,600 customers strong… 50,000 users I think… so it is proliferating pretty quickly. We have, I think as a lot of SaaS models do what you’d call a land and expand. We get in on a use case, and then over time, they say, “Well, it works so well here. We need to expand this,” and it easily can expand across the organization.

Shea Kelly: We are serving companies, like I say, in every vertical, in every industry. If they have a modern application, they have got to have a way to analyze and think about that data as they build, run, and secure it. We have customers from Anheuser-Busch to Pinterest to … Who are some of the others? As I’m thinking about it, JetBlue or Betfair, Hearst, and so, again, these are also global organizations, in many cases. For us, it’s, like I say, eight years strong. We’re some $250 million in investment, so we were no longer a startup. We’re a late-stage private company, I would call us, funded by some of the best and brightest in the Valley, and so we’ve got a ways to go on what my last point to be here is this journey. We’re just getting started in some ways. I mean, this proliferation of data, if you think about it, I am going to step in here just third from the right. If you think about it, that’s 2018.

Shea Kelly: Machine data by 2020 is predicted to account for 40% of all data created. If you think about it, this machine data, which is what we focus on with our application service, is growing at such an exponential rate. Customers and companies have got to find a way to analyze that data. This is the background. Again, if you just think about it, it’s digital transformation, software as a service, companies are going digital, modern applications always on, and through that process, which is what leads to our discussion today, is this question of, how do we make sure, because customers may have different needs and how they do these things, that we are listening to them and looking at all of their needs and figuring out how we build that into the product ultimately through how do we do security and compliance around it, okay? With that, I am going to turn it off to the real presenters. I’m going to start here with Bret. Here’s our group. Here you go.

Bret Scofield speaking at Sumo Logic Girl Geek Dinner.

Bret Scofield: Hello. Good? Okay, perfect. I’m Brett Scofield. I lead UX research at Sumo Logic. UX research is a relatively new discipline, so I wanted to talk a little bit about what that actually means. Design’s been around for a while, and I think product development has also been around for a while. UX research is really a combination of … or it works very closely with those two, so a lot of times, what we’re doing is getting feedback from our customers and from our non-customers on ideas. Sometimes, these ideas are really big ones. Should we build this feature? Is there a place for this new product? That type of thing. Sometimes, it’s more granular. We’ve decided, yes, we’re going ahead with building a metrics feature, and now, we need to get into the nitty-gritty of what exactly that looks like and how our customers are going to use that type of thing. UX research, I converse with our customers pretty much all the time. I advocate for them heavily, so I’m always telling their stories to our engineering, product management, designers, just really emphasizing like, “Hey, our customers are running into so much pain with this. Can we please, please change something?” et cetera.

Bret Scofield: Then, on a personal level, obviously, I enjoy Boomerangs. This is with my work wife. Hi, Rebecca. Then, I run a lot. I’m a marathoner, so I’d love to chat about all those things. I’m on the team, I’m the food contrarian for all things, so people are always like, “Hey, have you tried this awesome new like hybrid taco thing?” I’m always like, “That sounds like it sucks.” That’s usually my role. Then, I wanted to get into a little bit about why I chose Sumo, why I’m working here.

Bret Scofield: First off, we have a lot of really interesting gnarly problems to solve, and that’s great. You start off Monday morning, like today, you really dive into those problems. You’re working with engineers. You’re working with security people. You’re working with a bunch of people who are really, really smart and have a lot of things to say. That’s amazing, and that’s great to work on those problems, but then, our team does a really good job of balancing that with a little bit of levity. We go to lunch with the UX team. We talk about tacos. We talk about horoscopes. We talk about whatever else. That gives you enough breathing room and enough space to go back in in the afternoon and to like really dig into those problems again.

Bret Scofield: I also really appreciate that there is a huge customer focus throughout the organization. That’s why we’re giving this talk. We’re talking today about how the customer influences everything that we do at Sumo Logic, and so, it wasn’t hard to pull that together with all these other women because everyone in the organization really thinks about the customer and keeps them at the forefront of the decisions that they’re making.

Bret Scofield: Okay, so today, I’m going to be talking through the product development process, and I’m going to be talking through the two halves of it, which here are running concurrently. Instead of sequentially, instead of having all of this discovery happen before delivery happens, we have both of these processes going all the time at Sumo Logic. The first part of this, the discovery bit is really answering those like super-high level questions. Should we build this thing? Is there a market for this thing? That type of, it’s exploratory, it’s really like pie in the sky sort of stuff.

Bret Scofield: Then, after we’ve figured something out from there, we’ve determined, yeah, there is space for this, this is something that our customers would actually want and would use, then those findings are given to delivery focused teams. These teams have an idea. Now, they’re like, “OK, we need to build a metrics functionality or we need to build this type of functionality,” and so they need to dive into more of the specifics of that. They’re figuring out, “OK, with our customers, how exactly are they going to do what we want them to do in this? Is it a dropdown? Is it a visualization?” They get into the meat and bones of that.

Bret Scofield: What I’m going to talk about is how our customers drive both of those processes. With the discovery processes mentioned, these are the really big high-level questions, and the major question that we’re trying to answer here is, are we building the right thing? Is there space for this thing that we want to do? One of the recent … Well, not recent. One of the things that I’ve been working on for a long time at Sumo logic has been our personas. Many of you are familiar with personas. These personas are not real, but they are an amalgamation of our customers and their mental models.

Bret Scofield: The reason that we went through the exercise of creating personas is really because we want to give the entire organization a common vocabulary. Melinda has a certain mindset and approach to the product, so when she goes into Sumo Logic, she’s likely trying to accomplish a specific set of things. She has a certain familiarity with a product. She goes in in a certain frequency. Andre, completely different. He uses Sumo Logic for different things, goes in with a little bit more uncertainty, all these types of things.

Bret Scofield: When we refer to our personas, I can say, “Hey. Stacy in documentation, I’m dealing with an Andre.” She immediately knows what that means, and she knows what sort of pains he’s likely to be feeling, where he’s coming from, all that type of stuff. The process of creating our personas, we attacked this in, first, a qualitative way. We met with a bunch of our customers on site, watched them do work. We talked to them about their educational background, their career trajectory, what are the things that are painful for them, et cetera.

Bret Scofield: Then, after that, we aggregated all the data, came out with three personas. Then, during a hackathon, we went through the process of deriving quantitatively what our personas look like. Sumo Logic, as Shea mentioned, has a ton of data on what our customers are doing in the product. We analyzed it during this hackathon. We ran a k-means clustering algorithm on all that data, and we derived the key use cases. Those key use cases actually mapped really well to the personas that we had derived qualitatively. There’s both a quantitative and a qualitative backing for these. Then, they’ve permeated the organization. I think almost everyone at Sumo Logic knows who Kathy and Andre and Melinda are, so.

Bret Scofield: Then, as mentioned, so this was a discovery project. As mentioned, the discovery stuff often influences the delivery things, so now, in a lot of the delivery projects that are going on, we define at the very beginning who is this specific feature for? How do we expect an Andre to approach this? How do we expect a Melinda to approach it? How would it be different? Those types of things.

Bret Scofield: Then, I want to talk a little bit more about the delivery process. As mentioned, the delivery process is when that sort of overarching thing is defined. We know we need to build this specific thing, but the question that we’re seeking the answer here is, are we actually building that thing right? Are we doing the things that need to be done so that a customer can actually do the thing that they want to do in here? With delivery specific things, we start at the very broadest level, and then we narrow in.

Bret Scofield: One of the things that we commonly do here is participatory design. We have quite a good relationship with internal users of Sumo Logic, so our customer success team uses Sumo Logic heavily. They also interface with our customers. Sales engineering, similar case. We bring them in. We also bring in our own engineers. They love dogfooding Sumo Logic, and they generally like working with us, so we bring them in. We do design exercises where it’s pretty much, we start with a blank canvas, and we have them draw, what is your 10-star experience? What would this future look like in an ideal world?

Bret Scofield: We’re actually, as Shea mentioned, we’re holding our user conference on Wednesday and Thursday of this week, and we’re doing a large-scale participatory design with a bunch of our customers. We validated that there’s a specific feature that we want to build, and so we’ve made kind of a Lego kit for all of our customers to build their ideal version of this. It’s a super fun thing, and it’s really great because it gets buy-in from a lot of people. They feel like they are a part of this thing.

Bret Scofield: After that, the researchers and the designers will aggregate a lot of the feedback, and they’ll put it together, and they’ll start actually working with the pixels. This looks a little washed out, but they’ll start building designs and prototypes. Once those are in a solid enough state, we’ll put those in front of our customers. This is actually one of our customers in Australia. He’s expressing disappointment, which is … that sometimes happens with research. He’s a little bit bummed about one of the things that we had sort of neglected to redesign. We were launching this redesign, and there were some areas where we’re like, “Oh, well de-prioritize those. It won’t be a big deal.” Then, we found out from a ton of our customers, “No, it actually is a really big deal, and they are really upset, they want us to redesign this.”

Bret Scofield: This changed the trajectory of the project. We stopped, and we said, “Okay. We actually do need to redesign these few screens and make this a cohesive polished experience for our customers.” Then, after something has been designed and released to all of our customers, we measure. We work very closely with the product management team and then with our engineers to instrument the log data so that we can see what people are doing with this new feature. Are they exiting Sumo Logic right after? Are they continuing with their workflow? What exactly is being done with this new thing?

Bret Scofield: This is great because it allows us to measure success, so if we can see a lot of engagement with this, we’re pretty happy. It also sort of allows us to jump off with more qualitative research. If we see, for instance, that everyone’s exiting Sumo Logic after using this new thing, then maybe we should delve into that. We should hear some stories. We should figure out what’s going on and make some adjustments. We’re using the Google HEART framework actually to drive which sort of metrics we’re tracking for this.

Bret Scofield: Yeah, to sum everything up, I just talked through how the customer feedback drives these two halves of the product development process at Sumo Logic, so we have the delivery process and the discovery process. Both of those are heavily influenced by the thoughts and feedback that come from our customers. Then, I’m going to hand this over to Riya for her perspective from engineering.

Riya Singh speaking at Sumo Logic Girl Geek Dinner.

Riya Singh: Thank you. Do I use this too? Okay, cool. Lights are bright. Hi. Hi, everyone. How’s everyone doing? My name is Riya. My name is Riya. I’m in the engineering development team. I’m a team lead of the data engine team. Quick show of hands, how many engineers out here? Software engineering. That’s one-third of the room maybe. Okay, cool. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn if you have more questions after my talk, and I’m happy to answer more questions.

Riya Singh: The theme of today’s talk is, how does customer feedback impact different product areas? I’m going to give you the engineering perspective or how we are listening to our customers. A little bit of background about myself, I joined Sumo about four years ago. I started as a software engineer. Today, I’m the team lead of data engine team. My team is about five people, and we mostly work on streaming systems at Sumo, so anything that requires real-time, low latency applications like live tail, live dashboards, alerting, and, so on.

Riya Singh: I’m also a dance fitness instructor, so my mornings are all work, work, work. Nights are all dance, dance, dance, so it’s been a lot of fun. Sometimes, I’d work. I love Sumo because I can combine both my passions. I do all kind of flash mobs at work and all those fun stuff at work, but the main reason I’ve been with Sumo for years is because I’ve seen many companies in which engineering is given a project and said, “Okay, these are your requirements. Go and build it.” Very few times, we try to understand why we are building it or if you’re building the right thing or why is this important? Sometimes, I feel engineering does not get that perspective. In Sumo, it’s ground up, right? As soon as you’re trying to decide what to build next, we’ll ask the right questions. The advantage that we have is that we are our customer zero, so we are using our product as much as anybody else. You kind of understand why this is important, and that perspective really makes you make good products.

Riya Singh: Let’s talk about customer focus development. Some things are very strategic, right? Sometimes, you want to build products ahead of the market, right? We want to build things that nobody else is building. We want to be innovative. We want to be strategic. There are a lot of projects, which come through deciding to be innovative, so that aside, there are other things that we do when we get customer feedback from various channels. We work very closely with Bret and her team, so as soon as she’s going to a customer and having her discussions, we are reading back the reports come back in, and we try to figure out, “Okay, where are the different things we’re developing incoming?” and build something to help that customer.

Riya Singh: Two very nice things that we have in Sumo, I’ll just describe them a little bit of detail. This is my kind of favorite place to hang out. It’s the ideas portal. We have a public ideas portal wherein customers can go and mark the ideas or features that they want to see in our product. It’s very nice because you can see where it was created, how many words are there, and what’s the progress. That’s a very nice way to find out what is important to our customers, and we can build the right thing. That gives us a lot of perspective.

Riya Singh: The other place, which I really, really like as well is we have our own public Sumo Dojo, a Slack channel where all of our customers or most of our customers are there. That is nice in a way because it’s very real-time, right? They’re asking a question, and sometimes, they’re helping themselves or we are answering some questions. It adds that human connection to the conversation when it’s real time, right? That is one very nice place where we get our ideas from. Yeah, so as I said, we talked to field. We have all these channels, and we try to get feedback and build the right things.

Riya Singh: Cool. Shifting gears a little bit, one thing in engineering for running a SaaS service is very important is that we can’t just build and forget about it. The system has to run. It has to run 24/7. It has to run at 100% availability, which is easier said than done. A lot of elbow grease, which goes on in trying to make sure that the service scales, and it works under different load conditions. Engineering realizes that it is very important that the current service work, right, so we spend a lot of time in trying to make sure that our service are reliable. Some ways how we do it, we use our own product to monitor our own services, so this is an example of an outage dashboard. We’re trying to monitor different lag latencies. There is a group called the IRC, incident response coordinator, so in case our metric here does not look good, we declare it as an outage. All the teams are involved in trying to resolve it as soon as possible.

Riya Singh: When I joined Sumo, we were about 80 people. We had maybe 10 micro services. Today, we have 500+ and I think more than 50+ micro services. Being able to monitor and run the service at scale is a challenge, and we have learned so much through just trying to run this well. We have learned that things that work when you’re a small company does not scale when you’re a bigger company. You have to automate as much as possible. Anytime you’re adding more humans to it, there is more chances of errors coming through, so the human side of scaling does not translate to the skill. We spend a lot of time in trying to automate things so that if it in case something goes down, we can recover from it as soon as possible without human interaction.

Riya Singh: Despite all the works, sometimes outages happen, and you move on, but one thing very nice about Sumo and its culture is that our focus is very clear. We are one with our customers, so in case an outage happens, we all gather together in an outage war room and try to help each other to resolve it as soon as possible. You’ll see people leaving the meetings, leaving any presentation and coming and helping. It was very nice for me to see when I joined Sumo that everybody’s so helpful here. If an outage happens, we do post mortems within a day. At this point, any new feature development stops, and we try to work through the action items that have come through the outage post mortem.

Riya Singh: Our policy is no repeat offenders, so in case we find the root cause and it has happened once, we will find the ways to ask the five whys and fix it, but you want to make sure it doesn’t happen again, so no repeat offenders is our metric to see how well we are doing.

Riya Singh: Okay. Talking about outages kind of makes my head hurt too because I’ve been to, well, more than a couple of them, but we’re getting better.

Riya Singh: Let me just shift things a little bit and talk about this newest initiative that I’ve been leading at Sumo. I’m leading a new team at Sumo called the Quick Wins team. As you know, we have grown so fast that today, we have 50,000 users and 1,600 customers, right? They’re very engaged customers, so they’re constantly asking us for new things that they want to see in the product. Sometimes, a team is not tasked to do those small things because they’re already working on the next big initiative, right? These smaller things or UX feedback somehow doesn’t get prioritized. I’m sure you guys have noticed that too in your companies that the smaller things are sometimes skipping through.

Riya Singh: We started a new team called the Quick Wins team, and a secret sauce is the sriracha because a little goes a long way, and so we’re trying to make all these small, small changes, which makes our product better over time. It’s a cross-functional team, so we have … It’s a small team, one UI, one UX, one backend, one docs, one PM. One nice thing about this is we are growth hackers.

Riya Singh: We are not tied to any particular section of the product, so it’s not like somebody who knows search cannot do dashboards or somebody who knows dashboards cannot look at collection. We are training people and empowering them to be able to make progress in any part of the product, removing any kind of silos that exist.

Riya Singh: We’re trying to make the product easier to use for Andre, for Melinda, and all the personas that we have. The aim is to improve the NPS, which is net promoter score, which is a metric showing how much our customers like our product. That’s it for mine. Stacy shall talk about learning.

Stacy Kornluebke speaking at Sumo Logic Girl Geek Dinner.

Stacy Kornluebke: Hi. I’m Stacy Kornluebke in case any of you here looked out at the agenda and wondered how to pronounce that. It’s a frequent question. I am the manager of training and documentation at Sumo Logic, which if it’s a lot for you to say, we just kind of reduced it down to the learn team. I am also the mother of three wonderful boys. I have replaced my couch three times in case anyone’s wondering. People say to me, “Wow, that must be a lot of work.” I say, “No, it’s a lot of fun, but I do miss my furniture,” so I am an avid fan of the arts. I am kind of infamous for dragging my friends two and a half miles down Manhattan to see Gustav Klimt’s The Woman in Gold. If you don’t feel like making that trek, you can just watch a very wonderful movie with Ryan Reynolds, and you’ll see the painting a lot.

Stacy Kornluebke: I’m also a voracious reader. I have 80 out of my goal for 100 books this year. If you find me later for networking opportunities, do not ask me what I’ve read. Once you reach this level of quantity, there’s very little quality. I like a lot of steampunk and vampire and werewolf books. It gets me through the night, but in all honesty, what I really like to do is make users confident. My whole goal is to give them the materials they need so that they feel that they are able to use the product the way they want to.

Stacy Kornluebke: People often ask me what’s special about Sumo. I did leave Cisco to come here, and I did it for a number of wonderful reasons. One of the top reasons is that we have very technical and sophisticated users. These people do a lot with their day, and they’re pretty knowledgeable to begin with, so they’re fun to write for. They’ve got a good background. They’re also, interestingly enough, highly collaborative.

Stacy Kornluebke: One of the things that I don’t think we’d addressed enough is how cool Sumo users really are. I watched them in a training class helping each other, and I don’t mean people from their own company. They were answering questions for people for other companies. They’re very proud to know the product, and they share it well.

Stacy Kornluebke: I happen to be a member of the customer service team, and it’s a really nice place to be, but everyone at the company has a huge drive towards making customers successful. I can go to Bret frequently and ask how things would look or what’s going to happen or what’s the next design. I can often come to Riya and say, “Hey, what’s the Quick Wins team doing this week?” so I never feel shut out of what we’re doing, and I feel that it’s always highly based on customer feedback. They work very closely with them. Jen’s giving me the face, but I can always come to her for compliance and security reasons. She’s really a very great resource if you need to understand GDPR.

Stacy Kornluebke: Sumo Logic also has a great sense of fun. What you’re looking at, in case you’re worried, is a suitcase full of 70 Sumos. The squishies that you’re going to receive tonight are extremely popular with our students. We didn’t get them shipped in time, so in addition to other interesting things I have done with my life, I took 70 Sumos in a bag through JFK, and TSA did not ask me one question.

Stacy Kornluebke: Think the last thing that I want to talk a little bit more about is that when I came here, we had this great phrase about how Sumo Logic was going to be democratizing data. At first, I was trying to imagine, what did that really look like? The more I learned about the product, the more people shared information with me, the more I understood the importance of having information at your fingertips. A lot of information usually gets siloed off, and in my world, when I get siloed off, I don’t really know as much about the customer as I think I do. My whole goal is to make sure that they learn about the product.

Stacy Kornluebke: All right, so if everything’s perfect, and you came here, and you loved it, what’s the big challenge with Sumo? What have you been doing for the last 18 months? Christian’s giving me the face, so I think he’s wondering too. To be perfectly honest, there’s a lot of challenge in the world of learning. The world has kind of gone from a directed approach. “Hey, I’m going to tell you what to do. These are the five steps to use this toaster,” to an open approach.

Stacy Kornluebke: There’s Stack Overflow, there’s GitHub, there’s just Googling it, right? Everywhere you go, you try and find the answer to your question. If you want people to use your product correctly, you need to make sure that you’re answering their questions because if you’re just telling them how you think it’s being used, they’re going to stop coming to you, and they’re going to go someplace where they can find the answer. That may not be a good answer, and it may not be a professional answer, but it’s giving them what they need. Users absolutely have the right to expect that you’re going to help them accomplish the task they want with your product.

Stacy Kornluebke: What do you know about your users? The first thing to kind of try and answer their questions involves understanding your users, and so, we’ve talked to you through two presentations about Melindas and Andres. We’ve talked to you from a design perspective and from a development perspective, but from my perspective, they need to know about the product. Melinda’s on it. She comes to Illuminate. I have a million Melindas. They tell me that the docs are like the Bible. They love it. They go into it every day. That’s because they use the product every day. Our product has a query language, and for her, it’s a second language. She knows what to type, what to find, where to go.

Stacy Kornluebke: Andre is a less frequent user of our product. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to speak a foreign language that you only use once a month, but as you can imagine, trying to look things up, hoping that you got the right translation, the right inflection, that you understand the subtleties of the language, it’s really not going to happen if you pull out one of these dictionaries. It’s also not going to work quite so well with Google Translate, so you want to be able to get advice and understand what do these terms actually mean and how can I accomplish my task.

Stacy Kornluebke: If you’re trying to understand how to grow your knowledge in any part of your product, use the data you have already. Usually, Google Analytics is quite popular. Everybody uses it. No one knows what to do with the data. I suggest that you get the data, and understand a few things about what you want people to do with that information. For us, we were extremely excited to have people coming in, but then, we had to spend a lot of time figuring out, are they spending enough time on page views, do we want them to leave this page and find other pages, or do we want them to exit? Google will tell you what people are doing. You need to understand whether those behaviors are helping or hurting them.

Stacy Kornluebke: We also were very fortunate to have marketing reach out and give us information on SEO because a high number of our users Google. We needed to know whether or not we were obeying search algorithm rules. We also use net promoter scores. I don’t know … How many people are using NPS? Does anyone want to … Okay, so I see we’re talking to maybe 10 people. All right, so, the way NPS works is that it’s a ten … Excellent. No. You’re using my argument against me. I like it. I frequently do that to other people in the audience, so I deserved it.

Stacy Kornluebke: Net promoter score. On a basis of one to 10, a nine and a 10, those people are going to recommend you. Anyone below a nine isn’t as thrilled about you as you think they are. While they’re using you, they’re not excited about you. Hopefully, when they give you that rating, they’re going to tell you something. If they say, “Great product, but the docs suck,” I am the one who will find you and say, “Hey, what can we do to make it better?” but in these scores, that information does give you a sense of whether or not they’re truly satisfied. If only a nine or 10 matters, then you need to step it up and make sure you’re not making a seven or an eight.

Stacy Kornluebke: We also have this cool direct feedback mechanism in the docs, so down here where you see, was this article helpful? Yes, no. Leave feedback. I know that doesn’t seem that revolutionary, but we get feedback twice a week to our information based on this from customers. That’s a high level of participation. People come in. They feel very comfortable. They can say yes or no, but frequently, they can say, “Hey, I was expecting it to do this.” So long as you’re responsive to that, people will come back to you.

Stacy Kornluebke: We were also fortunate because we’d spend so much time making data visualizations. We could use our own tools, which was pretty awesome and a great kind of group project, and then again, I have to thank the UX team for giving us their customer journey because we could see the pain points people had with the product and try and align them to whether or not they were having a problem reaching information, training, documentation. Was it just an education issue, or was it something that was more of a product problem, and we were not going to get doc around it? It was going to have to be fixed.

Stacy Kornluebke: I speak a lot to search because 60% of our users and specifically, our struggling users, are coming to us for this reason, but if you are trying to figure out how to reach more users, find how they find you. If that’s through your Twitter feed, if that’s through your Slack channel, make sure that you know how your most struggling users are coming to you because if you aren’t speaking their language and you’re attempting to force them to use another tool, good luck. I don’t think anybody wants to learn one more thing. They want to find it the way they normally find it.

Stacy Kornluebke: Also, I recommend using your own tools. I know I’ve said it. I know you’ve seen all of us pull a dashboard showing how we use our product with our data, but what this allowed us to do was to take our certifications, take our data, and show it to sales. We pulled in customer success to make a meaningful dashboard. It became a group project. By involving more of the company, you’re going to get more people starting to understand what customers are struggling with and how they can help them. Frequently, our salespeople come in and they see who is certified and who isn’t and whether that makes a difference in whether people buy or renew. A certification is a great way to learn about our product, and it’s one indicator of whether or not people understand and feel confident with it.

Stacy Kornluebke: Okay, so how do I get answers to them? Well, everyone’s going to have to come up with a different way of doing this. For us, we found that a number of users desperately wanted some way to interact with a human being. They wanted immediate answers, and whether that was a Slack channel or that was an in-person training class, they were happy. Just bring me somebody who can answer my questions. The first thing we did with certification and training was we started holding what we called Cert Jams. We took the user classes that we hold at Illuminate. We came to cities where there were at least two, 300 Sumo Logic users. We said, “Hey, there’s a free class if you come today. Come in. Learn. Get a t-shirt.” Jane and Kerry were helping me out today, so somewhere around here, they’re wearing their t-shirts. Yes, so that, believe it or not, was a big thing for people.

Stacy Kornluebke: Quick answers to questions online as I’ve mentioned before. I know SEO is kind of this dirty word in the engineering world. It’s what marketing people do, and we shouldn’t touch it, but if you don’t, you don’t get the results you want. Then, just quick answers in real time, so if you can’t talk to a person, if you’re out on Anchorage and you’re using our product, you can still get on Slack. Anyone can find and ask a question.

Stacy Kornluebke: Here’s a picture of our Cert Jams. This is kind of cool for people. They’re really happy. We call this the t-shirt shot at the end. When they get their certification, they get their shirt. For every city that we go to, we try and take at least one of these. We’re doing at least 25 this year, and we hope to do 30 next year, but this is really a great networking opportunity for anybody who uses our product, and it’s a chance for people in our company to kind of get to know our users in a non-sales context.

Stacy Kornluebke: These are all the mistakes that we made with SEO. Please don’t make our mistakes. Please make new ones.

Stacy Kornluebke: We, first of all, did not know how search engines worked, so we had to use the SEM rush report to understand things like the algorithm will punish you for dashes and for underscores instead of dashes. Good to know. Our tool was automatically generating underscores all the time for us to take out those spaces, so we had to change the default setting, and magically, our documentation was popping to the top for our search results. Good to know.

Stacy Kornluebke: Use their terms. One of the things that I also find with learning materials, with documentation is we frequently try and force people into an exact definition of exactly what we’re doing, which is great, but it’s not the term people are searching for. A classic example of this is we talked very specifically to two-factor authentication because there were two factors when a lot of people were looking for MFA. We do not have the right to try and teach them the difference between multi-factor and two-factor. We can take them to the two-factor page, and then, they can see the difference between that and multi-factor, but please just get them to the information that they want. Use the term they use even if it’s a little hacky. They want to find their stuff.

Stacy Kornluebke: Then, the last bit is please avoid stubs. I’m just going to give you this bit of an SEO advice. If it’s under 200 words, your search engine hates you. I know there’s this great trend to try and bring down documentation to short little stubs, easy-to-read pages. Please bind up all those little stubs into a single page. You user will thank you because they don’t want to click through 60 pages, and your search engine will thank you because then, it will think it’s a real document. You can also make your own SEO mistakes. I recommend it. Keep having fun, but get people what they need.

Stacy Kornluebke: We also created an in-product learn tab. What we discovered was that people just want to go to the product, find what they need to do to learn, and go through stuff. Well, that’s great, but I have a 30-video library, and there’s no easy way to stick that all in the product. What we did was we had people from the UX team help us out with a design, and engineering helped us implement just kind of a short five-video series. We used APIs from our knowledge base to pull in the tutorials, and then, we provided quick links to other parts of the product. Now, this is really useful to a lot of people. They come in. They watch one quick video. They review the tutorials, and they’re done. It’s not a long-term thing. It’s a help in onboarding, but it made a big difference.

Stacy Kornluebke: You also sometimes have to accept change. As wedded as I am to SEO and I like forums, and I want information to be found, and we’re going to be the next Stack Overflow, a community where you have a timed response where people have SLAs and they’ll get back to you even within a day is not as cool as it used to be. People like Slack. Slack offers real-time response to questions. It makes people happy. They’re not really concerned if the next person can Google it. They’re getting the answer they need. Being where your users are is kind of what you need to provide.

Stacy Kornluebke: Also, just remember this is a process, so use any data that you have, CSAT, NPS, Google Analytics. Whatever you’ve got, start trying to understand your users. Please work with any group that you have that has similar customer based mindsets, so if you’ve got a UX team, if you’ve got a customer success team, if you’ve got a field full of salespeople that desperately want to help customers, reach out to them. Don’t hesitate to ask a couple of questions to do your job better.

Stacy Kornluebke: I also recommend that you join some grassroots movements. I like Write the Docs. It’s a bunch of people that take a more hacker-based approach to writing documentation, but it’s also just a user conference where people come who work with problems every day. We can talk about our struggles with trying to use analytics data. Talk to your users directly. I don’t know, depending upon your corporate culture, how open people are to that, but Sumo’s really never barred us from reaching out and saying, “Hey, how could we make things better?” if it’s just sitting silently on a call with someone who is working with the customer, that’s good too. Understand what people are really saying about what you’re offering and what you’re teaching about the product.

Stacy Kornluebke:  I want to say thank you. I know I gave you a to-do list, but that’s kind of what I do. Now, we’re going to hand you over to Jen who’s going to talk to you about security and privacy.

Jen Brown speaking at Sumo Logic Girl Geek Dinner.

Jen Brown: I’m Jen Brown. I am DPO here at Sumo Logic. As you see, I control everything security and privacy as far as GRC goes. That means I get to work with all of the external auditors and do all that fun internal audits policies. I’m putting you to sleep already, so yes. I’m also a contributor to Dark Reading. If any of you aren’t aware of what Dark Reading is, it’s a really great resource for technology news, so check it out if you haven’t and don’t know about it. I’ve been in this space for over 20 years. I’m a grandmother. You can see. I’m blessed to be booed. That’s what they call me, grandma to Lucy and Will, and then Max is in the middle there. He’s over here sleeping. He’s our security mascot. Happy to be at Sumo. I’ve been here for about two years now, was here for about six months as a consultant, liked it, so I came on. We kind of did a try before you buy. They made sure they liked me. I made sure I liked them. Luckily, it all worked out.

Jen Brown: Our group is broken into three different groups. We’ve got the Security Operations Center, so we’ve got a manager for that who’s building that out. We actually are just beginning that journey. As I said, I do compliance, all our external audits. You can see we have PCI, SOC 2, ISO, CSA Star, HIPAA, Privacy, and then we also do risk management. We’re also looking or going towards FedRAMP certification, so a lot of fun to be had, and then DevSecOps. We’ve got an engineer that we poached from finance, which sounds really strange, but our last two hires have been from the finance groups. I have to be really careful when I’m walking around that group. I have to kind of skirt it, so nothing hits me, but he’s helping us to automate everything possible. I’m going to show you one of the things he built for us to save a lot of time and make our customers much, much more happy.

Jen Brown: What we’ve got here is we’ve got a self-service portal. When I first came onto Sumo, what would happen is if a customer needed something like our PCI AOC, which is an attestation of compliance, the salesperson would go in. They’d enter a JIRA ticket. It would come to us. We’d have to make sure there’s an NDA in place. There was this back and forth. Depending on how busy we were, if I had audits, whatever, sometimes, this could take three to four weeks to get a document. Doesn’t equal happy customers at all.

Jen Brown: What Mike built for us … Let me just pull this up real quick. Hey, Brian. Is Brian here? I was going to take you through the portal, but this will be good enough. There’s an NDA on the front of it, which really helps us reduce that time of making … We don’t have to go and make sure there’s an NDA with a customer before we let them see this. They agree to it, and this is what they’re going to see. They’re going to see that they can pick from any of these documents here to get sent to them. If they’re our customer, so if they’re in Salesforce or they’re a customer or prospect in Salesforce, they’re going to get those documents right away. I mean, instant. Just no more two to three weeks. They get it right away.

Jen Brown: If they’re not in Salesforce, there’s going to be a little bit of investigation that goes on. Jane who works with us back there, she’s going to go to the sales team, and she’s going to find out like, should this person who’s requesting this actually get these documents? This has made our customers really, really happy. It has cut down a lot of work for us too, which of course, makes us really happy. The other thing we’ve done that I was going to show you is we put our DSR portal on here. Anybody working with GDPR? We put our data subject request portal on this as well, so it’s really automated a lot of what we’re doing.

Jen Brown: All right, so, as you can see, just in a quarter alone, we had 546 from customers and 616 requests from prospects. That’s a lot of JIRA tickets we didn’t have to deal with, and again, a lot of happy customers. It’s decreased the time, as I’ve said. It enables us to be more transparent with our customers because we’re able to put more documentation out there, and we’re always trying to find new things that we can put out there. At first, it was just the attestations and certifications, and now, we’ve got our pen test results out there. We’re always trying to provide more.

Jen Brown: The other thing on that portal that I wasn’t able to show you because it got cut off is we’ve got a place where customers can come to us and say, “You’re not compliant with fill-in-the-blank.” I mean, there’s so many laws and regulations out there. They’re able to tell us what it is they need us to be compliant to. There’s the German privacy law. There’s the New York CFR, so on and so forth, so we’re able to get that from them, which I think I’ve got a minute to teach.

Jen Brown: Yes, so we’re able to, instead of just throwing a dart and trying to figure out what maybe customers want, we’re able to hear from them. We’re hearing from sales all day long. We love sales, but it’s better to hear it from the customers and really see what it is that they want. Just based again on a quarter’s worth of data, we found out that 11 customers really need it. I’m not even going to try to … Maybe you can pronounce it, Christian. It’s a German privacy law. They need us to go get compliant with that. New York has got a new financial services law on the book. We’ve got 11 customers who need us to look at that.

Jen Brown: Australia has got our IRAP. We’ve got another 11 customers who are asking for that. Then, GLBA, we’ve got 10. There’s some others that people are asking for, but we’re able to really see what people are looking for us to be able to show and demonstrate compliance against. That’s really helped us to build that roadmap instead of just guessing because there’s hundreds you can choose from.

Jen Brown: All right, so that was mine. Mine was quick, sweet, and short, but we’re always trying to automate what we’re doing in security, so that way, when we build our roadmap, we’re building it correctly and adding more and more and more every time that we do. Our customer input influences all our decisions at Sumo Logic. I mean, it’s just a really, really big point. Customers are so important. That includes how we design, engineer, like end-to-end. It’s amazing. We share a common goal and partner closely with our customers, impact cross-functionally. I mean, as the women said, it is really end-to-end. This reflects the core value of what we … We’re in it with our customers. All right.

Shea Kelly: All right. Thank you, Jen. Everybody still with us? Happy Monday still? Okay, okay, okay. Good, good, good. We wanted to set some time aside. Is that too loud? I feel like I’m talking really loud. Set some time aside at the end for some questions, so I thought we’re going to scooch … How about if we scoot our chairs over? Does that work? Is this not working anyway? While we’re doing that, I actually want to shout some thank yous out, so first and foremost to Angie, and to our team Stacy and Bronwyn for the recording and all the help to get this recorded for us, so we’ve got it in perpetuity.

Shea Kelly: Second, if she’s back there, I want to shout out to Tori Lee. Is Tori here? All this food, beverage, everything, Tori is magnificent. She does this for us every day, and I was thrilled she was able to do it for all of us here today. Obviously, I want to thank our panel, our fabulous panel. I want to thank all of you for coming. We’re going to shift to a few questions, and we’ll see. We have mics we can hand out and around, so if anyone has the questions, just put a hand up, and we can bring a microphone to you, or you can shout it and we can probably just repeat it. Okay. Max is out. Yes, we are very dog-friendly. At any one point, what do we have? Like 50 here a day? Yes, that’d be great. Yes. Thank you. Is he up? We’re just going to adjust lights a little bit here. Did somebody have a question?

Audience Member: Yes. Right here.

Shea Kelly: Oh, I’m so sorry. Okay.

Audience Member: First of all, thank you. The set of the presentation is one of the best I’ve seen because you touched on real everyday life in a company versus how you, being a woman, makes a difference through your job. No. Thank you. I mean, I got from each of the presentation something that I could relate to but that brings the question to Bret and Riya. You both … and actually, to the learning lady.

Shea Kelly: She had to leave, just so you know.

Audience Member: Yeah. All of you, your presentation talked about the product management but there’s no product management talking, and each of you … Obviously, I’m in product management, so I’m concerned, but you are doing things that almost, throughout my career, part, all of it would fall under my responsibility. Can you talk about the product management dynamics in the company?

Shea Kelly: You want to repeat over there so …

Jen Brown: Louder.

Shea Kelly: Do you guys have mic? Can you turn it on?

Jen Brown: Product management dynamics. He’s Bruno. He’s one of our co-founders.

Bruno Kurtic: Hi. Could somebody-

Riya Singh: Hello.

Bruno Kurtic: Hi. Could you repeat the question because nobody behind here could hear it?

Shea Kelly: This is Bruno Kurtic.

Bruno Kurtic: Here. I’m going to give you the mic. In fact, we’d throw with this thing around.

Audience Member: I’ll shorten the question. First of all, the compliments still hold. One of the best set of presentation in Geek Girl Dinner ever because it touched on real life topics. Instead of what being a woman in tech means, you talked about what doing my job as a professional means, which I can … and happily more to relate to, but back to you. Many of the responsibilities that I as a product manager or head of product view as my responsibility were amazingly well-described by people that their title is not product management. Can you describe the dynamics of product management in the company interacting with UX, with engineering, with security?

Bruno Kurtic: Sure. We have a really easy job in product management. We just sit around and all these guys do everything else. That’s how it works here. No. Just to be serious, we don’t actually talk about ourselves as product management or engineering. We actually call ourselves product development, and all of these people here are in product development, bar one, who has a big input into product development. We run very integrated teams, right? Everybody has their primary responsibility, product, for strategy and requirements, user experience for design, engineering for architecture, things like that.

Bruno Kurtic: Ultimately, we basically break teams up into small units that have cross-functional team members who do the things that are necessary for that unit to succeed. Usually, that’s rallied around specific customer outcomes, so when we build things at Sumo, we don’t build features. We build outcomes. We focus ourselves around whose life are we going to make easier if we do X, Y, and Z. That’s why when you talk to everybody across the company, you’ll hear a lot of things that are relevant to other cross-functional topics. We usually don’t have very stringent decision-making that you get to decide this, you get to decide that. The team decides. They do the best that they can. That’s why.

Audience Member: Thanks. Great. Thanks.

Riya Singh answers a question from the audience at Sumo Logic Girl Geek Dinner.

Riya Singh: I’ll just add a little bit more to it. Firstly, we’re missing one of our PMs — She is on a maternity leave, so that’s why there’s one missing function here. I work very closely with Lavinia and all the other product management as well. I think when we said that engineering takes in customer input, obviously, the vision comes from the product management, right? It’s not me you or it’s just her or one person. It’s all together, right? Customer experience is important to us. Especially with things-

Audience Member: It was a compliment because you said product management, so I think I was wondering you have no job for the product manager. It was a compliment because there was no dedicated speaker as a product manager, but you spoke product management. It was a compliment. That’s why I was asking.

Riya Singh: Yeah. I hope Lavinia will be back soon, and we can talk more. Yeah. More questions, guys?

Audience Member: Yeah, I got it. First, thank you for the wonderful presentation and the hospitality. You talked about that collaborative environment, for example, when there is a problem, you go to the war room, you drop everything, and then you solve the problem. My question is, how does this culture scale when the number of projects, applications, and customers grow?

Riya Singh: More war rooms. Every room is a war room. The concept of war room was particular to outages. The definition of an outage is that it shouldn’t happen too often. It’s not that you’re spending all the time in the war room, right? We are working very hard to make sure that these outages don’t happen over time. As I said before, no repeat offenders, right? It may sound stressful when you are in this war room, an outage situation, but it’s not frequent. The frequency is just going down with time. Does that answer your question?

Audience Member: I was stressing the example, the war room, but on a larger scale, the idea that there’s cross-functionality, collaboration, I think that’s a recent change in culture. How does that scale?

Riya Singh: If the team is larger, how do we make sure this cross collaboration happens?

Shea Kelly: Maybe Jen, you …

Jen Brown: Yeah, so communication. We’re always working together. He thinks it’s a laser. Sorry, he’s very excited. Sorry. We work really closely together. We make sure that there are people who are on point for when things like outages happen, items like that. I mean, even though we’re growing, I don’t know if it’s just unique to Sumo, but we just haven’t seem to have that problem yet. I mean, Christian?

Christian Beedgen: We’re always… It’s a divide and conquer sort of strategy. We make room for more teams. We make more teams, so we keep them cross-functional. Then, over time, as we need to grow, we needed to grow more leaders as well, and then there’s sometimes an additional layer of cross-functional leadership discussion, so to tie it all up, it’s a tried matrix, I think.

Jen Brown: A good example of that is when I first started in security, we had a security engineer, we had me. Now, we have DevSecOps. We’ve got the SOC engineer, so we are growing and adding more teams and functionality like Christian said. Does that answer better? You look like … Okay.

Audience Member: Who are your direct competitors, and then how you differentiate yourselves from them?

MaryAnn O’Brien: All right, so good question. When I came to Sumo, I actually have a lot of friends that work at one of our direct competitors. As I started to research … Actually, to be quite honest, I had never heard of Sumo Logic when a recruiter had reached out, so I had an opportunity to research and do my own level of understanding in terms of the company itself. I’ll just tell you one of the primary competitors that we’ll see especially on the enterprise side is Splunk, if you’re familiar with Splunk. Another … I lead a mid-market sales team, and one of the actually big competitors that we see a lot is open source, so if you’re familiar with ELK, they’re actually … We run into them quite a bit more actually, just as equally, probably about 50/50. In my particular segment is ELK, as well as Splunk are the two primary.

MaryAnn O’Brien: Overall, that’s mainly on our log side, but we also have a unified logs and metric strategy, which includes metrics, so every so often, we will also see some monitoring and metrics type of competitors like Datadog as an example. Does that help?

Shea Kelly: Anybody else?

Audience Member: It’s a really big microphone. Yeah. All right, it’s awesome. I always want to pause a microphone. Thank you for the presentation in [inaudible]. It’s really good. My question is that, listen to your customers, and since you have so many customers, I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of feature, there’s a lot of requests, a lot of I wonder if some want that. Based on experience, what do you find the best way to prioritize and how do you choose what feature or what new things to work on first?

Riya Singh: That’s very in the PM to answer that question about prioritization. Bruno, you want to take that?

Bruno Kurtic: It’s a loaded question, but we start with the overall strategy. What is the true north? What are we trying to achieve as a company? I oftentimes tell people that strategy’s knowing what not to do. It’s not knowing what to do. We start with the strategy. We align those strategies with customer outcomes. We focus on certain set of things as few as we can. It’s not always easy, right? You always try to kind of do less, but you end up doing a lot more than you probably can, and you should. We try to really tightly scope what problems are we trying to solve.

Bruno Kurtic: We try to sort of align on what is the minimum amount of work we need to put in to produce something that actually changes the outcomes for the customer. We really like to work agile and deliver products out to customers. We’ve built a very sophisticated way to surface new capabilities in production to individual customers even though we’re a multi-tenant SaaS service, so we have very fine-grained controls over what we deliver to customers. We did that because we wanted to be able to give customers things early, get feedback, iterate, iterate, iterate, improve, and that’s how we develop. It has to be aligned with strategy. It has to be aligned with positive customer outcomes. It has to be in scope of certain time horizon, usually six to nine months, and then, you just fill the backlog, and you burn down.

Audience Member: Thank you.

Shea Kelly: Any other question?

Audience Member: I heard the mention of customer success. I was just wondering if you also have a customer support team. Is it one thing for you guys? How do you deal with like 24 by seven support or service?

Riya Singh: Our learning lady is missing. We do have customer success and customer support. The way I understand it, so we have our support portal where customers can put in support requests. Customer support is mostly trying to solve their immediate use cases or reporting bugs or something is not working, helping them troubleshoot. That’s customer support. Customer success is a little more broader. They’re trying to make solutions to help our customers. They’re actively trying to find out why this customer is not giving us a good score or how is he using the product, and how can we increase usage adoption within their accounts? They’re effectively trying to make them more powerful in using of the product.

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