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“Girl Geeks Gone Gov”: Martha Wilkes + Lisa Koenigsberg with United State Digital Service (Video + Transcript)

Transcript of Elevate 2020 Session

Gretchen DeKnikker: This session, yes, we are recording them. They will be on YouTube later. Subscribe now, and all of your dreams will come true. If you’re hosting a watch party or you want to tweet or have questions, throw them in the chat, send them out on Twitter. Definitely have the pictures. We saw the ones earlier of the watch party with the dog, and that was amazing. That just gave the whole team life because we’re all a little tired after this week.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Submit and upvote your questions during this session, down here using this Q&A button and be sure to check out the job opportunities from our sponsors at girlgeek.io/opportunities. That does include jobs where you could work with these amazing ladies that I’m about to introduce to you at U.S. Digital Service.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Martha Wilkes and Lisa Koenigsberg are both working at U.S. Digital Service, and they’re out here to tell you a little bit about mid-career malaise, a very important thing, knowing that everyone in this audience is more senior than our average audience, and the fact that we work in this ridiculously ageist industry that never gives enough attention to these things, and that all of us are going to face it. You guys are going to come, you’re going to give us life today, so I’m going to stop talking and let you take it away.

Martha Wilkes: Thank you, Gretchen. I’m Martha Wilkes, and I work at U.S. Digital Service. I’m one of the two Girl Geeks Gone Gov. They asked us to come up with a cute title, so that was our alliteration to the next level. We both found ourselves in the government with no intention. Lisa, what is US Digital Service anyway? What are we doing here?

Lisa Koenigsberg: Yes, yes. U.S. Digital Service. It’s comprised of about 170 technology geeks, and I use technology in air quotes, across different expertise, products, engineering, procurement, developers, designers, really smart bureaucracy hackers, which we’ll come back to again. We work with various government agencies to mostly give them permission to try something new, keeping in mind that the mission to do that is to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people in the greatest need.

Lisa Koenigsberg: We’re hiring, by the way, usds.gov/apply. Check us out. We’re going to tell you more about it as we go. I’ll tell you a little bit about how I got here. It was 12 years in a nonprofit, 12 years of coming in one day and finding out thank you very much, but no thank you. Here I am, a mid-career, middle-aged woman who has to go out and fend for herself.

Lisa Koenigsberg: It was hard. I had heard about USDS from a conference, actually a diversity and inclusion conference, that I had gone to several years before. I pocketed a card and made some LinkedIn connections and put that in the back pocket, doing what you typically do is, “I’ll never go and do that. There’s no way I’d work for the government. I’ve heard horror stories about how hard it is to get into the government and who wants to go from private sector to public sector?”

Lisa Koenigsberg: I’m here to tell you that I have done it and it ain’t so bad. I don’t know, Martha, if you want to say a little bit about your journey?

Martha Wilkes: Yes. Mine was a little more fraught. I didn’t ever have USDS in mind and if I did, I don’t think it ever sinked in. I technically live in North Carolina. We’re here in Washington, DC right now.

Martha Wilkes: I, too, got laid off and here’s lesson number one to the people. When you get the mandatory HR meeting with no agenda and you have to attend on the day, there’s your sign. We scrambled, and this goes to my other lesson for you. Keep your portfolio and resume updated all the time. I heard this all my career. Did I do it? No, because on that day, I was scrambling like everybody else was. We knew what was happening.

Martha Wilkes: You have to be ready to go. I was at a company for 16 years, thinking I’d stay at that company 16 years, and guess what? That’s not what happened. I would say that was my first lesson, to be ready to go.

Martha Wilkes: I really also was not finding a lot of jobs locally, and it took me a while to find work, even any jobs, really. I was actually finding that the ones I was getting were the ones that were where the interview process was sight unseen because I have a lot of gray hair, people. That’s what I have, and I’m a middle-aged woman in the tech world. It turns out ageism is real and both of us have experienced it. I think you also liked the fact that the USDS interview process was on the phone.

Lisa Koenigsberg: Yeah. Let me tell you a little bit about that process. I’m going to lead in with an example that tells you what United States Digital Service is. We refer to it as USDS.

Martha Wilkes: Sorry, United States Digital Service.

Lisa Koenigsberg: Inside baseball here, so I apologize, an acronym heavy world.

Martha Wilkes: It’s the government; there are acronyms.

Lisa Koenigsberg: Typical government placement takes a long time. The USDS process took two clicks. You don’t need a government resume. You can use your regular resume. You go online, you pick a few checkboxes and upload your resume and you’re done.

Lisa Koenigsberg: What our counterparts that predated us did, one of the things that we did was hack the US Government hiring process to make it so that we have a much more human-centered approach to hiring. We’ve been talking a lot throughout today about bias. The entire interview process consisted of three pretty detailed interviews. All of it took place on the phone. I did not physically see a human being until I accepted an offer.

Lisa Koenigsberg: Then I said, “Well, wait a second. I would like to see who I’m going to work with and maybe where I’d be working and see a human being,” just because I didn’t trust that it was real. It doesn’t remove all of the bias because there’s still voice and tone and language that comes from different parts of the country and the world, but it definitely removed some of the ageism bias because they couldn’t see what I looked like or what I wore or any of those things.

Lisa Koenigsberg: That gives you an example of what USDS is. USDS is still working with the office of personnel management to make the hiring process more user friendly, meaning that you don’t have to write a 25-page computer readable resume that does keyword matching, and then maybe if you did everything right, you get to talk to a human. We start with human and go from there, so there’s ongoing work happening, but USDS started that with their own process. Did I say that we’re hiring?

Martha Wilkes: Yes, usds.gov/apply. we won’t be offended if you go to our website in the middle of our talk. That would be awesome. We’re always hiring people.

Martha Wilkes: Speaking of other people who work here, the imposter syndrome here at U.S. Digital Service is turned up to 11, because there’s incredible people here. I have to say, in my career I’ve worked with what I thought were awesomely smart people. Everybody here is smart and also nice because that’s one of the things that we’re looking for at U.S. Digital Services, not only people who can do the work technically, and we all have to be able to do that, but there’s an extra special secret sauce to USDS, U.S. Digital Service members that we don’t always own the thing.

Martha Wilkes: Mostly what we’re doing, because of our reputation, is that we don’t have all the answers. Our agency partners and the folks that work in the agencies are awesome people. They just are stuck in the bureaucracy and the red tape maybe of their agency. We mostly partner with them and elevate them and make sure their excellent ideas come to fruition. We can, because of where we are, locate a breakthrough a little bit. Do you feel like that imposter syndrome, Lisa?

Lisa Koenigsberg: Oh gosh. In any given day, I’m sitting in a room full of a combination of agency staff, let’s say at Office of Personnel Management. I’m sitting in a room with USDS staff that could go anywhere from former CTO of companies, to the people who started–the famous five or seven of Google, and the chairman of the Office of Personnel Management. Then there’s me.

Lisa Koenigsberg: I’m with my sweatshirt and my tennis shoes on thinking, why am I here? What could I possibly contribute? Then they ask me a question and it’s amazing, the support that you get in the feedback. They’re just looking for help. They’re looking for people from the outside to help them realize how to deal with the American public and create user-centered services and product ties and use modern technologies.

Lisa Koenigsberg: It’s hard, but it’s super fulfilling. I have given the example of if you want to do something in a place that has the big impact, forget Google and Amazon. Those numbers are minuscule. There are millions and millions of people in the United States and the people that we work with every day, those are their customers, not the couple of million that belong to Google or Amazon. It’s huge. If you’re looking for something that has purpose and meaning, there’s nothing bigger than you can do than work for a government agency.

Martha Wilkes: The other good thing about working for the government, which again, neither of us ever thought we’d be in, the benefits are really good. I think this is our advice and our lesson to especially middle aged women and also planting seeds in younger women who maybe one day, so may be thinking about this, because we are looking mostly for people who can walk in and handle themselves and have had maybe some life experience.

Martha Wilkes: I think both of us has had some life experience. Not only have we had life experience, but to sound like a Hallmark card or an Oprah episode, the hard things in life, the disappointments we had by being laid off in mid career, I almost can’t believe it’s coming out of my mouth, as cheesy as it sounds, but it literally has brought me to this experience, opened my mind to, “Okay, I have to broaden my horizons because I’m a middle-aged woman in tech and I need to find something, the next thing.”

Martha Wilkes: Also, that–having gone through that now has given me something, so when something hard comes along, maybe I can keep it in perspective a little bit, or maybe be like, “I’ve been here before and it’s been a hard thing, but I’ve come out the other side.” I think that’s the lesson, to be open to the adventures in your career. I never really thought I would. I never envisioned myself here. What do you think?

Lisa Koenigsberg: Yeah, when I dropped my resume in, I thought, “Nah, that’ll never happen. I’m just going to do it for the experience and have another interview through my belt.” I do want to, again, echo some of that, don’t be afraid to stretch yourself. Don’t be afraid to try something different.

Lisa Koenigsberg: I know the average government employee works in a place for 20 years plus. We have terms. We’re limited to two two-year terms, so a total max of four years because that is the industry standard, right? That’s how long people stay at a job. That’s how long you don’t become succumbed to the inside baseball. There’s a purpose for that, and it’s hard.

Lisa Koenigsberg: I also come from a woman perspective and I have found that, because I’m with the United States Digital Service, that has given me some carte blanche to walk into a room and be heard. As a woman in technology, I offer give every opportunity that you have to be heard. Don’t be afraid to have your voice. Don’t be afraid to say what you think. It won’t always go well, but don’t shy back because you’re sitting in a room full of men. Your voice matters. Find a place where you can be heard.

Lisa Koenigsberg: I will also just give a few examples of what USDS does, talking a little bit from our own experience. Do you want to throw in a few things that you’ve done?

Martha Wilkes: I’m a designer. My first project, when I joined U.S. Digital Service was to actually dig on a hiring pilot. We have a pilot and we’re trying to improve the government hiring because we have had stories and evidence of people with upwards of 60-page resumes. That’s what it takes to even get through the hiring process, which is crazy, especially when you’re trying to hire awesome tech people who might be coming from the private sector who have a two-page resume, like we all do.

Martha Wilkes: That was my first project. Now I’m at the Department of Veterans Affairs, working on tools for healthcare for our awesome veterans. They’re such fantastic people, who have paid the price up ahead, assuming that they did the right thing up ahead for their country, and now we owe them all the stuff that they sacrificed for.

Martha Wilkes: They’re wonderful, wonderful users. I listened to some user testing last week, usability testing last week. I told everyone I’m biased because I fell in love with everybody. They’re awesome, awesome people, our veterans.

Lisa Koenigsberg: Yep. My original few months, maybe six months, was at the Veterans Affairs Administration and I focused on the authenticated experience. Once you’ve logged into the VA.gov website, what do you see? What is your dashboard? What is your profile? What services do you have rights to and how do you find out about others? Super exciting.

Lisa Koenigsberg: We did a three month in-depth research and discovery phase that directed probably a two-year roadmap that’s now being executed against. I got to come in and just make that happen. I’ve now handed that off to another really smart group of people, and I’ve been working at Social Security Administration to help them better transactions, like getting a replacement Social Security card or getting proof of benefit from them or finding out your claim status. We’re helping them bring the consumer to the forefront and get the- I guess our time is up.

Martha Wilkes: USDS.gov. That’s our final thing. USDS.gov/apply. Sorry about that. We made it.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Wonderful. Okay.

Martha Wilkes: We’re happy to take questions, you guys.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Yes, and I love that U.S. Digital Service, they sponsor–they join us as a government participant every year. Every year, the speakers are just phenomenal. You think at the beginning, there’s no way I would ever work for the government. Then you meet these women and you’re like, “You know…?”

Gretchen DeKnikker: Then you guys talking–not you guys, y’all talking about impact…

Lisa Koenigsberg: Oh.

Martha Wilkes: We’re Girls Geek Gone Gov.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Just the impact, you touch everyone, everyone in the entire United States. That is scale and that’s amazing. I think a lot of people, for the first time are looking at it, going, “Oh, wow. This sounds really cool, and I could work with you two.” Okay–

Martha Wilkes: It’s daunting. It’s a little scary, truly, when you walk in and you realize that when you’ve been operating at a different level, maybe, especially for me in the private sector, but it is thrilling and also you’re not by yourself. There’s an awesome team of people. Again, mostly the agency folks are the ones who really have that expertise and you partner with, I would say. Do you agree?

Lisa Koenigsberg: Yep.

Martha Wilkes: Cool.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Our most popular question is, well, it’s switching as they do. One is around the technology stack that’s used. I know you all work in different departments. Is that even something you can share? Is it a secret?

Martha Wilkes: Does COBOL strike anybody’s fancy because we’re huge in COBOL at Medicare/ Medicaid, and guess what? We actually can’t change that out. That runs the–

Gretchen DeKnikker: Well, the scale of that, yeah…

Martha Wilkes: That runs, what is it, 84% of the economy, so that COBOL code, thank God, is still up and running and safe.

Lisa Koenigsberg: I feel like a lot of what we do when we go in is there are a lot of mainframes sitting in use, okay? I’m not going to lie, but a lot of what we do is try to figure out how to build API services or microservices on top of that, so that we’re not hitting the mainframe for every request that we have, as a starting point of trying to then understand the business roles that drive that, so that we can then replace it some day.

Lisa Koenigsberg: It is not the forever solution, but unfortunately moving from static servers to AWS doesn’t work very easy here. A lot of what we do is try to incrementally get them to do that API transition, so they can uncover business logic and then have it written down when they’re ready to replace it.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Right. You’re the [crosstalk 00:18:22] inside the government.

Martha Wilkes: At the VA, The Veterans Administration, the project that we’re working on, React, microservices, like modern stuff…

Lisa Koenigsberg: There’s React, there’s Ruby. We do have modern services, but they’re often layered on top of very legacy systems.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Okay. There’s two questions. I want to try to get them both in, but we’re like close on time. One is do you need to have a technology or engineering background to apply to U.S. DS Digital Service?

Lisa Koenigsberg: I would say most of our folks do. Most of the on the ground work at the agencies is technology based, so we’re typically looking at people from the technology industry and design and engineering and product. We do have some front office and some talent parts that don’t require that, but knowledge of how to find that is also necessary. I would say most of it does come from a technology background.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Okay, and then the other one, I know it can be confusing… If you guys can get the owl to go back to have you centered, too. Focus just…

Martha Wilkes: Well, the owl has a mind of its own. When I start talking, it literally just…

Gretchen DeKnikker: The other one is how the terms work. You come. It’s a year or two years or four years. Then do you stay, do you go to another department? How does that work?

Lisa Koenigsberg: Neither of us have had to deal with that. I’ll give you the 30,000 foot view of what I’ve heard. Everything goes smoothly. Your two years hits and you can easily just roll over into your next two year term, or you can choose that this is enough, or you can choose that I’m all in on government and try to get yourself placed in a permanent government position.

Martha Wilkes: That’s what I want to do.

Lisa Koenigsberg: Right,

Martha Wilkes: Right now.

Lisa Koenigsberg: You could do your two years and then opt into your next two years. Usually, around year three, you’re starting to look at, and even the leadership at United States Digital Service is starting to talk to you about what is it that you want to do and help you get whatever direction you’re going to go.

Lisa Koenigsberg: We know that right now, there’s a 30/30 split last year of people who went back to the private sector or stayed in some kind of civic tech. Most of the people who stayed in civic tech went to other companies that were doing civic tech work, not necessarily with the government, but a lot of people are staying in the civic tech space because it’s super compelling.

Martha Wilkes: It’s so addicting, having worked at a private sector company, to come and work someplace that really has a mission of serving American people and people who are applying to be Americans citizens. To go back to just selling stuff for a company or just making stuff… It’s a little bit addicting I have to say, and I can’t imagine going back. I don’t want to go back.

Lisa Koenigsberg: I’ll also offer that a lot of the big companies, Microsoft, Google, offer sabbaticals to go do things for three to six months. We’ve had a lot of people come in, thinking I’m going to do my three or six months and have either done that or have stayed and said, “This is amazing. We want to stay.”

Martha Wilkes: There’s no experience like it in the private sector.

Lisa Koenigsberg: Our current administrator, Matt Cutts, came with a six months’ sabbatical from Google and stayed.

Gretchen DeKnikker: I don’t think you guys mentioned: Are you hiring?

Lisa Koenigsberg: Always.

Martha Wilkes: We are hiring. We’re always hiring because people are always coming and going. A lot of people don’t even stay for their full two-year term. People, for various reasons in their careers, are always coming and going, so we’re always hiring.

Lisa Koenigsberg: usds.gov/apply.

Gretchen DeKnikker: There we go. All right. That’s what I wanted to get in one more of. All right. This has been a pleasure, a true pleasure. Thank you so much.

Martha Wilkes: Thank you.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Thanks, everybody.

Lisa Koenigsberg: Happy National Women’s Day.

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“Lift As You Climb: Morning Keynote”: Carin Taylor with Workday (Video + Transcript)

Transcript of Elevate 2020 Session

Gretchen DeKnikker: We are ready to kick off the morning. Carin Taylor, our keynote speaker, is the Chief Diversity Officer of Workday, where she has global responsibility for the development and execution of Workday’s inclusion and diversity strategy. Prior to joining Workday, she was the head of diversity, inclusion and innovation at Genentech, where she was responsible for strategic initiatives, including executive coaching, building, and leading highly effective teams and increasing play engagement. She is here to kick us off with our theme today, Lift as You Climb.

Gretchen DeKnikker: We are so, so, so excited to have you, Carin.

Carin Taylor: Good morning. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much, Girl Geek X for actually having me. It’s my pleasure to be here, obviously being your keynote speaker, but also just really as a sponsor as well. I’m going to go ahead and share my screen. What I’m going to talk about today is I’m actually going to talk about building a culture that vibes for all. You’ll find out what that means in a few minutes, but I’d like to start off with just a couple of things. First of all, thank you again for having me. Happy International Women’s Day or weekend.

Carin Taylor: Most of us, or a lot of us, are starting to celebrate today, but a lot of folks will be celebrating on Monday and next week as well. But thank you all for actually being here. I’m going to talk about something that is important to me as I think about this work around belonging and diversity, and how it actually impacts us, not–as women, but also our entire work environment in the world that we’re in. So I’m going to talk a little bit about that. And I’m going to start talking about the fact that a culture that vibes is a culture that thrives.

Carin Taylor: But I also want to acknowledge that it starts with you. It starts with me. It starts with us understanding what is our journey and who are we in the context of this conversation. For me, I was born and raised in California. Obviously, grew up as an African-American girl. I was in a family with three other brothers, so I grew up in a really competitive environment, have lived in Silicon Valley my entire life. I’ve worked for some pretty big Silicon Valley companies, as you heard from Gretchen. Doing that and being a lesbian, an African American, a mother of two beautiful biracial kids, that has shaped how I actually see the world and how I think about this work.

Carin Taylor: It wasn’t until I started doing work on myself and understanding my points of view around this that I really began to be able to have a perspective that actually was able to help other people. I’ll share a quick story with you. These experiences have shaped my life. One of the things I had an opportunity to do is live and travel all around the world. And so, being acknowledged as someone who was very different while I would be traveling in different countries was something that really stuck with me. But one of the real pertinent and impactful situations that I was involved in was actually an experience with bias.

Carin Taylor: Ad so, I’ll paint the picture for you. I was at a sales conference, there were about 200 or so people there. I was one of about 10 women. I was one of two African Americans, and I was the only African-American woman in the room that day. The topic of conversation that day just happened to be diversity and this was long before I started doing diversity work. But as I sat in the front row listening to the speaker, a typical-looking executive, white male, I had a really adverse reaction to looking at him talk to me, African American, traveled the world, etc., etc., talking to me about diversity.

Carin Taylor: It was really bothering me. It was like kind of hitting me in the gut. So I walked up to him during a break, and his name was Mike, and I said, “Mike, look, I’m really sorry, but I can’t receive your message.” And he said, “Why not?” I said, “Because of what you look like. I just couldn’t get past that.” I had cut off everything. I couldn’t even hear what he was saying anymore. And he said, “Why not?” I said, “Because of what you look like.” He said, “I’m gay.” It was the first time that unconscious bias really, really hit me upside the head.

Carin Taylor: But it wasn’t until later that evening that I really understood the impact of that story and that interaction that had happened. What happened was I was sitting at home and all of a sudden I burst into tears. Because what I realized is that what I had done to Mike, people had been doing to me my entire life. They had been judging me simply by what I look like and I in turn had started to do it to other people. I share that because that experience really kind of kickstarted my personal journey around understanding who I was as a person,. understand how I viewed the world.

Carin Taylor: But it wasn’t until I had very similar experiences in addition to that one, that really led me to believe that there was something about how I saw people and how I saw the world that I needed to work on and that again shapes why I feel so passionately about this topic. So let me go ahead and get started. So, VIBE. VIBE, if you VIBE, you can thrive. Vibe for us at Workday stands for value, inclusion, belonging, and equity for all. It’s really important that we put that for all on top of this conversation, because, as we’re doing this work and you talk about inclusion, and you talk about belonging, it has to be in the context of every single person that you interact with.

Carin Taylor: It can’t just be for women. It can’t just be for black women. It can’t just be for certain categories of people. You have to think about how you are inclusive of every single person within your workforce, and that’s what VIBE means to us. If we break it down in the areas that we focus on, it’s these areas that you’re seeing on the screen right here. So the inclusion, belonging, and equity, I’ll kind of go a little bit deeper into, but I want to kind of just lay this out for you. VIBE means that we value diverse representation.

Carin Taylor: It means that we look across our organization and want to make sure that there is a healthy balance of the workers that are actually in our workplace. Uniqueness is about how, how does my individual uniquely–uniqueness play a part in the environment and helping our company thrive. Inclusion is about the environment and the conditions that are being created for you to have a culture and a place of belonging for everyone. And so it’s interesting because inclusion, that environment, can be really healthy and you think you’re doing all the right things, but not everyone may necessarily feel like they belong in that culture.

Carin Taylor: So it’s important that you provide different ways of building inclusion so that everyone has an opportunity to feel as if they belong. Belonging is a bit different. Belonging is personal. Belonging is about how am I, or how are you personally feeling in that environment of inclusion that’s been created for you. And I’ll talk about that a little bit more. And then there’s equity. The way that we look at equity is really from a standpoint of does everyone have an opportunity to succeed in our company, and I’ll talk about equity a little bit more as well.

Carin Taylor: So here’s why belonging matters and at the end of the day, it really kind of gets to the bottom point there. And that is when you feel like you belong, you perform at your best, you are your best person. So think about situations where you feel like you have not belonged and think about the emotional capital that you demonstrate in terms of whether or not you’re showing up with imposter syndrome, whether or not you’re giving your full self, whether or not you’re being as creative as you can possibly be. If you don’t feel like you truly belong in an environment, you’re really not giving your best.

Carin Taylor: And so, as we think about this transition that we’ve seen within the diversity space, where back in the ’60s, it was about affirmative action and equal opportunity to today how we’re talking about inclusion and belonging, this thread of how we want to make sure that everyone feels as if they’re included is really a critical part to the work that we’re doing. Obviously not just myself, but all the belonging and diversity HR practitioners out there that are really striving to make strides in this particular area that we’re working in.

Carin Taylor: So let’s talk a little bit about equality versus equity. So you can see from this pictorial, the equality, it really gets to sameness. It kind of assumes that everyone is starting from the same level of platform. The reality is we would love to think that that were true across the board, but the realities are, is that we’re not all starting from the same place. And so when we think about the difference between equality and sameness and making sure that everyone is treated exactly the same, that doesn’t necessarily lead to equity. And so, as you see, what’s depicted on the right hand side, equity really is about fairness.

Carin Taylor: It’s about giving everyone that opportunity to succeed. And sometimes as you can see here, it means adjusting the way that you do things or how you provide opportunities for people in the workplace. And so we think about those things. We want to strive to make sure that there is equity in the workplace, but in reality, until there is equity, there really can’t be equality. So why does this matter to us? Why should this matter and why does this matter to us really as a culture and as a society? Well, it’s because of this $16 billion a year stress that it’s causing corporations. And this $16 billion, this is from a study that was done by the Kapor Center.

Carin Taylor: And what they found out is that when people feel like they don’t belong, they feel like they can’t thrive within a particular culture, there’s a ton of turnover, which means that it’s impacting retention. And the interesting thing is it’s not just impacting underrepresented groups of people. It is really impacting everyone. It doesn’t matter if you’re male, female, white, black, gay, straight, in tech or not. This is a $16 billion a year issue in Silicon Valley. So think about that around the world. Think about the complexity of what this really means when we have cultures that do not strive to do something like value, inclusion, belonging, and equity for everyone.

Carin Taylor: So I wanted to leave you with some tips to, as you’re thinking about how do you build a culture that really vibes, and I want to share some things and really think about this from some learnings that I’ve actually found. So the first one is really around leadership buy-in and accountability. And what that means is you have to have your leaders not just buy into what you’re doing from a diversity standpoint, but they’ve got to participate as well. They’ve got to be executive sponsors, they’ve got to be parts of councils. They’ve got to be talking about diversity and inclusion, both internally and externally, as you think about the impact of this on your business.

Carin Taylor: They have to do things like model behaviors so that those behaviors are demonstrated in the workplace and other people can actually see that they’re modeling those behaviors and benefit. One thing that’s super important though, it’s not just the verbal buy-in that’s super important. One of the also critical things is how do you get your leaders to document and really ultimately document to your CEO that they are committed to this work and making sure that the workplace for all, and particularly for women, is really a place that thrives.

Carin Taylor: The next thing is approaching this through a learning lens. And so I have found that one of the real important things is how you view this work. And the more that you accept that we all come from different backgrounds, perspectives, experiences, and you leverage those things as a way to do better for your business, you’re looking through a learning lens. And so you’re doing things like starting from a place of curiosity and empathy and forgiveness. We’re currently in a state where we’re fearful of saying the wrong thing or doing the wrong thing and therefore, in some cases we don’t do anything.

Carin Taylor: And so approach it really from a learning lens and allow for stumbles, allow for stumbles and resets. Don’t take this as if you do it wrong the first time, you’re going to continue to do it wrong, or don’t not move forward with asking questions because you may not know how to ask the questions, but really look at it through a learning lens. The next one is around sharing data. So as you all know, one of the things that really resonates with people is sharing data. So whether or not you’re looking at that data from a gender or race, a generation, a location perspective, a leadership perspective, it doesn’t matter, sharing data so people can actually see what’s happening, see what the trends are is super important.

Carin Taylor: But what’s equally important are the stories, the personal stories that come along with that data. It’s really important to attach personal stories, people, to the data that’s actually happening because data for most of us is just data and there’s no personalization to it. But when you attach it to a story, something that’s real life happening for people, then it tends to resonate a lot, a lot more. It’s really important that you have to look beyond just the numbers. So the next thing is ensure everyone is aligned. And what this is about is this is, what’s your one strategy that you may have?

Carin Taylor: So for us, it’s VIBE. Regardless of where you are at in the company, VIBE is really what we strive for and everyone at our company understands that. But I also have to make sure that there is some flexibility based on the region, the organization that you may be in, because there could be differences. And I’ll give you a quick example. If you’re working in a typical engineering environment, we all know that engineering is more dominated by men than it is by women. And so when you’re having those conversations, everyone’s trying to VIBE to make sure that this is an inclusive culture for everyone.

Carin Taylor: But in engineering, you may need to put more of a focus on how you’re inclusive of women. If I flip that story, and I think about an organization like human resources, they almost have the opposite problem. They have the issue of they are more dominated by women. And so their organization may think, may need to think about how did they create more of a balance when it comes to gender diversity, but on the male side. So you have to allow for that flexibility as well. The one other thing that I’ll talk about here is making sure that you’re able to differentiate the difference between your personal values and your company values.

Carin Taylor: And I share this because one of the things is sometimes those things can conflict. Sometimes when my personal values come in conflict with my company’s values, I need to know which one is on top, which one takes precedence. And if you’re working in a corporation, it should be your company’s values. And so, even though I like to share that, if I decide on Monday mornings I want to be a really nasty person and every Monday I come in and I’m a real B. Well, that doesn’t necessarily align with my company’s values around integrity and valuing people.

Carin Taylor: And so I have to leave that part of me outside. I can’t bring that side of me in. And if we talk about this in real terms, we’re talking about the things that really damage our relationships in our culture, such as people being homophobic, people being sexist, people being racist. Those types of things that crumble your culture are things that you want to make sure don’t impact your company culture, even if that conflicts with a person’s personal values. The next thing that I’ll talk about here is provide clarity because words matter.

Carin Taylor: So people need to know if you’re in a corporation like we are of 10, 12,000 people, we have to be aligned on what matters and how we’re talking about things. And so if everyone has a very different definition of what diversity and representation are, or inclusion and belonging, and they don’t understand the difference, or equity and equality, or visible and invisible differences, you have to often define what those things mean in your culture so that everyone has more of a common understanding and lens in which they’re looking through those things.

Carin Taylor: And so know that words really matter. The next thing that I’ll talk about is, you have to talk about the hard stuff. This is a one that makes us feel most uncomfortable, but it’s also the one that’s probably one of the most important. So whether or not you’re talking about Black Lives Matter, or the Me Too Movement, or immigration or race or politics, or lack of diversity in leadership within your company, these are the hard topics that we need to overcome that we need to talk about. And I say, don’t ignore them because these are the things that our employees are thinking about.

Carin Taylor: These are the things that they’re talking about at the water cooler, in the bathroom, when they’re going for walks on breaks. Our employees are talking about this, which means that we need to have much more of a lens of how do we appreciate the fact that we have all these social issues going on and they are impacting the productivity and mind share of our employees. And so we really have to make sure that we’re not throwing the hard stuff under the rug, but that we’re really taking the opportunity to talk about them. The next thing that I’ll share around building a culture that vibes is around getting everyone involved.

Carin Taylor: How do you find ways to make sure that all of your employees can participate, regardless of the level in which they are at? So whether or not it’s getting involved in employee resource groups or councils or functional diversity councils, or how do you get your remote employees involved, how do you think about what this means from a global perspective, find ways to get people involved. And I’ll talk about that around a couple of things that Workday has done to really make an improvement in that area. You’ve got to measure progress.

Carin Taylor: So I talked about sharing data and stories before, but you have to measure how you were actually doing and measurements go up and down. And I’ll talk about this in a couple bullets, but this is a journey. This is not a destination. There are going to be stumbles. There are going to be resets, but as long as you’re measuring progress and then putting things in place to continue to build upon that, then you’re actually headed in the right direction. The next thing is to celebrate the big and the small. Remember that we’ve been doing this work for a really long time and creating a culture that vibes for all people requires not just that every one of us participate, but it also means that there are great things, big things, big wins that you’re going to have and then there are also small things that are going to happen as well.

Carin Taylor: But at the end of the day, the thing to remember is that this is a journey. It’s going to take you a long time to get there. No matter where you’re starting is–wherever you start is where you start. But the fact that you continue to make progress and look at it as a journey is really important. So that’s what you can do in reference to a culture of vibing. Let me switch a little bit to what you can do as a person before I wrap up and open this up to some questions. So one of the things is, understand your story. So I shared part of my story in the beginning.

Carin Taylor: In order for you to expect that other people are going to share their story and lean into the difficulties of this conversation sometime, you have to understand your story first. So that’s the one thing. Welcome difference. Make sure that you’re looking for different perspectives and experiences and ways that people think as a way to do better in the work that you’re doing. Lead from a place of curiosity, empathy, and forgiveness. I talked about this a little bit earlier, but we can’t have an environment where people are afraid to speak or afraid to ask questions and think that we’re going to make progress if we shut people down.

Carin Taylor: I’ll share a quick story. I was in a meeting one day and an employee says to me, Carin, I don’t believe in diversity and I don’t believe in equal pay for women. And so as a head of diversity and as a woman, you can only imagine how that kind of took me back a little bit. But the beauty in the conversation was two things. One is we had a culture where an employee could share what they were truly feeling about this work, even to someone like myself. The other piece of that is I didn’t jump on this person and shut them down and go, oh my God, why, why am I having this conversation?

Carin Taylor: I listened. I asked questions. I led from a place of empathy and understanding so that I could better understand what the perspective was from this person. And at the end of the conversation, we got to a really happy place, so that’s great. Demonstrate inclusive behaviors, demonstrate them for all, speak up, speak up for people who don’t have a voice, whose voices are not heard. When you’re sitting in a meeting and you’re listening to someone steal someone’s idea or repeat something that someone else just said. This happens a lot to us as women.

Carin Taylor: Make sure that you are being brave and stepping up for that person. Engage in a difficult conversation, share your experiences, actively participate in making your culture better. Whether or not you’re calling it VIBE, whether or not you’re calling it DEI, whether or not you’re calling it diversity and inclusion, it doesn’t matter. But in order for us to make significant progress in this space, everyone’s got to participate. Again, provide that space and airtime for others. And if you are in a position, mentor others, sponsor others.

Carin Taylor: Help give each other that leg up so that we can all survive in the workplace. This really is just a quick little picture of how Workday vibes. And this is what we call, this is a day that we had last June called VIBE Week. But you can just see how multiple people around the world are getting involved in the activities to help us build a culture of inclusion. And then lastly, what I’ll do is just share this quick little video and then I’ll wrap it up.

Speaker: Our love gets better every day.

Speaker: Our friendship has no religion.

Speaker: Love is about who you are and not what you are.

Speaker: I don’t see a wheelchair. I see the love of my life.

Speaker: Our love is greater than anyone’s hate.

Carin Taylor: And so with that, I leave you with this question of what can you do to make sure that you’re building a culture around you that values inclusion, belonging, and equity, and what steps can you personally take to make sure that you’re creating an environment where everyone around you can thrive as well? So with that, I’ll go ahead and open it up to some Q&A. Gretchen.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Thank you so much, Carin. That was amazing. We have tons of questions. We just have a few minutes, but we’re going to get through as many as we can. So first, this is the one I really want to hear your answer to. Where do you find your inner strength to standing up to bias?

Carin Taylor: To standing up to what?

Gretchen DeKnikker: Bias.

Carin Taylor: Yeah. That’s a …

Gretchen DeKnikker: It’s a good one, right?

Carin Taylor: That’s a fantastic question. So I think a lot of it has to do with almost that story that I talked about with Mike in the beginning and having been someone who demonstrated bias and actually seeing it on both sides. And for me, what I thought was I felt the pain and the hurt and the damage that it meant to me and then I felt the hurt and the pain and the damage as I witnessed myself doing it to someone else. And having both of those perspectives and being able to then say, oh my God, how do I compartmentalize this and how do I never make another person feel undervalued for who they were was something that was just so prevalent in my life in terms of how I personally can translate when I see bias happening, how I kind of like try to just kind of shut it down.

Carin Taylor: And so for me, I think that’s where that inner strength comes from is really thinking about it and feeling it from both different sides.

Gretchen DeKnikker: All right. Okay. So our next question, thank you for the brilliant insights. How do you measure belonging at Workday and what aspirational goals have you set?

Carin Taylor: Yeah, that’s a fantastic question.

Gretchen DeKnikker: And this one comes from Dublin, also. Okay.

Carin Taylor: Fantastic.

Gretchen DeKnikker: That could be like Dublin, not Dublin, but okay.

Carin Taylor: Ireland, Dublin, California.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Yeah. I could have like got really dumb excited for a second.

Carin Taylor: So we measure belonging at Workday through something that we call a belonging index. And the belonging index is a subset of really kind of 34 questions that are a part of what we call our Best Workday Survey. And so we survey our employees every Friday. As a matter of fact, I took my survey this morning, but we survey our employees every Friday with only two questions from this set of 34 questions. But part of that, what we’ve pulled out are six questions that go directly to belonging. And that’s how we measure belonging in the workplace.

Carin Taylor: We measure it by gender, generation, race, location, and level that you are within the company. So individual contributor, manager, executive, etc. But that’s how we measure it. And it’s a part of that entire Best Workday Survey that we leveraged.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Okay. This is a good one too. Is leadership buy-in and ultimate accountability dependent on the organization style, like flat, hierarchical?

Carin Taylor: No, not necessary. Not necessarily. So if you think about leadership and who actually sits in leadership today, it can be hierarchical. But even if it’s not, making sure that the key point there was about making sure that people, that your leaders are talking about it and that they are participating in it. They can’t just go out and say, oh yes, I believe in diversity and not do anything about it and not do anything to support it and not build it into their organizational structure. It’s got to be a piece of what they do.

Carin Taylor: And part of it is hierarchical because if you have it coming from your very top leaders, and they’re saying that this is important, it certainly is going to spill down to the rest of the organization. But if you think about almost everyone being a leader within your company, also everyone having an opportunity to lead in some way, whether or not it’s on a project, it’s on a team, everyone can really play that leadership role. Everyone can take accountability and certainly everyone can participate.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for joining us this morning. This has been amazing. Again, everyone we have recorded this, so if you missed any part of it, it will be available later. And, Carin, thank you for your support, both personally, and from Workday.

Carin Taylor: This has been my pleasure. Have a fantastic day.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Thank you.

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“Jumpstarting Your ML Journey in Cyber Security”: Melisa Napoles with Splunk (Video + Transcript)

Transcript of Elevate 2020 Session

Sukrutha Bhadouria: All right. Up next, Melisa Napoles, we’re so excited to have, will be our next speaker. She’s a solutions engineer at Splunk, where she helps customers solve interesting data problems in security operations, as well as in business intelligence. Melisa will now be sharing with us her favorite lessons learned from organizations that jumpstart their machine learning journeys in cyber security. Welcome, Melisa, and thank you so much for making time for us.

Melisa Napoles: Excellent. All right, I’m going to go ahead and share my screen. All right. Can you confirm you guys see my screen all right?

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yes, we can see your screen.

Melisa Napoles: Excellent. Well, hi everyone. Thank you for those of you who are still on with us, and hello to those of you who are just now tuning in. For the next 15 minutes or so, we’re going to hopefully get you all out of here having jump-started or substantiating your knowledge around doing machine learning and cyber security.

Melisa Napoles: All right. Here’s what I have for our agenda the next 15 minutes. When I think about jump-starting this journey and I think about all the clients I’ve worked with, it feels natural to me to segment the conversation in these four areas. Before jumping right into it, though, I’m going to take just a moment to tell you a little bit about me so you can put some history with the face on the other side of the screen here with you.

Melisa Napoles: I moved around a lot growing up, and this slide just talks about what makes me me. As my company likes to call it, these are my million data points. My family immigrated to the United States from Cuba, so I am first generation born American. After graduating from school and having various internships and consulting experience, technical specialist experience, sales engineering experience, I landed myself at a big data company called Splunk. I currently live out of Chicago, Illinois, supporting some of our larger Splunk customers, but my heart is somewhere between Miami, Florida and Seattle Washington, where I have my family. They say that your home is where the heart is, right? That’s a bit about my situation.

Melisa Napoles: And what being a solutions engineer really means is that I’m sort of like a consultant with Splunk solutions and everything Splunk touches, which is a lot of things. Splunk got its initial start in IT and security, but it’s since translated into a platform that serves almost every business unit in an organization. And the reason that’s cool is it’s allowed me to be exposed to how businesses run their practices, in particular, their cyber security practices. And so from this work over the last five years now, there are certainly patterns that have emerged to show what really good looks like in a cyber security practice, embarking on machine learning and what not so good looks like and some of the things that cause organizations to stalemate and not be able to move forward. In this particular visual, something that I’m particularly proud of in working here at Splunk is we just have absolutely stellar, quality female engineers, and I’m thankful to have that support system around me.

Melisa Napoles: All right, so let’s jump right into it. When I first started working in this space, it took me a good long while to really get the gist of AI and ML, and I went to school for physics and I took a lot of math classes. I was pretty much forced to figure it out because of the clients I was working with and the questions they were asking me that ultimately I was also asking. And what I learned is that for starters, ML, or machine learning, is a subset of AI or artificial intelligence, to put it simply. AI is the broader concept of machines being able to carry out tasks in a way that we would consider smart, and ML is an application of AI based around giving machines access to data to make some decisions on their own. It’s really not as scary as people make it seem. And when we’re talking about cyber security in particular, I’m finding that many organizations are really still in the realm of the machine learning area, at least today.

Melisa Napoles: When I embarked on this journey a few years ago, I also ran into asking, “Well, is machine learning statistics or is it not?” And even to this day, I get organizations asking me this, trying to understand this on their own, too. And what I’ve learned is that machine learning is very much based off statistics. And the main difference between them is their purpose. All ML certainly uses statistics, but not all statistics can necessarily be classified as machine learning. Statistic models are designed to make inferences about the relationships between data variables themselves and the machine learning models are designed to make the most accurate prediction off those inferences. It seems like everyone has an opinion about this these days, but this is the best conclusion I’ve come to, at least to date. We’ll see how long it lasts for, but this seems to be working in separating my logic in this space.

Melisa Napoles: And of course, like all good things, there are also lots of opinions on this sort of thing that you see quoted here as well. There’s comedy as a part of this quote, but I do find this to be true. At a very practical level, what ML typically represents when an organization is first starting out is in fact basic statistics. And right, this is just the thing that we all learn about in the mandatory high school or college stats class that we were forced to take.

Melisa Napoles: And so with all the buzz around machine learning and AI in the industry, you’d think everyone is doing it. Right? But what’s surprising is that organizations are not. And for those who are doing it, they’re running into major issues that effectively put a brick wall in front of them. And it’s really hard to get over. Oftentimes, I work on projects where a good number of organizations do, in fact, feel like this is all hype because they don’t know where to start or they got started too quickly and didn’t understand some of the foundational pieces to having longevity in this space, but it’s definitely not all hype.

Melisa Napoles: And so the way that I think about working with any data is like this. Everything we ever do with data for the most part can route back to a question we are trying to answer, a question that is formulated by our brains that we are trying to answer. And oftentimes those questions, if not all the time, can be categorized as your known knowns, the questions you know you need to be asking and in which you have confidence in how to find the answers, your known unknowns, the questions, again, you know you need to be asking, but you really are not very confident how to go about finding those answers and your unknown unknowns, the questions you don’t even know to be asking and you definitely don’t know the answers. Most organizations implementing machine learning and cyber security live in the first two spaces here, your known knowns and your known unknowns. Only the ones with extremely good resourcing can also say they’re incorporating the unknown unknowns, and we’ll talk about why that is.

Melisa Napoles: All right, so I’m going to give you just a moment here to see if you can count the number of bears on this visual. If any of you have played Where’s Waldo before, this as much the same. ML can help you reduce noise and look for the things you care about, the known unknowns, “I know I need to be asking about this, but I’m not really sure what the answer is or how to come about it.” Because we’re short on time, I’m going to jump to the next screen, and there they are. There are four bears, but that was a lot of noise to sort through, right?

Melisa Napoles: And keep in mind that I told you, you were looking for bears. What if you didn’t know to look for bears? What if you didn’t know they were representative of something you cared about? Because you knew to look for the bears, this was a known known. You knew the bears were what you cared about, so now where are they? Let me count them. Had you not known you were looking for bears, this would have been a known unknown, “I don’t know what’s anomalous here, but I know something likely is. Let me look for similarities and dissimilarities to find it.” You may ask why we used bears here and not just a Where’s Waldo visual. Fancy Bear is a Russian cyber espionage group. They target government, military, and security organizations, so think NATO and the like, and they try to steal secrets, hence finding your Fancy Bears.



Melisa Napoles: And it’s easy to get overwhelmed with where to start with ML and cyber security or really ML in any practice, and you don’t have to be doing the most advanced things with ML to be getting incredible value. Go after, and what I often advise organizations, and the most successful ones, what I see them doing is going after what the industry likes to call low-hanging fruit. Go after the low complexity, high benefit use cases. What’s in the upper right hand quadrant here is representative of where I see organizations first implementing machine learning and where they’re very successful. When you see things like malware detection or intrusion detection, think about asking questions like, “Do I have employees visiting weird websites that have long complex URLs that are sort of unrecognizable and are not indicative of something normal? And if they are, how often do they do it? Are they doing it more than they normally do? And how do I even define what normal is? Is it no times and they’ve been there the first time? Is it more than five times?” Understanding what that normal is, is where machine learning is incorporating.

Melisa Napoles: When you see things like … We’ve got here, a variety of things, but even think about asking, “Do I have employees failing to log into their corporate-issued laptop more times than they normally do in a given period?” I’ll take myself in particular. I mean, I fail authentication on my laptop at least five times every single day for a solid week every time Splunk forces me to change my password. It’s just a habit. And with Splunk incorporating machine learning into cyber security practice, they should be able to ask, “Well, when is Melisa failing to authenticate on her laptop way more than she normally does?” So these are some things to think about.

Melisa Napoles: What’s working for organizations and where are they in their AI and ML journey besides what we’ve just talked about in that upper right hand quadrant? Most organizations get started on machine learning or anomaly detection in cyber security with static thresholds. Imagine for a moment that you’re part of a security organization and all that really means is your job is to protect the company from the bad guys and gals doing any variety of things. And you’re tasked with being able to answer, “When do I have employees failing to authenticate more times than they normally do, failing to log in more times than they normally do?” And the first way that organizations tend to answer this question is by saying, “Okay, well, let’s just set some static threshold in place.” In this case, in the visual I’ve got, it’s 100, so any data point where the failed logins are more than 100, I’m going to be notified. But how do I even know if 100 is the right number and if it’s the right number for every individual in my organization?

Melisa Napoles: Oftentimes, while that is an awesome way to start doing machine learning and cyber security in that particular one example, organizations will then often upgrade to incorporating statistics with standard deviation, so then being able to ask, “All right, well, instead of tell me when I’ve got employees failing to authenticate more than 100 times, tell me when I have employees failing to log in more than they normally would.” And so that’s what you see here.

Melisa Napoles: And so organizations will get here. They’ll live here for a while, but as they start to incorporate a larger volume of data, a larger variety of data, as they try to model this at the speed at which their data moves so that their models are not stale, they realize the three Vs, and the three Vs being volume, variety, and velocity, volume being more data means more history means more time to get to look back in those models, which is important for accounting for fluctuations in seasonality. What about your employee like me who fails to authenticate every six months when password refresh has happened? More variety of data, the more accurate your insights. And again, if your machine learning can move at the speed at which your data moves, you won’t have stale models, and that means you’ll be making more accurate decisions based on your insights.

Melisa Napoles: What happens typically next when organizations realize the three Vs is they then begin to incorporate fit and apply concepts or train and test concepts, essentially breaking up a single workflow with statistics into two workflows for scale so that we can account for the three Vs. Imagine for a moment that you have a data set that represents a fruit basket. You’ve got records for oranges and bananas and apples and grapefruits and you’ve trained that data set to recognize that when there’s a banana, the banana’s yellow and it’s curved so that when new data gets corroborated against that training data set and it sees a data point that is yellow and curved, it can say, “Oh, I know what that is. That’s a banana.” So that’s what incorporating train and testing concepts means. It’s really, in large, part starting to do what we call supervised machine learning.

Melisa Napoles: And sometimes at this point, organizations they’ll start to dabble in creating supervised machine learning models, but it gets to a point where you’ve got such a large volume and variety of data moving so quickly that it’s hard to know all the models you should be using to fit your data … because you don’t want to fit your data to a model, you want to fit the models to your data … that they bring in supervised and unsupervised solutions to help in the world of machine learning.

Melisa Napoles: And so the fit and apply concepts, I would say, fit more in the world of the supervised machine learning, but then you have those unsupervised machine learning models. And if you think about us talking about your unknown unknowns, that third aspect of your known knowns, your known unknowns, and then your unknown unknowns, the questions that you don’t even know to be asking, that typically falls under what unsupervised machine learning helps you solve.

Melisa Napoles: Here’s an example, just one example, one view, one solution of what unsupervised machine learning in the world of cyber security can look like. Forget all the antics of what’s on the visual here. What you’ll notice is if you follow my storyline, you’ve got seven distinct anomalies using machine learning, telling you a larger story of an employee’s account being hijacked and used to steal data. You see anomalies of a ridiculous amount of data being taken from the computer of the employee. You see the employee’s login being logged in from Chicago, from China, from Russia, right? That defies the laws of physics. It’s impossible. You see all these weird things happening in conjunction together that strung together by a bit of supervised machine learning and a whole lot of unsupervised machine learning over a two month period tell you a larger story of what’s happening, things that you wouldn’t have even known to ask about because you didn’t even know what the patterns were to be looking for.

Melisa Napoles: What’s holding organizations back from doing more, from getting to this point of doing unsupervised machine learning and any variety of other things in the world of AI? I firmly believe in all the clients I’ve worked with, small and large, across different industries in cyber security and even in other spaces, but especially in cyber security, it’s the fact that there’s not an onus on being a citizen data scientist, whether it’s leadership not promoting that or individuals not having that fostered within them. And being a citizen data scientist is not being a data scientist, but as the person who works with your data, who creates the data, who is most knowledgeable of your data, there’s nobody better than those people to understand the business impact of that data. And so that’s what it means to be a citizen data scientist, understanding some of the fundamentals so that you can take that data, work with your data science counterparts and really propel the business forward in doing machine learning, doing AI so that you can ultimately impact an organization’s bottom line, whether that’s efficiency or revenue or what have you.

Melisa Napoles: The most prevalent are what you see on the screen here, so don’t be intimidated by AI and ML. It’s very powerful, but it’s nothing that can’t be wrangled. Embrace that idea of being a citizen data scientist. You do not have to be doing the most advanced things with ML to be getting incredible value and have impact. And remember those three Vs, volume, velocity, and variety as you embark on really testing and playing with ML type things.

Melisa Napoles: Remember these concepts of training and testing in the world of supervised and unsupervised machine learning, and then lastly, we didn’t have enough time for it, but remember that you should never be forcing your data to fit algorithms. Rather, you should be able to pick algorithms that fit the flow of your data so that you have accurate insights and you can make really quite powerful data-driven business decisions.

Melisa Napoles: I am going to play a very quick video here, which I find to be very inspiring and works its way into the world of figuring out ways to use machine learning to advance really the business and the world.

Speaker: One inventor is Benjamin Franklin.

Speaker: Leonardo da Vinci.

Speaker: Thomas.

Speaker: Edison.

Speaker: Alexander Bell Graham.

Speaker: No.

Speaker: That’s kind of a tough one.

Speaker: Um.

Speaker: In school, it was always a male inventor, I just realized.

Speaker: To know that there were women before me…

Speaker: It gives me motivation that I can invent something, make maybe a change in the world, and that would be really cool.

Melisa Napoles: All right, so that was a campaign that Microsoft put out for International Women’s Day in 2016. I fell in love with it when I first saw it and I still watch it every now and again just to remind me of a few things.

Melisa Napoles: Lastly here, I do just … Let me see. There we go. What I have to remind myself of, and what I hope that I leave all of you with, is in the world of figuring out how to work with machine learning and not be intimidated by it, but find productive uses for it, don’t be afraid to go out there and really respectfully challenge the status quo.

Melisa Napoles: All right. That’s all from my part. Thank you so much to the Girl Geek organization for letting me speak with you all here today and also letting me learn from the rest of the speakers. It’s been a great event so far.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hi. Thanks so much, Melisa. This was great. I want to make sure to thank you for making time for this on a busy weekday. We have some questions that we will take offline, so they’ll be answered offline. Thank you so much, Melisa.

Melisa Napoles: No problem. Take care.

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21 Insightful Quotes on Leveling Up: Becoming a Manager of Managers

On Friday, March 6th, senior female tech leaders & engineers came together to celebrate International Women’s Day with over a dozen tech talks & panels during the Girl Geek X Elevate 2020 virtual conference. Today’s blog includes quotes from a session with Arquay Harris, Senior Director of Engineering / Slack; Bora Chung, SVP of Product Management / Bill.com; Ines Thornburg, AVP of Customer Success / Splunk; and Gretchen DeKnikker, COO / Girl Geek X. In addition to the YouTube video replay, a full transcript from the talk is also available.

  1. “When you make the transition from managing individual contributors to managing managers, what happens is you go from this very directive, sort of supporting, coaching state of mind to managing to outcomes.

    When you have a person who is also responsible for managing other people on the team, you don’t want a person who is managing or doing things in the way that you would do them. You want them to manage in the way that feels comfortable for them.

    I would never say to a manager, ‘Hey, I want you to do this, and this is step one, two, three.’ It’s like, ‘This is the outcome. How can I support you to get there?’ You have to really trust them to be able to do it. And so the unlearning comes from wanting to be the person who is the hero, jumps in, saves the day, maybe writes the code — to really growing and empowering that next generation or that next level of leadership.” —Arquay Harris, Senior Director of Engineering / Slack

  2. “One mistake I made when I became a manager’s manager was just having one-on-ones with my immediate direct reports. They also have a set of teams and maybe not as frequently, but making sure that I check in with the team members made a big difference. When I hear some of the key themes and strategies being played back in skip level one-on-ones, I think that’s when things are going well. If you hear a game of telephone being played and have a disconnected kind of direction and alignment, you’ll know that things are not going well. Do those skip level one-on-one check ins. They’ve served me well.” —Bora Chung, SVP of Product Management / Bill.com

  3. “I had to learn to balance my time across the different responsibilities in a way that, frankly, I wasn’t getting too involved. I learned to trust the expertise on my team and learn what was good enough. Perfection is not always the end goal. We have to continue to progress multiple workstreams at one time in initiatives, and really make sure that no one gets left behind.” —Ines Thornburg, AVP of Customer Success / Splunk

  4. “I struggled to learn when to stop helicoptering in and trying to rescue everyone. I’m still learning it, but to me, the biggest difference between a junior employee in a very small startup versus a manager’s manager is learning how to do helicoptering in and helicoptering out at the right moments.” —Bora Chung, SVP of Product Management / Bill.com

  5. As you grow in your career and you become more visible, have more responsibilities, the one thing that I’ve learned is that when you say something, the impact of what you’re saying really is that much stronger, that much more gospel, so to speak. When you’re facilitating a meeting or when you’re communicating, you have to realize that, again, as your responsibility grows, people really listen.

    You have to be careful, so if you’re trying to facilitate a brainstorming, for example, what I’ve learned is to facilitate the dialogue, get the conversation going, but I reserve what my opinion is until the end, because I don’t want everybody to just think that my opinion is the right one, because it’s certainly not. That’s why I bring together, and when I’m doing hiring, I always try to look for complementary skills.

    So I’ve learned to really be cautious about what I say and when I say it and to whom I say it, because I realize that what I’m saying does affect and impact a lot of the folks on the team.” —Ines Thornburg, AVP of Customer Success / Splunk

  6. “Be friendly, not friends. If my team’s watching, they’re probably laughing about this, because I say this a lot. Very early in my career when I made that transition to manager, these people are your best friends. You hang out with them every night and when you are friends with the people who report to you, you cannot be impartial, right? You can’t say to your best friend, ‘You really screwed up on that thing. I need you to work harder in this area.’ It can be really awkward.

    And so what I really learned later in my career was how to set boundaries, because I do you a disservice if I’m not able to give you that really constructive and helpful feedback and help you grow. And that doesn’t mean that you have to be this monster who’s just a robot, but boundaries are really, really important and I just wish I’d learned that earlier.” —Arquay Harris, Senior Director of Engineering / Slack

  7. “In the early part of my career, I was thinking that I should be the smartest person if I’m the manager, and I was somewhat reluctant and afraid of hiring people smarter than myself. But what I am realizing is that it’s absolutely cool to hire people smarter than me. It actually elevates the team. It improves the quality of the thinking and ultimately, what we deliver to our customers is going to be much stronger. So I think I had to shed that a little bit of early stage career insecurity to really put together a strong team.

    I don’t have to be the perfectionist that knows all the answers. Sometimes a great value as a manager or manager’s manager comes from asking the right question, maybe asking the powerful question that nobody else is asking, because they are afraid or there’s a big elephant in the room.” —Bora Chung, SVP of Product Management / Bill.com

  8. “As your responsibility grows, you’ll have lots of different experts on your team in different disciplines, different business units, and you can’t be the expert on everything. It’s just physically impossible as your organization grows, and so what you do need to do is to be really, really comfortable working with these teams of experts in helping them accomplish their mission.

    As a leader, my value to my team is making sure that we’re working towards the same goals and cascading those company goals down. I make sure everybody understands those goals, that we’re progressing on those goals, and that we’re communicating our progress effectively in working together.” —Ines Thornburg, AVP of Customer Success / Splunk

  9. “Really, you should make your management style situational to the person and to the stage that they are in their career. It really just goes into this first quadrant, which is directive, which you might do to a more junior person. You might say, ‘I need you to log into this machine, do this work,’ and then you move up into coaching, which is you have a little bit more skill and it’s like, ‘All right, you kind of know what you’re doing. How can I coach you through it?’ Onto supporting, which is, ‘You know what you’re doing. How can I support you? How can I help you get to that next level?’ And then the final magic kind of golden quadrant is delegation, and that’s just, ‘I don’t even really need to tell you what to do. You probably are bringing me the problem, telling me what it is that needs to be solved.’

    The thing that’s really interesting is it’s not really a straight line. You might kind of hover, depending upon your skill set, maybe in communication you’re in full on delegation mode, but at technical proficiency, maybe you need a little bit more support.

    When I’m managing managers, I really try to think about each individual’s strengths and how I can help really, really uplift a person’s strengths, and how do I help them really either correct for or counterbalance any weaknesses that they may have?” —Arquay Harris, Senior Director of Engineering / Slack

  10. “Understanding what type of leader you are and what you can contribute is way more important than a very specific checklist of skills. If you’re interviewing someone and they haven’t done that exact thing, can they describe to your their approach or their philosophy? What I really look for is ‘is this person a structured thinker? Do they have best practices or some kind of toolkit or some sort of methodology in the way that they approach leadership?'” —Arquay Harris, Senior Director of Engineering / Slack

  11. “When I first transitioned to managing managers, I thought I needed to know everything and I was so embarrassed when I didn’t know what was going on. It took me a while to realize I’m just air traffic controller. The less information I have on a tactical level, the less opportunity I have to screw things up… I should just let the expert be the expert.

    And then my most amazing moment as a manager’s manager was when I walked in, I was planning this 10,000 person conference and there were hundreds of people setting up all of these little tiny details that we’d spent a year making. I only knew the names of like six people that I could see at any given moment. And I was like, ‘Okay, this is working. They have this. They’ve got it. I don’t even need to know what’s going on right now. This is amazing.'” —Gretchen DeKnikker, COO / Girl Geek X

  12. “It’s really fulfilling and rewarding to see people grow — to see them go from kind of more junior manager to senior manager to director, to see them be able to come into their own as a manager, develop their own styles. That’s probably the best thing about progressing to higher level of management.” —Arquay Harris, Senior Director of Engineering / Slack

  13. “Part of management is about soft skills and developing and augmenting those skills in your team. So that means communication skills, collaboration, meeting facilitation. It means executive presence, making sure that when you’re representing your company or your team, that you do it in such a way that you’re proud of that. So, when I know I haven’t prepared my team and I see a train wreck about to happen, that’s cringe-worthy.” —Ines Thornburg, AVP of Customer Success / Splunk

  14. “My most proud moment is when I’m absent on a sabbatical or extended vacation and the team doesn’t even notice that I’m gone. I think that’s the ultimate success of coaching and grooming the right team. If they noticed you were gone, your team isn’t quite where you need them to be.” —Bora Chung, SVP of Product Management / Bill.com

  15. “During my skip level one-on-ones, I start with a very broad question of ‘How are things going?’ I try to also let the manager in the middle know that we are having the skip level. I think the worst outcome is if the manager in the middle gets alienated in this conversation.

    I don’t really have an agenda during skip level one-on-ones. With some folks, I talk about just their career aspirations. With some folks, since I’m one level away, they could maybe ask more questions about the big picture strategy and whatnot, so it’s a little bit different, but I always let the team member drive the agenda.” —Bora Chung, SVP of Product Management / Bill.com

  16. “I want to be the finalist on all interviews because I really take pride in knowing people. One of the things, as a leader of a large organization, that I like to understand is, is career aspirations. This is where we have a much larger purview of opportunity as a leader, and frankly if I have a conversation with someone and I understand really they want to be in another part of the organization at some point in the future, I would love to make that match and keep that talent within my company rather than seeing people leave and take all that wonderful knowledge and great talent to another company.

    I don’t want people leaving my organization necessarily, but at the same time, if we can promote from within and give people more opportunity within our organization, people appreciate that and I love a team that culturally has a strong morale and knows that we’ve got each other’s backs.” —Ines Thornburg, AVP of Customer Success / Splunk

  17. The top trait to focus on developing if you’re interested in a management role is adaptability, because the thing about being an IC is that it’s a pretty defined trajectory to go from associate to engineer to senior to staff to senior staff, right? You might not know exactly what it is but some part of it is mapped out.

    It’s a little bit more opaque when you’re talking about leadership, because in any given moment, you could have to deal with people’s emotions and you have to coach and you have to support and you have to discipline. It’s just all of these things that you have to do, and so you need a growth mindset. You have to be willing to iterate and change.

    If you’re a person who’s really rigid and you like things just so, you maybe want to consider something else.” —Arquay Harris, Senior Director of Engineering / Slack

  18. “At more junior levels, there’s a mindset that meetings are a waste of time. Meetings are your lifeblood when you get to a certain level. If you spent your whole day in meetings, you were doing your job all day — and I think that’s a mindset thing that a lot of people really struggle with changing.” —Gretchen DeKnikker, COO / Girl Geek X

  19. “There are two major mental shifts that occur when you transition into engineering management. ICs generally think about execution for the most part, so you have to start to blend in execution as well as strategic thinking. So I think that’s maybe the first shift you need to make to become a manager.

    You’ll also shift how you think about time horizons. Let me take product development as an example. Maybe when you’re an IC, you’re thinking mostly about next release, the release after that, but when you eventually become a manager, you think about an annual roadmap or a three year vision. I think those are maybe the differences in time horizon of your thinking, and there’s not a right or wrong.

    I think there need to be different parts of thinkers. Some people need to execute, some people need to think strategy. Some people need to think next release, some people need to think about the three year vision, but I think those are some of the shifts that need to occur in order to transition into a managerial role.” —Bora Chung, SVP of Product Management / Bill.com

  20. “To overcome bias and avoid being stereotyped as the ‘quiet, introverted Asian woman,’ I spent extra energy on developing what we usually call the executive presence and executive gravitas, because especially when you become a manager of managers, it’s not just your personal brand and personal reputation any more. It’s your team’s effectiveness that you have to be responsible for. I try to overcome the bias by being more vocal and represent the team more actively.” —Bora Chung, SVP of Product Management / Bill.com

  21. “I think one of the hardest things about being a woman in engineering, especially a woman of color, is just the big issue of low expectations. What happens to me a lot in particular is people think that I’m not technical.

    I’ve had interns be like, ‘Do you code?’ which is a ridiculous question that you probably never ask a male who’s a director of engineering. You face that a lot and it’s really unfortunate.

    On the bright side, I think things are changing, particularly as we get more and more women in leadership positions, I think just having different voices in the room is really contributing to the conversation.

    When I was coming up, there weren’t a lot of people who look like me who did the job that I do, and so it just wasn’t a thing that I could even see myself doing. The idea of a CTO was Andy Grove, right? With the khaki shirt… a blue shirt and khaki pants. So make yourself aware and available, and let people know that you are a source of information.

    Sponsorship is a big thing that people are doing right now.

    If there’s someone that you see who you think has potential, maybe encourage them. If I have people on my team who show interest in management, I try giving them some tasks. Like, ‘Hey, maybe try managing this intern for a summer and seeing how it goes, or maybe you might want to run the sprint meeting.’ That kind of thing. Just give them these little nuggets to see if they have the aptitude and really understand what management is.” —Arquay Harris, Senior Director of Engineering / Slack

To hear more from Arquay, Bora, Gretchen and Ines, check out the transcript from their March 6th panel during Elevate 2020, or watch the video replay on YouTube!

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“Leveling Up: Becoming a Manager of Managers” — Girl Geek X Elevate (Video + Transcript)

Transcript of Elevate 2020 Session

Gretchen DeKnikker: The inspiration for this panel was, you think it’s really, really hard becoming a manager until you become a manager of managers, and you don’t realize it’s just like another rung on the ladder. It’s like a whole different skill set and you’re lost, and it’s super hard, and so because we have such an amazing senior audience tuned in today, I thought this would be a perfect topic. And then, thanks to these wonderful ladies, we were able to put together the perfect panel, also.

Gretchen DeKnikker: So we have Ines Thornburg, who’s the Area Vice President of Splunk, works in their customer success arm. Arquay Harris is the Senior Director of Engineering at Slack. She actually got her intro at Slack through a Girl Geek dinner, so you should be coming to those dinners, because if you want to be Arquay, and don’t we all, you should do that. And then Bora Chung, who’s the Senior Vice President of Product Management at Bill.com. So, they’ve all worked at different sized companies. They’re at different sized companies now, so they have all of this amazing perspective. Bora’s going to come from product and Arquay’s going to come from engineering and Ines is going to come from customer success, and it’s going to be amazing, and all I have to do is basically sit back and let these women talk.

Gretchen DeKnikker: So, if we want to do a quick kind of round of intros, and why don’t you start, Arquay? And let us know kind of how many people that you’re managing now and a little bit about how you got where you are.

Arquay Harris: Sure. Hi, I’m Arquay, a senior director of engineering of essentially the growth team here at Slack. My org is about 70 or so people. I manage two teams. One is called customer acquisition and one is called expansion, and essentially they make up the product purchase funnel. How I got to Slack, as mentioned, I went to a Girl Geek dinner. I highly recommend that you go. It’s very rewarding. I’ve been here for about four years. I’ve watched the company grow from a company that was about 500, where engineering was roughly 100 or so, to now engineering is well over 700 and at our largest we were 2,500 people.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Bora?

Bora Chung: Hi everyone, I’m Bora Chung. I am SVP of Bill.com and I lead an organization of about 40 product managers and product designers. Just to give you context of the size of the company, we are about 13 year old company that do workflow automation for SMBs and our revenue’s about, I think last fiscal year was about 110 million. The entire company size is about 550, so product managers and product designers account for about 40 of them. We just went public December of last year so we’re going through a transition of being a private company to public company.

Bora Chung: How I got here, even though I manage both designers and product managers, my own professional heritage is more on the product management side, so I spent nine years out of business school at PayPal, four years at Apple, and then four years at eBay.

Gretchen DeKnikker: The quick unmute is not working. Ines, can you go?

Ines Thornburg: Absolutely. Thank you, Gretchen. So, Ines Thornburg. I am responsible for the Americas portfolio and customers for customer success at Splunk. My team is about 100 people, comprising of customer success managers as well as the renewal function and the renewal team that supports Americas customers. Been here about two years now and my career spans back to a series of different software companies where I started off as a consultant doing implementations, moved into presales, joined Oracle through the acquisition of Hyperion, so I went from a small growing company to a midsize company to a mega company. Was there for a while, learned a lot and then decided to try a venture startup.

Ines Thornburg: So, why I’m at Splunk, the technology’s very relevant in today’s data explosion as well as where we are in our journey in terms of maturity. And so Splunk is going through a pretty massive business transformation, shifting to a SaaS and subscription model, so that’s what really excited me. We’re still what I would consider a medium size company and really on a trajectory of growth, and that’s what I feel like I can make an impact on for our customers.

Gretchen DeKnikker: All right. So, you guys can see … Y’all, I’m trying not to say “you guys”. Y’all can see why I’m so excited about this panel. They have just an amazing set of backgrounds. It’s a completely different skillset, right? Ines, what do you feel like you kind of had to relearn in that very first time that you went from being a manager to managing managers?

Ines Thornburg: Gretchen, for me it was all about how I spent my time, really. And so going from being, as I mentioned, starting off as an individual contributor, doing the work myself, then being able to manage people doing work, then to manage multiple workstreams and priorities and making sure that those managers responsible for different workstreams not only were competent and experts in their field, but then, me balancing my time across the different responsibilities in a way that, frankly, I wasn’t getting too involved, I learned to trust the expertise on my team and learn what was good enough. And frankly, perfection is not always the end goal. We have to continue to progress multiple workstreams at one time in initiatives, and really making sure that no one gets left behind.

Ines Thornburg: And so, me figuring out that right balance between rolling up my sleeves and doing versus allowing people to do and coaching along the way was really that arc that we continue to perfect over time.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Bora, you were within the first 100 employees at PayPal, right?

Bora Chung: That’s right. When I first started, I started out as an MBA summer intern and the company was about 100 people.

Gretchen DeKnikker: What was that journey, along the same vein that I’m assuming it sort of started there where you were drinking from the fire hose?

Bora Chung: Sure, sure. I think the soft skill that I learned during that period was just mental agility. So, there were a lot of ambiguous situations when you’re a fast paced startup with just very few resources. You don’t really have a very well defined job description, so there were lots of ambiguous situations that hit you every day but just figuring out how to be a go-getter and get out of that ambiguity using mental agility was a skillset that I picked up in the early days of my career, and then if I could just connect that with the manager’s manager tradition, when I get to manager and then a manager’s manager, what I had to unlearn a little bit was when do I helicopter out versus when do I helicopter in. There’s absolutely no management course or management book written about how to do it, when to feel it out.

Bora Chung: So I think that’s a basic soft skill that you have to pick up very quickly and I struggled through that a little bit. I’m still learning it, but to me, the biggest difference between a junior employee in a very small startup versus a manager’s manager is learning how to do helicoptering in and helicoptering out at the right moments.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Right. Yeah, I like that analogy. Arquay, what’s a skill that served you really well as a manager and then you kind of had to unlearn?

Arquay Harris: Oh, that I had to unlearn? As an engineer, I got into engineering leadership in the way that most engineering managers get into engineering management which is you’re the most technically proficient person on the team and so your manager says to you, “Have you ever thought about management?” And you’re like, “No, but I’ll try it,” right? And so it’s a really hard transition because … It’s really hard because you know that you’re technically most proficient and so you just want to jump in there and do PR reviews and all of the stuff, and so you have to really make this transition from being able to be the person who was the peer on the team to the person who is the leader on the team.

Arquay Harris: And then when you make the transition from managing individual contributors for people playing bingo to manager, what happens there is you go from this very directive sort of supporting, coaching state of mind to managing to outcomes. So, when you have a person who is also responsible for managing other people on the team, you don’t want a person who is managing or doing things in the way that you would do them. Right? You want them to manage in the way that they do them and the way that feels comfortable for them.

Arquay Harris: And so I would never say to my manager, “Hey, I want you to do this and this is step one, two, three.” It’s like, “This is the outcome. How can I support you to get there?” You have to really trust them to be able to do it. And so the unlearning comes from this thing of wanting to be the person who is the hero, jumps in, saves the day, maybe writes the code, to really growing and empowering that next generation or that next level of leadership.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Yeah, absolutely. Maybe let’s go to Bora. What skills have you gained along the way that you feel like, “If I’d just learned that earlier, it would have been so much less painful?”

Bora Chung: Right, right. I think it’s doing skip level one-on-ones and getting the right communication done in those sessions. So, one mistake I made when I become a manager’s manager was I was just having one-on-ones with my immediate direct reports, but then they also have a set of teams and maybe not as frequent, but making sure that I check in with the team members and the delightful moments are when I hear some of the key themes and strategies being played back, I think that’s when things are going well. When you completely hear game of telephone being played and have a disconnected kind of direction and alignment, that’s when you know that things are not going well, so I think one thing that I recommend, and is a pretty tactical thing that you could easily do is maybe a little bit less frequent but do a skill level one-on-one check in and I think that I didn’t realize early enough but I picked it up and that has been serving me greatly.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Yeah, I’m taking that one back with me for sure. How about you, Ines?

Ines Thornburg: I think the one thing as you grow in your career and you become more visible, have more responsibilities, the one thing that I’ve learned is that when you speak or when you say something, the impact of what you’re saying really is that much stronger, that much more gospel, so to speak, and when you’re facilitating a meeting or when you’re communicating, you have to realize that, again, as your responsibility grows, is that people really listen. So you have to be careful, so if you’re trying to facilitate a brainstorming, for example, what I’ve learned is, facilitate the dialogue, get the conversation going, but I reserve what my opinion is until the end, because I don’t want everybody to just think that my opinion is the right one, because it’s certainly not. That’s why I bring together, and when I’m doing hiring, I always try to look for complementary skills.

Ines Thornburg: So I’ve learned to really be cautious about what I say and when I say it and to whom I say it, because I realize that, frankly, what I’m saying does affect and impact a lot of the folks on the team.

Gretchen DeKnikker: How about you, Arquay?

Arquay Harris: Things I wish I could have learned earlier?

Gretchen DeKnikker: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Arquay Harris: This is a thing that I say all the time, which is … I say, “Be friendly, not friends.” If my team’s watching, they’re probably laughing about this because I say this a lot and it’s basically very early on in my career when I made that transition to manager, these people are your best friends. You hang out with them every night and when you are friends with the people who report to you, you cannot be impartial, right? You can’t say to your best friend, “You really screwed up on that thing. I need you to work harder in this area.” It can be really awkward.

Arquay Harris: And so what I really learned later in my career was how to set boundaries, because I do you a disservice if I’m not able to give you that really constructive and helpful feedback and help you grow. And that doesn’t mean that you have to be this monster who’s just a robot, but boundaries are really, really important and I just wish I’d learned that earlier.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. You’d kind of talked a little bit before about another skill, about learning to delegate, and you had this example of quadrants.

Arquay Harris: Yeah. I kind of dug into that a little bit earlier. I wish I could claim credit but it’s essentially situational leadership. You can google it. There’s lots of videos on YouTube about it, but it’s basically about how when you are leading a large organization, or any organization, what a lot of managers will do is they will try to bend the team to the way that they lead. “I’m really introverted” or, “I’m super extroverted” or whatever it is, like the people need to fit into what I expect of them, but really, what a really good leader should do is you should make your management style situational to the person and to the stage that they are in their career.

Arquay Harris: And so it really just goes into this first quadrant, which is directive, which you might do to a more junior person. You might say, “Bora, I need you to log into this machine, do this work,” and then you move up into coaching, which is you have a little bit more skill and it’s like, “All right, you kind of know what you’re doing. How can I coach you through it?” Onto supporting, which is, “You know what you’re doing. How can I support you? How can I help you get to that next level?” And then the final magic kind of golden quadrant is delegation, and that’s just, “I don’t even really need to tell you what to do. You probably are bringing me the problem, telling me what it is that needs to be solved.”

Arquay Harris: And I think the thing that’s really interesting is it’s not really a straight line. You might kind of hover, depending upon your skillset, maybe in communication you’re in full on delegation mode but at technical proficiency maybe you need a little bit more support, and so I think that when I’m managing managers, I really try to think about it in that way, about what are the strengths and how do I help really, really uplift a person’s strengths and how do I help them really either correct for or counterbalance any weaknesses that they may have?

Gretchen DeKnikker: That is a good segue. Hiring is so different. All the skills that you learn to vet people when you’re a manager, and you’re just vetting them for do they have the skillset to do this role and do I think they’ll be the right fit with this team? But when you start hiring managers, what’s your suggestion there? Where do we start, Ines?

Ines Thornburg: One of the best practices that we have, and we really are very firm about it at Splunk, is at any role at this point, we have a panel. We have a select group of people that bring different questions to the table to assess skill. So, for example, we may have someone assessing the technical skill, we may have someone assessing behavioral type skills, situational skills, collaboration skills, et cetera. I always like to make sure I speak to the finalists.

Ines Thornburg: I like to know every single person on my team, a little bit about them, and really I have two primary questions that I’ve always asked as a leader doing hiring through every company I’ve been at, which are, number one, why am I talking to you today about this role, whatever the role is? Because what I’m looking for in that question is really what is their career journey? Why does this particular role fit into their long term career journey? I’m not looking for someone that’s just applying for a job because they may have seen something. I want somebody who’s put thought into how this role is going to help them along their long term career journey.

Ines Thornburg: Second, why Splunk or why whatever company? And to me, that shows me they’ve done their homework, they have a passion about what the company is we’re trying to achieve and we can have a dialogue. And from there, those two questions really help me take it on to the next level conversation, which is something that, frankly, how I always start those … And I’m not looking for skill, I’m not looking for technical proficiency. I’m looking for the long term drivers that really want that person to be on my team.

Gretchen DeKnikker: So, Bora, you’re at a company that’s one sixth the size of Splunk, so you might not quite have all the bells and whistles that Ines has at her disposal, so what is your process and how is it different?

Bora Chung: We start with the fact that interview is definitely a two-way street. We want to make sure that we evaluate the candidates, but candidate’s evaluating us, so we try to actually put an interview panel together that represents cross functional relationships, because teamwork, team play is an important element of culture at Bill.com, so we make sure that the candidate experiences the characters and the types of people that he or she will be working with. So, I think that’s one.

Bora Chung: The other piece is I think we have different seniority levels represented in the interview panel as well, so that I think some of the maybe early career folks could really test out the technical chops. You know, is this person a great designer? Is this person a great engineer? And then maybe someone like me could maybe test a little bit more about their soft skills, right? Can you actually influence the cross functional teams? Are you going to think more for the company versus your own output versus your own team’s output?

Bora Chung: So, I think we have a good balance of technical assessments and culture fit and teamwork elements going on. So I think we could definitely do more in terms of strengthening the recruiting process, but we’ve been hiring a lot of good talents through this.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Arquay, you’re kind of at the midsize between the two, but also, what did you have to change about how you interviewed? What skills did you need? What muscle did you need to build to be able to vet people to be managers as well as you did for ICs?

Arquay Harris: Having worked at very, very large companies where you have an interview process that is pretty set in stone and pretty precise, the cool thing about working at a hyper growth company like Slack is that I had the opportunity to really be involved in crafting that interview process and seeing it evolve over time, and we, right now, have a pretty defined rubric where we have pretty set slots where you’re judging people on things like teamwork and collaboration, ability to execute, strategy, and then we try to make it so that we have really diverse panels that are representative of gender and race and tenure and that type of thing.

Arquay Harris: But I think that the difference between evaluating an IC versus a manager is that to a certain extent when you’re judging an IC, there is the work product. That can be a really good weeding out factor, because if you do a coding exercise or you do … even when you come in and you’re doing white boarding exercises, not necessarily algorithms but something that shows technical proficiency, it’s a little bit easier to see whether or not a person can thrive or not thrive. It’s not perfect, but you have more signal, right?

Arquay Harris: When you’re evaluating a manager, it is, as I was mentioning, a lot more about the soft skills, and so you’re really trying to see if given certain scenarios, how they can fit and I think that it really does depend on your particular company and size and what you’re looking for, and so, for example, in those early days of Slack, one of the things that was really important was hiring managers who had experience or aptitude for scaling teams.

Arquay Harris: Because recruiting, if your engineering org is like 50 people or 100 people and we’re trying to grow to 7, 800 within a couple years, recruiting is going to be a very big part of it and do you understand to build strong relationships with recruiting? Do you understand how to really evaluate your pipeline? Fill gaps on your team? And so it’s these types of questions that we’re really looking for.

Arquay Harris: In terms of making it so that it’s a really fair and consistent process, we really make sure that we try to have our interviewers stick to the rubric, look to the way that people are answering the questions and that it’s not just subjective, like, “Oh, they’d be cool to hang out with,” kind of thing. We like to make it so that there’s some fairness and consistency built into the process.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Yeah, absolutely. You got me thinking, also, I think some folks really hesitate to hire that person with way more experience, right? Especially if you’re at the hyper growth company, because if you’re in a senior role at the hyper growth company, you’re gaining the skills at a rate that does not keep up. You might have perfected your job yesterday and you might be finally good at it, but the next day, it’s a different job and you’re not good anymore, and you’re constantly going. So how do you sort of fight that … I think some people get really nervous about, “I need to hire someone who knows what it looks like when we get there,” but that’s also a person that may know a lot more than you do, and I think people hesitate with that. How do you advise people to work with that?

Arquay Harris: Yeah, when I started at the company, my team was two people. Literally two people. And that was fine. I was like, “All right, let’s roll up the sleeves, let’s get it done,” but I was really excited about working for this particular company at that time and I think … You can suss a little bit of that out in the interview. If you’re interviewing someone and they haven’t done that exact thing and they can really describe to your their approach or their philosophy, what I really look for is, is this person a structured thinker? Do they have best practices or some kind of toolkit or some sort of methodology in the way that they approach leadership?

Arquay Harris: Because part of it is what you just said. It’s all intangible. The ambiguity is so high at a company like this, that I think understanding what type of leader you are and what you can contribute, that’s way more important than a very specific checklist of skills, because like you said, tomorrow it’s going to be different anyway.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Bora, you were nodding your head on that.

Bora Chung: Yeah, I was thinking about the early part of my career when you asked that question. I think when I was more junior in the early part of my career, I was thinking that I should be the smartest person if I’m the manager, and I was somewhat reluctant and afraid of hiring people smarter than you … smarter than myself, rather, but what I am realizing is that it’s absolutely cool to hire people smarter than me. It actually elevates the team. It improves the quality of the thinking and ultimately what we deliver to our customers is going to be much stronger. So I think I had to shed that a little bit of early stage career insecurity to really put together a strong team, so I think that was one.

Bora Chung: And then I think it goes back to one of the comments that Ines made earlier. I don’t have to be the perfectionist that knows all the answers. Sometimes a great value as a manager or manager’s manager comes from asking the right question, maybe asking the powerful question that nobody else is asking, because they are afraid or there’s a big elephant in the room. So I think a lot of wisdom I gained over the years is that it’s awesome to have team members that are smarter than you. They elevate you and your team and then, two, is you don’t have to have all the answers. Sometimes asking the powerful question could really be helpful as a manager or manager’s manager.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Absolutely. So, Ines, you have this huge organization. What do you have to add in? You have 400 people, right? Or something. It’s a crazy number.

Ines Thornburg: At Splunk, my team’s about 100 but in other jobs and other companies, it’s certainly been a lot larger, and that’s the thing. As our responsibility grows, you’ll have lots of different experts on your team in different disciplines, different business units, what have you, and it’s impossible just to chime in with Bora and Arquay. You can’t be the expert. It’s just physically impossible as your organization grows, and so what you do need to do is to be really, really comfortable working with these teams of experts in helping them accomplish their mission. And so, as a leader, really, my value to my team is making sure that we’re working towards the same goals and cascading those company goals down. Everybody understands those goals, that we’re progressing on those goals and frankly that we’re communicating our progress effectively in working together.

Ines Thornburg: Splunk’s a very technical company, like all these others, and am I technical? No, but I have a business degree and frankly we’re running a business at Splunk, and so my goal is to make sure that from a customer perspective, that those customers are getting value out of our technology so that they renew and we grow as an organization. And so, my value to my team is different than the value of them to our company and that’s what we have to make sure that we’re always balanced on so that together the team is stronger. So, that’s the way I think about it.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Okay. Time is going way too fast. We’re going to do one more question and then I see that we have some amazing, amazing questions in the Q and A also. So, your most cringe-worthy and your most exciting moments when you first made this transition, so that everyone can sort of go along with you. I can go first. My most cringe-worthy was like what Bora said. I thought I needed to know everything and I was so embarrassed when I didn’t know what was going on, and it took me a while to realize I’m just air traffic controller and actually the less information I have on a tactical level, the less opportunity I have to screw things up and I should just let the expert be the expert.

Gretchen DeKnikker: And then my most amazing one was when I walked in, I was planning this 10,000 person conference and there were hundreds of people setting up all of these little tiny details that we’d spent a year making and I knew the names of like six people that I could see at any given moment and I was like, “Okay, this is working. They have this. They’ve got it. I don’t even need to know what’s going on right now. This is amazing.” So, why don’t you kick us off, Arquay?

Arquay Harris: Cringe-worthy is definitely bad hires. Unlike hiring a bad IC hire, the blast radius is just so large when you have a bad management hire and it could affect the careers for quarters and quarters of the people in the team. Most amazing moment is really fulfilling and rewarding to see people grow, to see them go from kind of more junior manager to senior manager to director, to see them be able to come into their own as a manager, develop their own styles, and yeah, that’s probably the best thing.

Gretchen DeKnikker: How about you, Ines?

Ines Thornburg: Most cringe-worthy is when I feel like I’ve not done enough preparations and prepared my team, and so specifically, again, we’re all in some sort of technical discipline. Learning the technical skills, I think, is one aspect of the job, but let’s not forget about the soft skills. And so Arquay mentioned soft skills and looking at those in hiring, but also continuing to help the teams augment them. So that means communication skills, that means collaboration, meeting facilitation. It means executive presence, making sure that when you’re representing your company or your team, that you do it in such a way that you’re proud of that. So, when I know I haven’t prepared my team and I see a train wreck about to happen, that’s when I’m like … That’s the cringe-worthy.

Ines Thornburg: The most proud, frankly, Splunk just had our sales kickoff and we’ve been working really hard as a customer success organization over the past couple years to get to a point where we’re really ready to support almost 20,000 customers globally and the team recognition and what I saw … what my executives and the company recognized on the customer success team was just extremely rewarding to see the people on my team winning awards, being part of large contributions to customers, and frankly it just made me really warm and proud inside.

Gretchen DeKnikker: That’s awesome. All right, Bora.

Bora Chung: So, cringing moments. When you become a manager’s manager, naturally a lot more escalations hit your desk and escalations could stem from conflicts between people or conflicts between departments or sometimes goals are not aligned. Just having to resolve conflicts on behalf of the team, sometimes you’re successful, sometimes you are not so successful and disappoint the teams. So I think the escalation handling and conflict resolution, I think I had some rough spots at the beginning of my career, so I think that’s the cringe moments. The most proud moments, there are times that when you go on an extended vacation or extended business trip, you come back and your boss is basically telling you that, “Oh my God, Bora, your team was perfect. I didn’t even know that you were out of the office.” And at the beginning, again, you’re like, “Does that mean that I’m not adding any value? Did you not know that I was out of office?”

Bora Chung: Sometimes I would wish that some crisis would happen just so that they know that I was absent, but I think the real truth is that that means that you have a fantastic bench and you have a great top talent manager. So, my most proud moment is when I’m absent on a sabbatical or vacation and then the team doesn’t even notice that. I think that’s the ultimate success of coaching and grooming the right team.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Absolutely, yeah. Okay, so we have a ton of questions. The first one, and we’re going in order of their voting, as women of color, have you experienced any difficulty or veiled biases while managing male coworkers? What did you do to handle that situation? So, Arquay, Bora?

Arquay Harris: Sure, I’ll just jump in. I think one of the hardest things about being a woman, especially a woman of color, is just the big issue of low expectation. What happens to me a lot in particular is people think that I’m not technical. I’ve had interns be like, “Do you code?” Which is a ridiculous question that you probably never ask a male who’s a director of engineering. And so I think, yeah, you face that a lot and it’s really unfortunate. On the bright side, I think things are changing, particularly as we get more and more women in leadership positions, I think just having different voices in the room is really contributing to the conversation.

Bora Chung: For me, the usual stereotype where sometimes the hardship is, especially as an Asian woman, getting stereotyped into a bucket of, “Oh, you must be quiet, you must be an introvert,” so I think this is why I spent extra energy on developing what we usually call the executive presence and executive gravitas, because especially when you become a manager of manager, it’s not just your personal brand and personal reputation. It’s your team’s effectiveness that you have to be responsible for. So, I think those have been some tough spots, but I think I try to overcome it by being more vocal and representing the team more actively.

Ines Thornburg: Gretchen, I think you’re muted.

Gretchen DeKnikker: I need to unmute. Okay. Bora, this one’s for you. What are the things that you discuss during your skip level one-on-one? I’m thinking of setting up a skip level one-on-one with my skip level manager but I don’t know what we should discuss during those meetings.

Bora Chung: Right, right. So, I think it starts with just a very broad question of how are things going? And the other kind of check in is that, is there a certain expectation? So I try to also let the manager in the middle know that we are having the skip level. So I think the worst outcome is that if the manager in the middle gets alienated in this conversation, so I don’t really have an agenda. I think just like our services are getting more and more personalized, I think the skip level one-on-ones need to get personalized. So with some folks, I talk about just their career aspirations. With some folks, since I’m one level away, they could maybe ask more questions about the big picture strategy and whatnot, so it’s a little bit different, but the two things that I just always do is I let the team member drive the agenda. I just start by just checking in on overall things and I make sure that the manager in the middle is aware of the fact that we are having this conversation, and we’re not breaching confidentiality.

Bora Chung: There are some key things that I think the manager in the middle should know. I also make it pretty obvious and public as well.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Ines, do you do skip level?

Ines Thornburg: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I even do double skips. Like I said, I want to be the finalist on all interviews because I really take pride in knowing people. One of the things, as a leader of a large organization, that I like to understand is, is career aspirations, as Bora mentioned, because honestly this is where we have a much larger purview of opportunity as a leader, and frankly if I have a conversation with someone and I understand really they want to be in another part of the organization at some point in the future, if I see that connection and see that match, I would love to make that match and keep that talent within my company rather than seeing people leave and take all that wonderful knowledge that we have, and great talent, to another company, frankly.

Ines Thornburg: So, I do that a lot and, frankly, when I’m looking … I don’t want people leaving my organization necessarily but at the same time, if we can promote from within and give people more opportunity within our organization, it just makes … frankly, people appreciate that and I love a team that culturally has a strong morale and knows that we’ve got each other’s backs.

Gretchen DeKnikker: I think this one’s for everyone, so we’ll have Arquay kick us off. What are the top traits and qualities you recommend focusing on for someone looking to get into a management role?

Arquay Harris: Adaptability for sure, because the thing about being an IC is that it’s a pretty defined trajectory to go from associate to engineer to senior to staff to senior staff, right? You might not know exactly what it is but there are some … some part of it’s mapped out. It’s a little bit more opaque when you’re talking about leadership because in any given moment you could have to deal with people’s emotions and you have to coach and you have to support and you have to discipline and you have to … It’s just all of these things that you have to do, and so you have to take, like we say, growth mindset. You have to be willing to iterate and change. So if you have these kind of qualities …

Arquay Harris: If you’re a person who’s really rigid and like things just so, you maybe want to not consider … Consider something else.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Or find people that are just like you.

Arquay Harris: Or that.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Yeah. How about you, Bora?

Bora Chung: I would say maybe two shifts and mixes, right? One is if ICs generally think about execution for the most part, I would say you have to start to blend in execution as well as strategic thinking, right? So I think that’s maybe the first shift. The second one is just how you think about time horizons, so let me maybe take product development as an example. Maybe when you’re an IC, you’re thinking mostly about next release, the release after that, but when you eventually become a manager, you think about maybe an annual roadmap or like a three year vision. I think those are maybe the difference in time horizon of your thinking, and there’s not a right or wrong. I think there need to be different parts of thinkers. Some people need to execute, some people need to think strategy, some people need to think next release, some people need to think about the three year vision, but I think those are some of the shifts that you start to … you need to have to transition into a managerial role.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Ines?

Ines Thornburg: Yeah, in addition … I mean, the adaptability is huge, and Bora’s comments, I think, were spot on. I will add onto those, communication, and, frankly, as you think about just rallying a team from what they’re doing at a macro level down to the micro, everyone needs to have a proper communication cadence and understand where we’re all marching toward. So, I think a lot about communication and different ways that we communicate, whether it’s quarterly all-hands calls, weekly cadence calls, the one-on-ones, the skip levels, Slack, we have Slack channels, we have email … I mean, we communicate in lots of different ways.

Ines Thornburg: We actually have spent the starting part of our year thinking about all the different communication … You know, the different communication means and important forums that we need to do to make sure, frankly, everyone is marching in line. At these high growth companies, things are moving so fast and, frankly, as a leader, we have to make sure that everyone is working towards the same goal. So, tops down, bottoms up, communication to me is super, super important and sometimes we just don’t think about it enough. So that’s one that I’ll add on.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Yeah, or the mindset that meetings are a waste of time. Meetings are your lifeblood when you get to a certain level. If you spent your whole day in meetings, unless they were just … you’re not careful with your time, if you spent your whole day in meetings, you were doing your job all day, and I think that’s a mindset thing that a lot of people really struggle with changing.

Ines Thornburg: Yep, agreed.

Gretchen DeKnikker: So, next question, I think this would be for Arquay. In engineering, what can we do as an organization to encourage more women in manager of managers positions? Was there anything specific that helped you get to where you are in your career and that is Katie coming from the Scotland, UK today so [crosstalk]

Arquay Harris: Thanks for joining. Part of it is basically making sure that there’s some sort of support system at your company and paying it forward and being that person who can encourage. So, for example, one of the things that I do at my company is every week I have office hours and I post it, and the women’s ERG … bingo … So I’ll post it in certain channels and get people to sign up and try to be mentor and support system when I can.

Arquay Harris: And then the other thing is, I think, really just having … When I was coming up, there weren’t a lot of people who look like me who did the job that I do, and so it just wasn’t a thing that I could even see myself doing. The idea of a CTO was Andy Grove, right? With the khaki shirt … I mean, a blue shirt and khaki pants, and so that’s part of it too. Just making yourself aware and available and aware to other people within engineering and letting people know that, hey, you are a source of information.

Arquay Harris: And then sponsorship is a big thing that people are doing lately. If there’s someone that you see who you think has potential, maybe encourage them, and if I had people on my team who show interest in management, maybe try giving them some tasks. Like, “Hey, maybe try managing this intern for a summer and seeing how it goes, or maybe you might want to run the sprint meeting.” That kind of thing. Really just give them these little nuggets to see if they have the aptitude and really kind of understand what management is.

Gretchen DeKnikker: I can’t believe we’re already at time, but I just want to thank you on behalf of everyone who’s tuned in right now because you guys just gave them most amazing session. So thank you again to Arquay, Ines, and Bora, and we will be back in just a moment.

Ines Thornburg: Thank you all.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Bye.

Posted on

“The Next Million” — Girl Geek X Elevate (Video + Transcript)

Transcript of Elevate 2020 Session

Rachel Jones: All right. So we’re going to move on to our next panel, but first some housekeeping. So, we are recording all of these sessions. They’ll be available on YouTube in just a couple weeks. If you’re hosting a watch party, we want to see. So please share, tag us on Instagram, use the hashtag Girl Geek X, and remember to submit your questions in the Q&A box and upvote your favorites. Right. So a background check typically excludes people, but at Checkr, a high level goal of theirs is actually to get one million more people into the workforce. So this group of Checkr girl geeks will share how working at a mission driven company is core to engineering, product, and design. So I’m going to hand it over to the moderator of our panel, Krista. So Krista is an engineering manager at Checkr. So, Krista, take it away.

Krista Moroder: Thank you. Hi everyone. So as you mentioned, one of our goals is to bring people back into the workforce. So a quick background on Checkr, we are an API first background-check company that was started about six years ago, went through Y Combinator back in 2014, and since then I have taken on the background check industry and worked with a lot of on-demand startups as well as enterprise companies. And so I joined about nine months ago, and one of the things I was most impressed with when I joined was the big focus on mission at the company.

Krista Moroder: And so the goal is not just to help people be more efficient in hiring, but also to make sure people aren’t losing opportunities because of how the background-check industry has historically worked. And so in this talk, we’re going to talk to a few people on our team, in product and engineering and design, about what they do every day and how that’s impacting our mission. So I’ll start before handing it over. As mentioned, I’m an engineering manager and before that I’ve had a few careers, software engineer. I started a company at one point and I also spent a decade in education, including as a high school English teacher. So I’ll hand it off over to Melanie.

Melanie Cernak: Hi. I’m Melanie. I’m a product designer here at Checkr and I care a lot about social impact in criminal justice reform. I believe that everyone has the right to work and create a viable living and that there’s truly a right position for everyone. Prior to Checkr, I was at a different background check company where I realized how antiquated the industry is and how there’s these really deeply entrenched norms. And that’s I came excited about Checkr. I feel like it’s really shaking things up and a key progressive player in this space, working to expand employment opportunities for people with conviction histories.

Jess Zhang: Hi, I’m Jess. I’m an engineering manager in Checkr. I joined Checkr about four months ago. And what impresses me is Checkr is with our technology, we disrupted– The industry is so–20 years behind the modern era. And another thing impress me was the Checkr’s mission. For me, the first impression of background check is just to block people. To check your background, you have everything you said you have. I never thought of the other side as we want to actually get more people into the workforce and how if we do things too strictly, we’re actually not doing anybody a favor. And I’m very glad to join the risk team. And now that my team and I have a chance to detecting fraud and help to make the workplace a fairer place for everyone.

Michelle He: Hi. My name is Michelle. I’m an engineer on the motor vehicle report team at Checkr. I actually have a background in structural engineering and architecture. I transitioned into tech about four years ago and now I’m with Checkr for about four months. Personally, I’m very interested in use of technology to improve efficiency, solve problems at scale. And as a society, we have seen a lot tremendous progress with what technology has brought today. And, personally, I’m very fascinated by the way we discovering new ways we can be more productive and increase efficiency and reduce human errors. So the reason why I joined Checkr is that the opportunity to help shape the future of an industry that is stuck in the very long distance past. And it hasn’t seen a lot of innovations recently, and Checkr is actually a company that has a very strong north-star mission to help people get work, to guide its own growth, and it has a strong culture of nurturing individual growth. And, lastly, the office is lovely and every day it provides healthy lunch and snacks. That’s the last reason I joined.

Vivian Chen: Hi. I’m also a software engineer on the motor vehicle report team. And I also really like improving efficiency through the use of technology. I think it’s extremely gratifying to build practical solutions to make people’s lives a little bit easier to solving real-world problems. There are two main reasons why I decided to join Checkr. First one was, it was important for me to find a mission-driven company when I was switching jobs. I saw an article about how Checkr was making the initiative to be more inclusive of people who are formerly incarcerated and I thought that was really cool. Second, Checkr provides a lot of opportunities to work on interesting engineering problems. Checkr’s a operations-heavy company by virtue of being in the background-check industry and the amount of business logic required for completing background checks requires a lot of creative engineering solutions.

Krista Moroder: Thank you. Yeah. So let’s get into it. The whole mission of Checkr is very big and it’s abstract, but the actual day-to-day nature is a little more difficult. There’s a lot of system complexity in trying to actually go through the workflow of a background check. And so I’m curious, and maybe we can start with Jess, what does that look like in your role every day? And I know that Vivian and Michelle and I, being on the same team, we joke all the time about how we feel like philosophers every day. So from your perspective, what does that look like in the fraud-detection world?

Michelle He: I think you were muted, Jess.

Jess Zhang: Sorry. Thank you, Krista. This is a great question. I start smiling because it’s exactly what my day looks like as well. So on the fraud team, basically our mission is to detecting fraudulent identities. People using people, selling, they sometimes they create account and then they sell this to, their illegitimate accounts, to people who wouldn’t have, or to people who have bad intentions. There are people who fake out all sorts of documents identities. So our job is to block those people, but with Checkr’s mission will encourage me and challenge me to think outside the box, think of how I can not… It’s easy just to block people out, but it’s harder to how to block only the people who’s truly a fraud out and to keep the people who maybe made a mistakes, maybe have typos and have a mistake in their identities, and in their IDs, in their documents, how to keep those people in.

Jess Zhang: So that challenges me every day to think creative solutions. And with this, I also believe that the solution we bring to the market will be completely different from the companies who don’t think about this a daily basis. In the long term, we have a lot of questions to answer. Who are we blocking? And really what is our cases of fraud? With that, right-and-wrong questions answered? Is our data biased? Is our judgment, decision-making biased? How do we know? We have so much data to collect and to analysis and to build a [inaudible]. So these are very exciting and big challenges ahead of us. And it makes me excited every day.

Krista Moroder: Thank you. Michelle, you are going on support next week for our team, so tell us a little bit about what that looks like.

Michelle He: Yeah. So our company is a API-first service. So on a yearly basis, we process millions of reports and through all this process, unfortunately, there are some stuck reports. So, once in a while, because of a system can take care of some [inaudible] edge cases, we end up with these reports [inaudible], and they will end up being a support ticket coming to engineering’s desk. So as engineers, we actually look into these reports and figure out the reason why they were stuck and we actually have the power to grant or delay someone’s permission to get a job. So I think that’s a very powerful thought and that makes our support tasks even more meaningful. And at a granular level, for long term planning, I think because Checkr has such a strong mission that actually guides our decision making on how to invest resources and prioritize in our roadmaps on a quarterly basis. So, for example, next quarter, it’s very easy for us to come to a conclusion that data accuracy is our first priority because of our mission.

Krista Moroder: Awesome. Yeah. And Vivian, do you want to talk a little bit more about that as well? I know that you’re dealing with a lot of the same support issues as Michelle, but also with data accuracy, I know you’ve been very involved with that this quarter, especially.

Vivian Chen: Yeah. There’s a lot of coordination involved between these various entities in the life cycle of a background-check report. And so we have to make sure that as we’re passing this along, that we are parsing the information correctly, displaying it correctly. And to be more concrete, some of these entities include the data furnisher, which is where we get the information about the candidate. This could be information such as education verification, employment verification, and motor vehicle records. The customer who is the company that is actually requesting the background check and the candidate experience team who interfaces with the candidate and helps resolve any issues that come up during the process. As engineers, we have be cognizant of how our decisions are impacting the background-check life cycle and ensure that whatever we’re building is in the best interest of the candidate. And we have to avoid any mistakes that would delay a candidate from starting their job, therefore negatively impacting their livelihood.

Krista Moroder: Yeah. Thank you for sharing all that. That’s really useful to think about all these different things. When I was first joining Checkr, I remember there was this aha moment where I realized that at a high level, we’re doing background checks, at the actual deep level, we’re trying to help clean up this awful data interoperability problem across every single court system in the U.S. Because every single state sends data differently, maps it differently, uses different codes. And so, as we think about this giant data problem, moving to all these different people we have to work with, Melanie, I am super curious what you have to say about how you think about all of these different personas, because as a designer, you are the person who often has to think about how the candidate is making their way through this entire life cycle. So love it if you could talk a little bit about that.

Melanie Cernak: Yeah, absolutely. So we just created candidate personas, and candidate, if you’re not familiar, is anyone who’s going through the background check process. So we created three personas. The first is someone who’s been incarcerated for a long period of time and is now reentering society and has done a lot of rehabilitation, really ambitious, made a bunch of positive improvements in their life, but is still facing a lot of bias in the hiring process. The second is someone who has misdemeanors and struggles to understand what’s going to show up on their background check report. And then the third is someone who has a clear record and is applying for jobs.

Melanie Cernak: And so we use these personas in our product development process to really humanize the experience, make sure we know who we’re building for. For example, and I’ll touch on this a little more in depth later, but we’re working on this feature called candidate stories that lets candidate share information directly with employers. And when I was designing this, I was really thinking about the persona of someone who was incarcerated and now reentering society, they’ve done so much positive change, and now we’re giving them the opportunity to actually share that with customers. And so hopefully customers will take in this information and instead of not giving someone a job, reconsider and give them employment.

Krista Moroder: Yeah. I’d love to follow up on some of that. And I’m also curious if you’ve worked directly with some of our fair-chance talent in thinking about some of these designs, because we make it a priority as a company to make sure we’re bringing in people to our organization that have been impacted negatively some way by the court system. So what are some of the favorite features you’ve designed and how have you collaborated with our team to build on these?

Melanie Cernak: Yeah, absolutely. So at Checkr, five percent of our workforce is fair-chance talent. So people who have conviction histories, which is amazing. And they’re so great to work with and especially on our mission-related features, I often have focus groups with them where I can run the current progress and get their feedback on it. We did that with the personas and then two other projects. So the first is around candidate stories, which I mentioned earlier. So this lets candidates share information, either general information about themselves, so they can share evidence of rehabilitation, certain certificates or volunteer work, or they can share context about a specific record and say like, “Hey, here’s what happened in this charge. Here’s why it happened. Here’s what I’ve been doing since. Here’s why it won’t happen again.” And the goal for this is really, again, just to give more information to customers. Have them have the opportunity to give a personal statement and really make it more human.

Melanie Cernak: The second project we’re doing is around expungements and this actually came out of a hackathon project that won first place. If you’re not familiar, an expungement is the process of sealing and removing a criminal charge from someone’s record. And this is especially relevant when you think about marijuana charges. So this showed up in one of the recent democratic debates, that a lot of States have legalized marijuana and people who have low level of marijuana possessions are eligible to get their records expunged. And in certain States is actually mandated that they’re expunged, but this can still take years to process. And in the meantime, people are being denied employment, housing, licensing. So we wanted to take a two-pronged approach to addressing this. The first is just around education of going through and finding who has a potentially expungeable record and educating both the customer and saying, “Hey, look, this record may qualify for expungement. We recommend that you don’t deny employment based on this charge.”

Melanie Cernak: And then the other is telling candidates like, “Hey, did you know that this charge you have on your background check could be expunged?” And then the second part of that, which is a really exciting part is we’re exploring building the nation’s fastest and most affordable expungement service. And this would be an end-to-end experience for candidates. So they’d be able to go in, Checkr would tell them, “Hey, you have a expungeable record.” They could fill out a questionnaire that determines if they’re actually eligible and then they can actually process and pay for their expungement. And then we would contact all the CRAs, it’d be taken care of and removed from their record. So we’re really excited about this. This has the potential to affect hundreds of thousands of people’s lives and really move in the direction of getting a million more people with conviction histories into the workforce.

Krista Moroder: That’s awesome. And I just learned about that second part after talking to you today, which I think is just evidence of how many different things are going on at Checkr. So I guess as a final question, what are some of the other ways that people here have gotten involved in the mission at Checkr? And Jess, you mentioned that you’re going to be doing a prison visit sometime soon.

Jess Zhang: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for mentioning that. I learned that in Checkr will provide entrepreneurship and employment training for people who are currently incarcerated and the day consists of a one-on-one coaching sessions, assisting them with job-related training, as well as the time for connections. So next month, my teammates and I will actually join a prison visit through our partner on Defy Ventures. So it’s part of this program. I’m very excited and my team and I are also participating in many of the volunteering opportunities in the Bay area. We decided to use our team building time slot in a quarter to do volunteering and to give back to society. So we feel like nothing is more fulfilling than working together and make a difference to our society and Checkr provide that opportunity for us.

Krista Moroder: Thank you. Michelle, do you want to jump in and share your upcoming work?

Michelle He: Yeah, actually I am going to be on the same prison visit with Jess. I’m very excited about going on the visit. But also I want to mention, again, that Checkr is actually walking the walk as well. We’re not just talking to talk. We’re also fair-chance employer. And I actually have personally the opportunity to meet some of the fair-chance talents at Checkr, hear their personal stories, and work with them. They’re wonderful people who were just in bad situations, oftentimes not by choice. They’re hardworking people who have overcome many barriers after they have left the system and that I can only myself imagine and they deserve equal opportunity just like any others. So I love the fact that I have firsthand experience working with people who have prior record and they definitely deserve more than what they currently are getting.

Krista Moroder: Thank you. And Melanie, you’re also involved with Bounce Back, right?

Melanie Cernak: Is that correct? Yeah. So Bounce Back is a committee within Checkr. That’s solely focused on the mission and I’m one of the leaders of the Bounce Back product sub-committee. So I really try to champion our mission product initiatives and make sure that our mission is reflected in our product experience. And in addition to that, I volunteer for a reentry simulation, which is really powerful. It’s kind of walking the mile, empathy-building exercise, where you go through what it’s like for someone who’s been incarcerated and is reentering society. And you see all the challenges and barriers that they face. We had a conference in the fall called Checkr Forward, and we held this reentry simulation with all our customers and they were very moved and really excited about fair-chance hiring and how they could get involved afterward.

Krista Moroder: Yeah, and that’s a great example. Someone just posted something in the Q and A about is their business impacted by customers who are very conservative in their views on background checks. And we can talk more to that later, but the reentry simulation, I think, was a perfect example of a lot of people responding afterwards that they didn’t realize how difficult it was for a lot of people and opened up a lot of customers’ eyes to exactly what that experience is like. Anyway, I want to make sure that we save time for questions. So I want to thank everyone for listening.

Krista Moroder: There’s a lot of different technology design challenges we’re working on, but one of my favorite things is always thinking back to the Bill Gates quote about how the first rule of any technology is that when you apply automation to something efficient, it makes it better. If you apply it to something inefficient, it makes it worse. And I always think back to that when we’re talking about background checks, because they have never, ever been clean or efficient or well-run. And so that’s why it’s so important that we’re constantly asking ourselves these bigger questions about what we’re actually trying to do and what our mission is. To make sure that we’re making things actually better and not worse. So, yeah, we’d love to take some questions with any of the few minutes remaining.

Rachel Jones: Great. So I know that you just touched on this question about customers who are very conservative in their views on background checks. So how do you manage that when you’re marketing yourself to potential customers?

Krista Moroder: Actually, let’s see here, who would like… Maybe we can take this from a design perspective? We don’t have anyone on marketing on board, but I know you think about it often from design.

Melanie Cernak: Yeah. So I know that our sales organization like varies the pitch based on what the customer is looking for. And if they’re a little bit more conservative and they’re not initially interested in fair chance, we pitch on kind of our other benefits first. And once we have them on board, it’s more of like, “Hey.” It’s a lot of education. So we have a fair-chance learning center course where it talks about the benefits of fair-chance hiring and how much it can expand your talent pool. And so really it’s getting people on board as customers and then helping educate why fair chance matters. And we do a lot of marketing and contents around that.

Rachel Jones: Great. Anyone else want to weigh in on that or just ways that you present yourselves to customers as a company?

Krista Moroder: Yeah, I guess I can join in on that. So a lot of the features that we have around things like fair chance are optional because there is no requirement for customers to actually use them. But, again, the marketing that we try to do is around why it’s important to think about these things. And I think as people use the product to maybe meet legal requirements, they start to see the benefits of opening up their candidate funnel, especially when a really good candidate applies and there might be something small on the record. That discussion they continuously have with their candidate, doesn’t have to be a one-off conversation. It can be a toggle setting or a shift in functionality that they can open up to many more people like that person who just might not have raised their hands and said, “Take a second look at me.”

Melanie Cernak: Yeah. And we also have certain product features that help promote fair-chance hiring. For example, we have a new product feature called Assess, which you can filter out certain records in advance. So like [inaudible]. Certain things that we shouldn’t be making negative hiring decisions based on. It’s improving operational efficiency just to not have to look at those charges and then helping promote fair-chance talent as a result.

Rachel Jones: Great. Our next question, what are some of the biggest challenges, designing products for customers who are more modern, like tech companies, versus more traditional, like educational or government institutions?

Krista Moroder: Melanie, do you want to take that one as well?

Melanie Cernak: Yeah. I think there’s definitely very different product needs for some of our more traditional staffing companies versus on-demand companies. We started with on-demand, which has traditionally been our bread and butter. And we’re now working on diversifying and understanding a lot more of the needs for these more traditional and conservative companies. I think, yeah, one design challenge is just to be mindful that we’re not building anything for any specific customer. If a customer is large and they’re more conservative, we try not to build just custom solutions for them. We try to find a good middle ground of something that addresses their needs, while still is progressive.

Krista Moroder: Yeah. And I can speak to that a little bit from the motor vehicle side with Michelle and Vivian. We’ve, since the beginning, have done a lot with companies that are doing ride sharing or part of the gig economy, but as we branch into more enterprise-specific customers, a lot of the work we’ve done over the last year has been to support commercial drivers and making sure that we’re meeting regulations that might be required to be a truck driver, for example. And so a lot of the product features have been to make sure that we’re handling all these more specific situations of the types of background checks that you might need for a job that’s not in an office, but might require special certifications and requirements.

Rachel Jones: Great. We have time for one last question. So are there any industries that fair-chance employees struggle getting into and do you offer any training or help getting training?

Melanie Cernak: Yeah, so we offer a lot of resources and are partnered with a lot of organizations that do training and help like interview skills for people who are reentering society, in general, like professional and skills trainings. And then I think we also give recommendations of places that are fair-chance friendly and try to guide people who write in through our Bounce Back website. We give like individual feedback of where might be good for them to look based on their report.

Krista Moroder: Yeah. And there’s a lot of information on that if you go to our website. I think it’s bounceback.checkr.com but there’s a lot of resources there for different customers or just anyone to learn more about ways to get back into the workforce and support people who are in that situation.

Rachel Jones: All right. Great. Thank you so much, ladies.

Melanie Cernak: Awesome. Thank you.

Michelle He: Thank you for having us.

Krista Moroder: Thank you for inviting us.

Vivian Chen: Thank you.

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70% of Girl Geek X partner companies are still actively hiring. Here are the jobs they’re hiring for!

We read the headlines about soaring unemployment and tech layoffs, yet when we asked dozens of our mission-aligned partners if they are actively hiring, over 70% said yes!

WEBFLOW IS HIRING

Webflow empowers designers to create beautiful, responsive websites—without writing a single line of code, or relying on a developer. Its drag-and-drop interface looks, feels, and works like familiar desktop design tools, and writes clean, semantic code any developer would be proud of.

More jobs at Webflow!

STRAVA IS HIRING

Strava builds software that makes the best part of our athletes’ days even better. And just as we’re deeply committed to unlocking their potential, we’re dedicated to providing a world-class, inclusive workplace where our employees can grow and thrive, too.

More jobs at Strava!

OPENDOOR IS HIRING

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

More jobs at Opendoor!

ATLASSIAN IS HIRING

Atlassian is a leading provider of collaboration, development, and issue tracking software for teams. With over 170,000 global customers, we’re advancing the power of collaboration with products including Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, and now Trello. Driven by honest values, an amazing culture, and consistent revenue growth, we’re out to unleash the potential of every team.

More jobs at Atlassian!

SLACK IS HIRING

Slack has transformed business communication. It’s the leading channel-based messaging platform, used by millions to align their teams, unify their systems, and drive their businesses forward. Only Slack offers a secure, enterprise-grade environment that can scale with the largest companies in the world. It is a new layer of the business technology stack where people can work together more effectively, connect all their other software tools and services, and find the information they need to do their best work. Slack is where work happens.

More jobs at Slack!

OPENAI IS HIRING

OpenAI is a research and deployment company whose mission is to ensure that general-purpose artificial general intelligence —by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity. We will attempt to directly build it safely and beneficially, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome.

More jobs at OpenAI!

UNITED STATES DIGITAL SERVICE (USDS) IS HIRING

United States Digital Service (USDS) is a tech start up at the White House, with a diverse group working across the federal government to build better tools and services for the American people. USDS is looking for candidates with hands-on skills and leadership to improve our Nation’s most critical digital services. You’ll join a team of talented technologists from across the private sector and government to serve time limited tours of service to untangle, rewire and redesign critical government services (e.g. millions of people use Federal Government Services everyday, veterans apply for healthcare, immigrants apply for naturalization).

Apply for USDS here!

CARTA IS HIRING

Carta (formerly eShares) is a software platform for founders, investors, and employees to manage equity and ownership. Carta helps companies and investors manage their cap tables, valuations, portfolio investments, and equity plans. Carta’s mission is to map and expand the global ownership network in order to increase liquidity and transparency between shareholders.

More jobs at Carta!

SALESFORCE IS HIRING

We bring companies and customers together on the #1 CRM. Sharing the news, events, and innovation you need to change the world for good.

More jobs at Salesforce!

INTEL AI IS HIRING

Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) is an industry leader, creating world-changing technology that enables global progress and enriches lives. Inspired by Moore’s Law, we continuously work to advance the design and manufacturing of semiconductors to help address our customers’ greatest challenges. By embedding intelligence in the cloud, network, edge and every kind of computing device, we unleash the potential of data to transform business and society for the better.

More jobs at Intel AI!

JOHNSON & JOHNSON IS HIRING

Johnson & Johnson Medical Devices is focused on shaping the future of digital surgery and expanding its robotics and digital solutions offerings across the entire portfolio, with multi-specialty, end-to-end solutions in orthopaedics, endoluminal intervention and general surgery. For more information, visit www.ethicon.com. View career opportunities in Robotics and Digital Solutions in Redwood City and Santa Clara.

More jobs at Johnson & Johnson!

MAESTROQA IS HIRING

MaestroQA makes omnichannel quality assurance software for modern support teams. Etsy, Mailchimp, Peloton, Zendesk, and more use MaestroQA to improve agent performance, optimize CX processes, unlock business-level insights, and enable amazing customer experiences—all while improving the metrics that matter like retention, revenue, and CSAT. We’re a small but fast growing, remote friendly team looking for partners to help us scale and build a diverse and resilient company that will change the customer support space worldwide.

More jobs at MaestroQA!

FISHER INVESTMENTS IS HIRING

Fisher Investments is a different kind of investment firm. We don’t come from Wall Street, nor do we believe we fit in with most of the finance industry, and we’re proud of that. We work for a bigger purpose: bettering the investment universe.

More jobs at Fisher Investments!

FREEDOM FINANCIAL NETWORK IS HIRING

At Freedom, we believe our people are the key drivers of our market-defining innovation and success. We strive to nurture an inclusive, caring culture that positions everyone to do their best work. We’re deeply committed to providing work that makes a meaningful impact by helping everyday Americans move forward toward a better financial future.

More jobs at Freedom Financial Network!

OPENDOOR IS HIRING

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

More jobs at Opendoor!

AMAZON WEB SERVICES IS HIRING

AWS Outcome Driven Engineering (ODE) is a new AWS engineering organization chartered to build industry-specific products by diving deep with industry innovation leaders to solve the hence-unsolved digital solutions that unblock the industry from new digital business models, step changes in efficiency, or otherwise transformative business outcomes.

More jobs at Amazon Web Services!

Think you’ve found your dream job in this list?

We highly recommend watching the video replays from the company’s Girl Geek Dinner or Elevate talks on YouTube to learn more about each organization, get to know some of their women leaders and technologists, and get an inside peek at what it’s like to work there.

We recommend reaching out to one or two speakers from the company directly via LinkedIn, Twitter, or email to strike up a conversation about the role, project or department you’re most interested in.

Remember, making a genuine human connection can help you stand out in a crowded talent market!

Good luck!!

Please let us know if you successfully land a job from this list, we’d love to hear about it!

Email us at hello@girlgeek.io

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“Checkr Coffee Break: Fair Chance Hiring”: Margie Lee-Johnson with Checkr (Video + Transcript)

Transcript of Elevate 2020 Session

Angie Chang: Hey, welcome back. Right now we are having Margie Lee-Johnson, who is the VP of People at Checkr and previously she was a Senior Director of Global People Operations at Twitch. And in this Checkr Coffee Break we will hear from her about today’s hiring landscape and understand that women are the fastest growing population in prisons and uncover potential business impact and increased our life through fair chance hiring. Welcome, Margie.

Margie Lee-Johnson: Thank you. Hopefully everyone can hear me. I’m going to assume that’s a yes. First of all, I wanted to just start by telling you that I am working from home today because of coronavirus. We are now working remotely. And I have a four year old who is at home sick, so if you hear some movement or potentially yelling, that’s her. She’s being her fantastic four year old self.

Margie Lee-Johnson: I have 15 minutes and I have a lot of content. So if you don’t mind I’m going to jump right in. And I’m excited to talk to you about diversifying your work force and increasing your social impact through fair chance hiring.

Margie Lee-Johnson: So a little bit about Checkr. So we are a technology first background checking company. We are headquartered in San Francisco. We have our second headquarters in Denver. And it’s interesting because when you talk about fair chance hiring and that is hiring people that may have had conviction histories or formerly incarcerated, people often wonder why would a background checking company be so interested in this?

Margie Lee-Johnson: And it’s important to know that we’re a mission driven company and as a background checking company we run 1.5 million background checks a month. And we realized that there were a lot of people who were qualified to do work that were being excluded from work because of their conviction history. And when you think about that, it really seems a little bit of counterproductive in terms of what we’re doing. But our goal is to make the right decisions based on the right type of work. And we’re going to talk about that a little bit more.

Margie Lee-Johnson: But our mission at Checkr is that we believe that everyone deserves a fair chance at work and we have become a fair chance employer as well as an advocate. And we specifically look for ways in our product to remove bias from the background checking process.

Margie Lee-Johnson: So when we talk about fair chance, the movement, because there is a movement, and we’ll talk about that in a bit more detail, but when we talk about it, we oftentimes frame it with the journey of civil rights. And I want to just do a quick run through from the 1960s to where we are today, which is actually 2020.

Margie Lee-Johnson: 1960s, we all know about the Civil Rights Movement and the outcome, but we rarely focus on the fact that the Civil Rights Movement was really a fight for equal employment and included a fight for equal employment for people regardless of their race, their ethnicity, their gender, their religion. And we oftentimes romanticize the Civil Rights Movement. We have a tendency to think about the March on Washington, the inspirational, I Have A Dream speech. But in the beginning it was really hard and it was really unpopular. And it started with a small group, a small movement of people, that were really dedicated to making a difference.

Margie Lee-Johnson: And when we think about this population, we eventually came together and acknowledged that our nation was acting against our values and we stood up together for what was right, despite furious opposition. And citizens of the US came together and effectively organized for civil rights for all people, which is really a luxury that we enjoy today and sometimes take for granted today.

Margie Lee-Johnson: When I look at this image, it’s one of my favorites. We actually have a mural in our Checkr office based on one of these pictures of people joining hands during the Civil Rights Movement. I always look at–pick out the white guys because they had really nothing to gain and they risked so much in this movement. I just think it’s a real testament to Americans banding together when we really believe something is fundamentally wrong.

Margie Lee-Johnson: And then we get to the ’64 Civil Rights Act which outlawed and banned discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin, and it was signed into law to give these protections to marginalized groups and give people equal access to work. It was a game changer for employment. And it, for the first time, paved the way for real federal protections for these marginalized groups. And that was only 56 years ago.

Margie Lee-Johnson: We’ve come quite far as a nation and we still have a little bit of work to do, but what’s interesting about the civil rights era and the ’64 Civil Rights Act is it’s basically just how we do business today. Every single employer in the US has an equal opportunity policy and standard practices. They state it when you go and apply for their jobs. And 63% of Gen Zers expect to work at diverse employers. It has fundamentally shifted the way that we think about going to work and how we employ people.

Margie Lee-Johnson: But who did we leave behind? When you think about where we are today, fair chance, which is basically hiring people with conviction histories, it’s a grassroots movement and it’s pretty much unpopular, and it’s about giving people, again, equal access to employment. And when we think about fair chance, think about the fact that these are people that have already paid their debt to society, served their time, and are reentering our communities. And just like in 1964, it’s not popular yet.

Margie Lee-Johnson: And I think about this early days in this movement, we’re really starting to gain momentum and I’m hoping that as we talk about it and encourage other employers to think about it and more and more companies step forward and say, I’m signing up to do this, and we take away the stigma, and we start to make it commonplace.

Margie Lee-Johnson: This is a statistic on formerly incarcerated people, and when we think about fair chance, I don’t necessarily know if we really think about it in the context of the fact that people that were formerly incarcerated and when they re-enter our society, they all have a hard time finding work, but it disproportionately impacts previously incarcerated African-Americans and women.

Margie Lee-Johnson: Women are the fastest growing population in our prisons and when they come back into society after having served their time, Hispanic women, African American women, and white women are disproportionately impacted by unemployment. And it’s a proven fact that the number one cause of recidivism is unemployment. It’s as simple as that.

Margie Lee-Johnson: So when you think about 2019, or 2020, need to update my slides, this is actually a picture of a Checkr employee. We encourage our employees to go on prison visits and there’s a specific program that we partner with called Defy.

Margie Lee-Johnson: And this is one of our Colorado visits, our HQ in Colorado visiting women who are incarcerated going through the Defy program. And it’s an incredible opportunity. We’ve actually hired some folks from the Defy program at Checkr.

Margie Lee-Johnson: So again, this is one of our prison visits, one of our employees at our Defy prison visits in Colorado. And we again have hired some folks from the Defy program. But what’s important to remember, or to know rather, is that one in three Americans have a criminal conviction. That’s 2.3 Americans, I’m sorry, 2.3 million Americans, who are reentering our communities every year have criminal convictions.

Margie Lee-Johnson: So when we think about this population, we have a tendency to feel somewhat distanced by it, but it’s really close and these folks are our friends, our neighbors, or people you may go to church with, siblings, parents, future colleagues. So it’s really important to humanize it and think about this population that is so dramatically impacted by unemployment when they re-enter our communities.

Margie Lee-Johnson: So when I talked about earlier about a lot of companies are starting to make a public statement that they’re fair chance employers. We’re really challenging the status quo. JP Morgan came out about four months ago and made a commitment that 10% of their hires are going to be fair chance. It’s an incredible story.

Margie Lee-Johnson: Slack also has made a commitment to be a fair chance employer. We actually just went to a Bridge Award ceremony, which celebrates innovative employers in the Bay area, and we won the 2019 Bridge Innovative Employer of the Year and just handed off the reins to Slack, both of us for recognition for being fair chance employers.

Margie Lee-Johnson: Also, celebrities are very talkative about it, very energized by it. So John legend and Common and Van Jones actively advocating fair chance employment. And even the White House is engaged with the First Step Act, which is a policy around the movement towards fair chance hiring.

Margie Lee-Johnson: So there’s just a lot of groundswell of employers stepping up and what is very energizing to me as more and more companies come out and publicly state that they’re fair chance employers, I hope other people are less nervous about it and really start to consider it.

Margie Lee-Johnson: When we think about fair chance employers, people have a tendency to think that you’re bringing people in as tokens and that old view on affirmative action, and that’s not really the case at all. What we talk about is lowering the barriers, not the bars. And SHRM reports, which is the Society of Human Resources Management, reports that 82% of managers and 67% of HR professionals who have hired fair chance talent believe that the quality is the same or higher than their workers without records. That’s very much Checkr’s experience as well.

Margie Lee-Johnson: So for Checkr, 6% of our employees are fair chance. We have a 79% retention rate, and 44% of our fair chance employees are promoted. So they have a tendency to stick around a lot longer, and they’re seeing a tremendous amount of success at Checkr, which is so exciting.

Margie Lee-Johnson: One of the things that’s important is when we talk about our diversity statistics as a company, and we’re very open with this, all of this is published on our blog, we include fair chance talent in our diversity statistics. We have a specific hiring goals, diversity hiring goals every year, and it includes fair chance talent. So I’m really proud of our statistics here. But again, if you want our full demographics, I would encourage you to go and download our diversity and belonging ebook.

Margie Lee-Johnson: So what can you do if you’re inspired by this? Become a fair assessor. A fair assessor is, we actually have a class on this, so anyone who’s doing it at their company, background checks with their company, or knows who’s actually making those decisions on what’s meets company standards or not, I would encourage you to ask them to become fair assessors. And that is conducting an individualized assessment with each background check. It’s looking at the nature of the job, the time since the conviction, and the nature of the offense, and it’s giving people really the opportunity to tell their stories and looking at it on the more than face value, but really looking at the details and considering the nature, time, nature test.

Margie Lee-Johnson: Also remove bias from the candidate consideration process. So one of the tools that we use at Checkr, and of course we use our own product, is that we look at our jobs and we say, hey, we don’t have any people that drive on behalf of the company, so we don’t worry about people with DUI convictions, as an example. So we have the ability to say, don’t even show me the records or report that there is a record that needs to be considered if it meets these criteria, because as a company, that’s not the type of work that we do and that’s not something we want to be concerned about.

Margie Lee-Johnson: But there are different areas like, hey, we have a lot of people data and so if someone happens to have a conviction of any type of forgery or identity theft, those are things we absolutely want to take a very close look at. And then fair chance talent, again, should be part of your diversity metrics. We feel very strongly that companies should look at what they’re doing on this particular front and maybe they’re, without even recognizing it, their policies or their practices are disproportionately impacting this population. If you’re looking at it, then you’re aware of it.

Margie Lee-Johnson: Also, talk to community partners, talk to other companies that are practicing, that are fair chance employers, and these are the programs that we work with, Defy Ventures, I mentioned earlier, runs programs within prisons. CEO is a great nationwide community partner that we engage with. The Second Chance Center, all of these folks, all of these organizations, work with folks that are formerly incarcerated or may have been justice-impacted to help them build their skills to go into the work environment. And they really don’t have a tremendous amount of employers that are keenly interested in doing this work.

Margie Lee-Johnson: So I would encourage you to get engaged and see if it’s something that your company would really like to be interested in. And of course we’re always available if anyone who would like to chat with us, we will share with you what our practices are, what’s worked, a lot of our learnings through the journey.

Margie Lee-Johnson: So I know that was super fast, but I had 10 minutes. My apologies for my slide issues, but if anyone has any questions, I’d love to answer them.

Angie Chang: So we do have some questions and I think we have time for just one. Do you think there are sufficient programs to help the currently incarcerated population gain both technical and soft skills to help them once they finish their sentence?

Margie Lee-Johnson: Say that slowly, one more time please. That’s got a lot packed in it.

Angie Chang: Yeah. Do you think there are sufficient programs to help the currently incarcerated population gain both tech and soft skills to help them once they finish their sentence?

Margie Lee-Johnson: The answer to that is there’s not enough, and it varies pretty dramatically. So The Last Mile is a organization that’s headquartered [crosstalk 00:15:17].

Angie Chang: I can see you.

Margie Lee-Johnson: Thank you, I got the video up. See, tenacity. Is headquartered in the Bay area and they have a program that they run in San Quentin to help folks that are incarcerated learn how to code. And we actually hired a gentleman, and I would encourage all of you, he’s been very vocal about his story, so if you ever do any Google searches on Checkr and fair chance it will likely come up. The prison he was in in California didn’t actually have computers, so he went through The Last Mile Program and he learned to code with pen and paper, and he was in a medium security prison and he asked to be transferred to San Quintin, a maximum security prison, because he wanted to actually code on a computer and that’s amazing to me.

Margie Lee-Johnson: And he was transferred. And for the first time he got to code on a computer and he’s a software engineer. He’s fantastic. And we hired him. He was released from San Quentin, went and worked for The Last Mile, did a lot of work with them, came on with us as an intern and we’ve hired him and he’s just amazing.

Margie Lee-Johnson: But there’s not enough of those programs. And to actually go through a program that’s teaching you how to code and to learn to do it on pen and paper is just beyond my comprehension. So there are programs. There aren’t enough. They’re really tough for people to get into.

Margie Lee-Johnson: When I was on a prison visit in Colorado, it was a level five, so their most maximum security prison in Colorado. There was a gentleman who had already been incarcerated for 30 years and the Defy Program was the first program he was able to get into. He had an incredibly long sentence and they prioritize the limited number of slots, understandably, based on your release date, and for 30 years he wasn’t able to get any education beyond just what he checked out of the library.

Margie Lee-Johnson: So there aren’t enough. There’s a tremendous amount of interest from these folks, and whatever we can do, please make donations to The Last Mile, make donations to Defy, because their limitation is not interest, it’s really funding, because they’re all privately funded.

Angie Chang: Okay, thank you for that. So, we’re going to be wrapping up this Coffee Break. Thank you so much,, Margie for your talk and thank you for joining us today. We are going to take a five minute break now and then we’ll be back with our next speaker.

Margie Lee-Johnson: Thanks everyone.

Angie Chang: Thank you.

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Girl geeks are stocking up on these surprising things during COVID-19.

stocking up during covid-19

Last week, we asked our community: “What surprising thing are you stocking up on right now (aside from toilet paper)?”

The answers came flooding in, and while many were things we too were stocking up on or had thought about, there were also some responses that we never would have expected! Here are some highlights:

plastic filament tower
Chung-Hay Luk, UX Researcher at Google is stocking up on 3d filament to print shields for healthcare workers in the Bay Area during the Covid-19 pandemic via Bay Area Face Shield Supply.
  1. “The surprising thing I’ve been stocking up on is plastic filament. My friends and I have been 3d printing visors and creating face shields for healthcare workers in need, and we’ve delivered nearly 1000 shields so far.” — Chung-Hay Luk, UX Researcher at Google.

    This is awesome and so unexpected! Color us impressed!

    Want to learn more? Check out the latest count of donated shields/visors, donate to the cause, or get involved with this volunteer effort at Bay Area Face Shield Supply.

  2. Sayali Kapre, a Firmware Validation Engineer at Zoox, told us that she’s stocking up on fabric and yarn.

    And we are totally envious of her patience and craftiness. Just ask the sewing machine that’s been collecting dust under my desk for the past decade… I had such high hopes!

  3. Sukrutha Bhadouria, CTO at Girl Geek X and Senior Software Engineering Manager at Salesforce, has been stocking up on frozen foods. She shared that with everyone working from home, most of her colleagues have been putting in more hours… leaving less time for meal prep.

    I don’t have any good reason for it — my hours have been impacted in the opposite direction… but I’m still stocking up on frozen foods too! Our freezer is about one item shy of overflowing at this point. 😂

  4. Sue Separk, Director of Financial Analysis at Firewood, is collecting seeds!

    Great idea, Sue! We have a few gardeners on the Girl Geek team, and at least one of us has stocked up on seed packets too! Our CEO Angie shared that she’s been regrowing some veggies from the discarded bits — like carrot tops and celery stems. Whichever way you garden, there’s never been a better time to double down and do more!

    Side note: Sue signed her email “Yours in unabashed excellence, Sue.” And we just needed to publicly say YESSSS, girl. You ARE excellent, and we love it!

  5. “I’ve found myself ordering a ton of ice cream. I’m not sure if it’s my way of coping with the stay at home order or if I discovered an amazing ice cream bar hahaha. It’s the Haagen-dazs Coffee Almond Crunch Ice Cream Bars!” — Lety Gómez, Web Developer at Girl Geek X & Software Engineer at TechCrunch

    Lety’s definitely not alone! I’ve been ordering a different Talenti icecream or gelato flavor with just about every Instacart order. Gotta try ’em all, right? And don’t even get me started on the “Fat Boy” brand icecream sandwiches. So. Good.

  6. In a vote for self care, Jessica Jallorina, an Inside Account Manager at TestEquity shared that since she can’t get a proper mani/pedi right now, she’s stocking up on foot and hand masks from Target.

    “Also popcorn!” she added.

    Yay for self-care! Take care of yourselves, ladies, whatever it is that’ll make make you smile or help you relax — go for it! You finally have the time. And double yay for popcorn! We wholeheartedly approve of the exclamation point, by the way. Popcorn deserves it!

  7. Rachel Jones, our resident Podcaster here at Girl Geek X, said she’s been stockpiling candles.

    I feel this one for sure. I have a habit of stocking up during annual candle sales, and then most of the candles just sit on a shelf until the cooler months or when we’re expecting visitors. But with all the time we’ve been spending inside lately, we’ve taken to rotating candles and lighting a new scent every day or two. If we’re going to be stuck inside, might as well make it smell good!

  8. Ofure Okoronkwo, a Senior Software Engineer at RBC, told us that she’s stocking up on Lysol disinfecting wipes and fruits.

    Us too! Our CEO Angie shared that she’s been trying to keep her kitchen stocked with produce and fruits instead of junk food. Lady Alice Apples are her favorite right now!

    And personally, I’ve been on a berry kick since about January, and Covid isn’t slowing that down! There are always at least 2 types of fresh berries in my fridge… with extra in the freezer for popping into smoothies. We also went strawberry picking last summer, so I still have some homemade jam left. We even found locally made huckleberry and boysenberry jams at a local dairy last month. It’s berry madness over here!

  9. Erica Kawamoto Hsu, Photographer at Girl Geek X, told us she’s stocking up on all things Asian pop culture. “Since I can’t travel and with being isolated, I’ve started taking greater interest in my cultural roots through podcasts, music, tv shows, and language exchange.

    This is awesome, I love it! Sounds like a much more fulfilling way to spend time than binge-watching every movie in the Hunger Games series. Not that I know anyone who has done that this week… 👀

  10. Girl Geek X CEO Angie Chang is stocking up on produce starts for vegetables like kale, broccoli, beans and more!

    It’ll be another week or two before I buy veggie starts — last frost can come pretty late here in PA, but I’ll be doing the same! We stocked up on compost and mushroom soil last month to prep a new raised garden bed. Always a project!

  11. Karina Eichmann, Senior Program Manager at Oath said that she’s stocking up on quarters, because they’re required to operate laundry machines.

    Smart. We wouldn’t have thought of this… but who wants to be handling quarters that have passed through hundreds of hands before getting to you? If you’re stocked up, you can disinfect them all at once and not have to sweat it when you’re doing your weekly laundry run!

  12. “For me (and my hubby), we are stocking up all the time on food for our cat, named Momo. Our household is gluten free and so Momo gets grain free food so that he can stay healthy. He is a rescue and we love him – best sleeping buddy.” 😊 — Aliza Carpio, Tech Evangelist, Intuit Global Engineering Culture (Office of the Intuit Chief Architect)

    The pet caretakers on our team are doing the same. Girl Geek X Communications Coordinator Amanda Beaty recently adopted a 10-year-old “pandemic puppy” from a rescue she volunteers with, so in addition to her usual cat food and litter stash, she’s now stocking up on dog food too!
Momo the grain free cat
Pictured: Momo the grain-free cat, sent to us by Aliza Carpio, Tech Evangelist, Intuit Global Engineering Culture (Office of the Intuit Chief Architect)


As for me, I’m stocking up on mycelium plugs. I’ve been foraging wild mushrooms since I was a kid, and I’ve read up on cultivation techniques a bunch of times. With a little extra time for a project right now, I’m finally taking the plunge! Thus far, we’ve ordered or pre-ordered about 1600 plugs — which are little cylindrical wooden dowels about an inch long, that have been inoculated with mycelium from various mushroom species.

Each mushroom I’m trying to grow has a preferred type of tree and habitat, so it’s a whole project of finding the right trees, cutting logs to the right length/width, and letting them dry for a couple weeks before moving on to the next steps (drilling, inserting the plugs, sealing, watering, siting the logs in the woods / shade, partially burying some of them, etc.)

If it works, the mycelium will take over the new log(s) and produce fruiting bodies (mushrooms) once the conditions are right. We should have 2 types of oyster mushrooms this fall, maybe some lion’s manes too… and then several other species in future years. Fingers crossed!

Pictured: Chicken of the Woods (Laetiporus sulphureus) and maiitake mushrooms (Grifola frondosa) that we foraged last year. We’re trying to cultivate both species this year.

What surprising thing are you stocking up on?

We’d love to hear from you! Tag us on the Twitters and let us know what you’ve found yourself stocking up on during Covid-19!

About the Author

Amy Weicker - Head of Marketing at Girl Geek X

Amy Weicker is the Head of Marketing at Girl Geek X, and she has been helping launch & grow tech companies as a marketing leader and demand generation consultant for nearly 20 years. Amy previously ran marketing at SaaStr, where she helped scale the world’s largest community & conference for B2B SaaS Founders, Execs and VCs from $0 to $10M and over 200,000 global community members. She was also the first head of marketing at Sales Hacker, Inc. (acquired by Outreach) which helps connect B2B sales professionals with the tools, technology and education they need to excel in their careers.

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“Military Transition: Vets in Tech” — Girl Geek X Elevate (Video + Transcript)

Transcript of Elevate 2020 Session

Rachel Jones: All right, so we’re about to start our final panel of the conference. For this one we’ll be speaking with some veterans in tech. So, with diverse backgrounds, careers, roles, and branches, vets are hardly a monolith. There’s so much variety to their stories, but one thing that they definitely all have in common is resilience. So, for this panel, these vets in tech will share the challenges and upsides of their amazing journeys. I’ll hand it off to our moderator, Tiana Clark, who is a director of marketing at Microsoft. Tiana?

Tiana S. Clark: Hello. Can you all hear me okay?

Rachel Jones: Yep.

Molly Laufer: Yes.

Tiana S. Clark: Awesome. I’m super excited to be a part of Girl Geek X today, especially on a topic that is near and dear to my heart. I’m glad that we just have an opportunity and a forum to be able to discuss this. I’m really excited. I think it would be good to start going around and having everyone tell a little bit about your branch, your role, enlisted or officer, and a career highlight or two. So we’re taking a step back and just reflecting on our military experience. I’ll go first. I am prior US Air Force. I was a Staff Sergeant Intelligence Analyst. And a couple of highlights, I was deployed for Operation Iraqi Freedom. I won Airman of the Year, and I’ve flown in an F-15 Eagle.

Tiana S. Clark: So that’s a little bit about my background. Let’s go ahead and start with Molly.

Molly Laufer: All right. Hi everyone, my name is Molly Laufer, and I spent four years as a Service Warfare Officer in the United States Navy from 2007 to 2011. During those four years, I spent time on one of the Navy’s smallest warships, which is a frigate. I served as the Ordinance Enforce Protection Officer doing counter-narcotic terrorism operations. Then I also spent a few years on the Navy’s largest warship, which is an aircraft carrier. I deployed on the USS Nimitz in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom on an Operation Enduring Freedom.

Molly Laufer: I think some of my highlights include things like swim calls and fishing expeditions off the back of a warship on a Sunday afternoon, as well as spending time … I was the only woman who was a battle watch captain on an Iraqi oil terminal in the North Arabian Gulf. So working with our ally partners and our Bahrani interpreters was really a highlight of my career in the Navy, because I didn’t expect to be somewhere that was not a warship during those four years.

Tiana S. Clark: Amazing. Thank you. Theresa?

Theresa Piasta: Hi everybody. My name’s Theresa Piasta. I served in the Army for six years between active duty, four years, and then Upstate New York in Fort Totten. After my active duty experience, I also did active reserves. So I saw it on both ends, but within the service I was stationed at Fort Hood, Texas. Then we deployed to Iraq from ’08 to ’09. We were gone for over 14 months. There, I was in charge of all base offense and access control. So at the age of 24, 25, I had to put on a lot of different hats and do things and teach myself new skills very quickly.

Theresa Piasta: I think that that experience that the military puts leaders in at a very young age was just such an amazing experience, that I think all of us here in this panel probably have those different tidbits of when you’re just put in a situation and you’re expected to do a lot with a lot of constraints as well. So that experience in general, leading base offense and access control on a base that had a 27 kilometer perimeter and thousands of people residing there has set me up for success for the rest of my career.

Theresa Piasta: After I got back from Iraq, it was the financial crisis, so I turned on that resilient leader hat and found and put grid on again, and found a role in the financial services industry on Wall Street. Since then, after six years I moved to the Bay area. I’ve been building a tribe called Puppy Mama, and we’re now over 25,000 people. So, I think with [crosstalk 00:04:42] Yeah, with the military. So, the experience was amazing. Learning those technical skills early on and having that confidence that you can set me up for success to be in the tech industry. I’m looking forward to answering anyone’s questions.

Tiana S. Clark: Awesome. We’re going to get into a lot more, everyone, about our transition out of the military. So we’ll learn more about Puppy Mama and that whole thing, but thank you for sharing. Okay, Claudia, tell us about your military experience.

Claudia Weber: Hi everybody, this is Claudia Weber. I am a US Navy veteran. I was in the Navy for eight years. Five and a half years active duty, and I was stationed at the Navy and Marine Corps Reserve Center in New Orleans. A highlight for me was being involved in a staff command, seeing the operations real time up front, and in my career, seeing the work I did come full circle during Desert Storm when we had to recall the reservists to active duty and being a part of that team in the Northwest that worked 24/7 during our recall period. So, it was really fascinating to see us going live with everything we had trained to do at that point.

Tiana S. Clark: Wow, thanks for sharing that. All right, Melissa, last but not least.

Mellisa Walker: Hello everyone. My name is Melissa Walker. I spent four years in the Marine Corps, enlisted from 2011 to 2015. I was stationed at Camp Pendleton in SoCal, kind of near San Diego, working in various jobs in the aviation supply field. They supported workups and deployments for the squadrons on the airfield. I was working with the logistics for the supplies that were sent out, as well as personnel. I was also in an accounting division that was keeping track of all the fuel receipts as well. I spent a year and a half working at Squadron 267 as a logistics liaison between that squadron and our supply warehouse as well, so that’s mine.

Tiana S. Clark: I just love that you’ve got these strong women who have done some really amazing things in the military. And as was said before, at young ages. Coming in, I was 19 and I’m training pilots. It’s just a level of responsibility and a level of accountability and knowledge, and being able to take that on and to transition it really outside of the military into a tech career field, I think is very, very impressive. So I want to take some time to help people understand what that transition was really like. Because I don’t know about you all, but it wasn’t an automatic jump for me.

Tiana S. Clark: I’ll tell you a little bit more about my story, but I want to let you ladies speak about it first. But let’s just hear what it was like getting from where you were to where you are today. Let’s go ahead and start with Melissa.

Mellisa Walker: Sure thing, thank you. So my journey into tech was like you said, and like many others on this panel, not premeditated at all. I was actually in my last semester of college finishing up my Bachelor’s degree up here at Cal State, and my veterans counselor sent out an email with an opportunity for a veterans directed internship with none other than the company Workday. So if any of you were able to catch the morning speaker, we had Carin Taylor, which is our fearless belonging and diversity leader here.

Mellisa Walker: The internship is called CAP, which stands for Career Accelerator Program, for anyone who’s interested in kind of learning more. So I applied for the internship, not really knowing what I was getting myself into. At the time I had spent zero time in the tech world or the corporate world. My life was previously consumed on finishing school, working retail during that time, or being in the military before that. The internship itself doesn’t tell you much of what to expect, because all the applicants can be placed in different roles based on what teams have head count.

Mellisa Walker: So they can’t really tell you what kind of description of what you’re going to be doing. So, I landed the internship, which went on for four months. They just put you in a real job, so you’re not treated like an intern. You’re treated like a new employee. This was not an easy process for me at all. I was 27 at the time, and I felt like it was teaching an old dog new tricks with all these new terms and a different mindset that I had to learn. So I know that 27 is not that old, but coming into something totally new made it feel like I was really behind the curve, especially from my peers.

Mellisa Walker: Right now I work on a team called Implementation Tools, which deals with data migration tooling that customers use within their Workday product. Also, we are the gatekeepers of all sorts of data that goes into the factory default data that is delivered to the field. So all these different teams put in their new functionality, and then we’re the ones who have to double check to make sure that it works properly for our data migration tooling.

Mellisa Walker: So long story short, very technical role. It’s been very hard to adapt, but I just celebrated my two year work anniversary, so I’m definitely still trying my hardest to be successful here, because Workday is great.

Tiana S. Clark: That is awesome. So just to recap, so straight from military and your first role is at Workday. How long do you feel that it took you before you really felt like you were in your zone, like you’ve got the information, you’re ready? How long do you think that took overall?

Mellisa Walker: Probably in two years.

Tiana S. Clark: Right?

Mellisa Walker: I’m not going to lie, it took a solid year for me to figure out what was going on. I had other people around me that had the same kind of mentality, so it was hard for me, but easy to see that other people were going through the same thing. But yeah, that was a long transition.

Tiana S. Clark: Yeah. Yeah, I totally understand. All right, thanks for sharing. Molly, you want to talk about your transition a little bit?

Molly Laufer: Sure, yeah. Like Melissa said, the transition from the military to the tech world certainly did not come as maybe smoothly as I look back and remember it with rose colored glasses. I left the military in 2011, and moved up here to the Bay area. It was like a fish out of water, complete culture shock. You could’ve dropped me into another country. The vernacular was different. The acronyms were different. I mean, everyone on this panel knows that the military has a lot of acronyms, and they were all very different from the startup world.

Molly Laufer: You know, what’s private equity? How does that differ from venture capital? What’s a cap table? How do I negotiate equity? What’s the difference between a Series A and a Series D? I mean, I felt like I was drowning in new information. It was honestly like being a 22 year old ensign, showing up and having to learn a complete new navigation system on a ship.

Molly Laufer: So when I joined Silicon Valley, I thought, “Well, I’ll just do what everyone does and I’ll go work at a big tech company, because that’s just what everyone does right away.” I was, again, very clear-eyed, very naïve. I submitted my resume to a lot of different places, and I kept hearing the same feedback over and over again. Which was, “Your background sounds really interesting, but we don’t see an obvious fit. Our company is at a stage such that we need people that are experts in a specific area and aren’t just kind of general managers or general figure-it-outers.”

Molly Laufer: That was really demoralizing in the beginning, and so the advice that I had received from someone was, “Maybe you aren’t really in a position to be able to go to a company where they need someone with very specific experience. Maybe you should translate your jack of all trade, master of none experience from the service warfare community into the startup space.” So for me what that looked like is I actually ended up joining a eCommerce direct-to-consumer snack company as the first employee, where for the first several months I was a jack of all trade, master of none.

Molly Laufer: There was really no job that I wasn’t willing to do or to figure out or to get my hands on.

Tiana S. Clark: What a perfect transition for you, Molly. Gosh.

Molly Laufer: Exactly, exactly.

Tiana S. Clark: Yes.

Molly Laufer: It was a really good … When you kind of said it out loud, it really made sense. Then from there, was able to as the company grew, really focus my interests and experience into customer acquisition. So I’ve spent the last nine years really, really focusing customer acquisition. But it didn’t start out where I am today. I really had to kind of take that ability to get my hands on a lot of things, be willing to learn new things, and be willing to just get involved in every job. And really using that experience from the military at a very, very early stage startup.

Tiana S. Clark: Wow. Now, I have to ask one followup question for anyone in the audience who’s curious. How did you meet this founder, or how did you get to be employee number one?

Molly Laufer: Really good question. It certainly isn’t from submitting your resume to a number of different job boards is what I found. It really came down to a friend of a friend of a friend. It was a former coworker of my husband’s coworker, who happened to be a venture capitalist. I said, “I’m new here. Like, literally new into Silicon Valley. Can you tell me about the industry? What kind of investments do you make? These are the types of industries that I’m interested in. Because, again, I have no tech experience in any one specific industry, so here’s what I’m interested in. Do you know anyone who maybe has a company who’s doing that?”

Molly Laufer: He said, “Actually, I do know someone. A friend of mine is actually starting a snack company. You should talk to him.” I was obviously very grateful for that introduction, and that introduction is actually what led to that four year career, that experience at the startup. But it certainly wouldn’t have come from just applying myself to jobs. It certainly came from putting myself out there and being willing to have conversations with people where I didn’t really know what to say, but honestly more importantly, it was because of people who were willing to have those conversations with me, too.

Tiana S. Clark: That’s amazing. So I hear a lot of that using your network, which we’re going to circle back to as well. All right. Let’s hear from Theresa.

Theresa Piasta: Unmuting myself. Molly, I love everything you just shared, because I have found myself similarly, and actually recently I took a Gallup CliftonStrengths assessment test. Anyone in the audience who hasn’t taken it, it’s been really helpful to have discussions, because to discuss my military days, yes, I served from 2006 to 2012. That included two years of active reserve time as well. There’s something that always goes back to my military training and the DNA of being a former military officer. I was a Captain, as I said before, in the US Army. Is number one, on that Gallup assessment, says activator. Everything that Molly just said is pretty much me in a nutshell, and other veterans I’ve spoken to as well.

Theresa Piasta: So I love to be able to do a lot of different things. I love to be able to be impactful in different organizations. Number three on the list is significance, which I also look at, hey, I also love to be part of missions that I am very proud to be part of. So as I navigated my career after the military, those were things that as I’ve recently took that test, it started to … I understood a lot better how to communicate the overall military experience to other people, is because being an activator, I love learning new things. I love learning new skills, and so right after the military went to convertible bond sales and trading desk.

Theresa Piasta: If anyone has ever tried to be on a trading desk, it’s a pretty … very dynamic environment where you have to make quick decisions under pressure. I stayed in the financial services industry for multiple years, but as I moved back to the Bay area with my husband, I’m from Sonoma County. Anyone know the wine country? I’m from Santa Rosa. I was exposed to all the tech out here, and this was four years ago, that I was inspired, as the jack of all trades type activator, and I love to learn new skills. I’m passionate. I was inspired to start a business three years ago called Puppy Mama.

Theresa Piasta: There’s a lot of negativity in social media is what I have found three years ago, but I saw something beautiful where people were connecting with each other in a beautiful and positive way through dogs, and creating a community of love and support for other women. But since then, being a founder of a pet tech company, I’ve had to really learn new skills constantly, and design. In order to grow a business bootstrapped, I’ve had to be very crafty. I go back to my military days of, hey, constantly needing to learn new skills, be resilient, and keep moving forward.

Theresa Piasta: Everything that Molly said is pretty much what my experience in a nutshell, where what organizations hopefully will recognize that from people who come from the military. Because we do have a lot of skills, and we can be put in a lot of different environments because we are resilient leaders, I would say about military folks in a nutshell.

Tiana S. Clark: Absolutely. And understanding the transferable skills that you have, which we’re going to touch on, is so critically important, and being able to communicate that, which we’ll get to. But I also like what you said about the StrengthsFinder. So, I’ve taken that as well. If you all haven’t done that, it’s like $25.00 or something last time I checked, but it does give you a really clear indicator of what makes you tick, like who you are to your core, which will help you when you’re looking at the next role for yourself.

Tiana S. Clark: You can really see, “Where am I strong? Where can I align that to my next opportunity?” So I’m glad you called that out. Let’s hear from Claudia and your transition.

Claudia Weber: Thank you. My transition was a little different. I also wasn’t looking for a career in high tech whatsoever. I did learn computer programming on the job when I was in the Navy. When I got out, I was working at Children’s Hospital in Seattle in child psychiatry. Later worked in community mental health in a startup experience, and the agency I worked for relocated 50 miles away. I made the decision not to relocate, so at that point I was looking for another job, and I had friends and neighbors working at Intel in Washington State.

Claudia Weber: They encouraged me to apply, and I really thought I didn’t have the skills to work at Intel, but I also knew from my military experience that I was often put in a position and had to go figure things out, learn it on the job, take charge, make decisions, and that I could learn anything I set my mind to. So I started applying for jobs and was hired in 2000 at Intel, so going on 20 years ago.

Claudia Weber: One of the reasons I got hired was because of my military experience, and I believe the ability to deal with rapid change and be adaptable and to be resilient. They also loved my experience with mental health. My career over the past 19 plus years has just continued to grow and grow and grow in the world of technology. Learning to create systems, to land systems, enterprise systems for our employee base. It’s really been that ability to learn as I go and to know that I could do anything that I set my mind to. So, a lot of my military experience has helped me to be successful in this role.

Tiana S. Clark: I love that. I just got to touch on this because everyone’s been saying, about our experience and being able to be calm and resilient. It’s funny, because … I work in corporate America. I’ve been in corporate America for 13 years, and I’ll tell you a little bit about my transition here. But one thing that’s funny is a lot of times people get bent out of shape and anxious about things all the time, and I’m like, “Like seriously, I’ve briefed international generals at the Pentagon on critical intelligence. I’m pretty sure I can handle this conference call.” You know?

Tiana S. Clark: It’s like, “Calm down.” But that is a skill, it’s one of those skills that we don’t talk about often, but is extremely important. So just a little bit about me, when I left the military after almost five years, I decided to go into the field of education, because as a youngster I had always wanted to be a teacher. So I taught at an at-risk school while I was going through my Master’s program using my GI Bill. Then afterwards I realized that I couldn’t really deal with the bureaucracy of the school system. It just wasn’t a good fit for me.

Tiana S. Clark: The kids were great, but the system. I was like, “Oh, I don’t know about this.” So I then went to corporate America because a friend, going back to Molly’s comment about having a network, a friend of mine who, she worked at Valero Energy Corporation, which is an oil and gas company based out of Texas. She said, “Well don’t discount Valero.” I was like, “But I don’t know anything about oil and gas.” She said, “Well, there are other opportunities here.”

Tiana S. Clark: So I really looked at the career list, and one of the opportunities was around change management. It had to deal with a lot of executive briefing and training. I was like, “Oh, I’ve done that a lot in the military.” Sure enough, I was able to make that transition. Now, because that group that I went to resided within the IT organization and I was now more of a business analyst helping to bridge that gap between the business and the IT group, now I’m getting this peripheral, almost, view of IT and I’m working with the people in IT.

Tiana S. Clark: So again, another network situation happened where one of my coworkers leaves to go to Microsoft. He said, “Hey, Tiana, you should think about coming to Microsoft.” Again, I was like, “But I don’t have a computer science degree.” He said, “But it’s really around those transferable skills that you have. You have relationship building, you have executive presence. You know how to talk business value to our customers.” So I thought, “Oh, okay.” Then I interviewed for that role and ended up getting it, so that’s how I ended up at Microsoft. I’ve been here for eight years now. Now I’m a marketing director.

Tiana S. Clark: So, loved hearing about all of your experiences. We talked so much about transferable skills and we talked about resilience being one of the skills, just our organization, our ability to deal with pressure, all these things. Can you each maybe give me two other transferable skills that you think helped you? Because I just want people who are listening in to be thinking of and have a variety of things that they can be applying to that concept when we say that.

Tiana S. Clark: For me, I’ll just give one because I don’t want to take away from something that you might be thinking. But for me, for example, when my role in the Air Force was learning everything there is to know about air to air missiles, surface to air missiles, terrain masking and evading, that’s a technical aptitude. So while I might not have a computer science degree, I wasn’t joining Microsoft to be an engineer or a developer, I was joining Microsoft to have 100 level, 200 level technical aptitude. And I had already shown that I could do that, right? So that’s one example. Let’s hear from the rest of you. I don’t know if, Claudia, if you want to go first.

Claudia Weber: Sure, thank you. Two things that are extremely important. One, I would say dealing with change. Change is constant in our world and everything that we do, and being able to deal with change is critical regardless of your job position. The other, I think, is taking ownership, taking ownership to get things done, to drive things to success is critical as well. I think those two skills you can take to anything that you do and hope to be successful.

Tiana S. Clark: That is so true. That’s so true. Theresa, I think you were getting ready to … You were leaning in.

Theresa Piasta: Well, I had already spoken about resiliency and grit, but two that also come to mind between financial services and the tech industry that have been very helpful is diplomacy and knowing how to properly, as you mentioned, Tiana, having to properly advocate for your point, your team, your mission. To advocate for more resources to your senior leadership. I had to do that almost every day in Iraq, and you have to do it incredibly respectfully but still advocate for what you believe and what you need for your team.

Theresa Piasta: So that is something I have seen over and over again for the past 10 years in business related roles that I’ve been in. That is a really helpful skill that I got from the military.

Tiana S. Clark: That is extremely important. Molly?

Molly Laufer: Yeah, I actually … I’m really glad that you said that, Theresa, because I was also thinking in the kind of realm of people, relationship, and relationship management. First is the idea of not just having experience leading a team, but also having a lot of experience managing or navigating things up your chain of command. I know we don’t call it chain of command in the startup world, but managing up the chain of command as well as cross functionally.

Molly Laufer: Again, we might call it cross department. But thinking about all of the experiences that you had having to manage your boss and his boss and his boss. I guess I’m saying the word “his” a lot and that’s going to be part of my second point. But really being able to manage up, and then also manage kind of across the different departments in your division, I think that’s a skillset that translates really beautifully to the tech world because most companies are all about cross departmental collaboration.

Molly Laufer: Then the second point is just being comfortable being on a team that’s very diverse, and potentially managing a team that’s very diverse. I know we talk a lot about diversity in Silicon Valley, and some of us have specific notions about what diversity means, but from my experience one of the most unique managing experience that I had was that I had a sailor in my division who was much older than me.

Molly Laufer: In fact, the first thing he said to me was, “Ma’am, just so you know, I’ve been in the Navy longer than you’ve been alive.” And something along the lines of, “My kid is older than you.” So just being comfortable and able to not only manage, but work with people of different ages, of different backgrounds, is a skill set, that I think is incredibly important in Silicon Valley right now. You can have those little nuggets of examples and you can just whip them out of your pocket in an interview, in a conversation, and you can really point back to that managing in not only uncertain environments, but in really diverse environments.

Tiana S. Clark: I love that. Melissa?

Mellisa Walker: Sure. So I would say a big thing is problem solving, for me. So many times in the military you’re going to hear people say, “Just get it done, I don’t care how,” you know? Even when the task just seems impossible, like you would never be able to do that. You would usually just push it to the side if you weren’t going to get in trouble sort of thing.

Mellisa Walker: So when you’re in the tech world and you’re lost with all these new terms, you need to figure out how to be comfortable with being uncomfortable and you need to figure out what you need to learn and how to do it. You can’t be messing up your manager’s schedule every time of the day when you don’t know how to do something. You need to figure out how you’re going to learn, sort of thing.

Mellisa Walker: So problem solving is big for me, and also just kind of the ability to roll with the punches. Sometimes you have to do things that you have no idea how it works on the back end, and you need to learn how to be okay with that and how to stay positive. Sometimes it’s kind of a joke in the military, your higher ups will go make you go outside and sweep dirt. It’s totally useless, and you don’t really understand why you’re doing it, but you need to be able to roll with the punches and be positive.

Tiana S. Clark: Absolutely. I want to touch on, this is something actually Melissa and Molly, you both hit on this. You talked about acronyms, and interestingly enough, so you all talked about it in terms of when you were in the civilian world, the tech world, and there’s all this new stuff coming at you. One of the tips that I’m going to leave with the audience today is also think about how you are articulating that value and your transferable skills to a potential employer.

Tiana S. Clark: We also have to watch our acronyms and our verbiage, right? So Molly talked about chain of command. That’s something that we may say in the military, not necessarily in civilian. The other thing is don’t just throw out, “Oh yeah, at the ASOC, we did this.” They’ll be like, “What does that mean?” So just making sure that you’re taking the examples that we heard today and speak of it in those terms.

Tiana S. Clark: Just make sure that you’re translating that into layman’s terms that people can understand. Otherwise, an amazing thing that you’ve done in the military, it may fall on deaf ears if they don’t understand what you’re talking about. Did anyone else want to comment on that or have any additional points to share or examples?

Claudia Weber: I’ll add to that, this is Claudia. I think that’s one of the biggest challenges I see with transition from the military or other careers is those adjacent skills and how we explain them. And being able to understand the skills that benefit the job you’re applying for or the career that you’re moving into is really important. Even when it doesn’t look like you have the experience, oftentimes it is those adjacent skills where you do have the experience. So, think in terms that are much more broader.

Tiana S. Clark: Yes. Even when you’re reading those job descriptions, be very diligent in making that connection. Don’t count yourself out and say, “Oh, I don’t think I can do this,” because you very well may have already done similar experience.

Tiana S. Clark: Another thing I want to touch on, I know some of you were officers, so meaning that you entered the military with a college degree. I just want to quickly, because we’ve had a previous session today where they talked about the percentage that’s declining of people who have degrees and so forth. So maybe just tell us, did everyone finish at least their Bachelor’s degree before leaving the military, if you didn’t already have it when you came in?

Mellisa Walker: I finished mine up after.

Tiana S. Clark: Okay.

Claudia Weber: I finished-

Tiana S. Clark: So in the last two years? Oh, go ahead.

Claudia Weber: I finished mine as I was leaving active duty, and then continued on later to a graduate degree.

Tiana S. Clark: Excellent.

Molly Laufer: Well, I graduated before I entered the Navy, but I think now that I can say nine years later, those four years in the military were far more formidable and impactful on my career and who I am today than the four years I had spent before that in undergrad. I really believe that that was my training ground and that was my education.

Tiana S. Clark: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Okay, let’s talk a little bit about the networking piece. So we’ve heard from myself and from Molly about networking. I want to first touch on when you came into this new world, as we mentioned before, like you got just dropped into. You’re like, “Where’s this?” Talk about the difference in team dynamics, right? Because I felt that in the military there was so much comradery and then you come into the civilian world and there’s a different type of network and there’s a different type of team dynamic. What did you all find to be the case in your experience?

Theresa Piasta: Tiana, I have learned that outside the military … Well first, I was in the military when Facebook was actually turned off and no one had LinkedIn, and when I was leaving and when I got back from Iraq and needed to network, someone recommended that I create a LinkedIn profile. So, that was a game changer for me, to network newly out of the service. In the Bay area, I don’t know someone who’s in the job or career right now that doesn’t have a LinkedIn profile, so if you don’t have one, highly recommend that. But in general, networking is so important to get the coffee chat.

Theresa Piasta: Even if you, I would argue, are currently in a career that you really enjoy and love, in order to continually understand what you should be doing to advocate for yourself when your quarterly or annual reviews, to recognize where you could go in the next two to three years, having those discussions with other people in a coffee meeting, et cetera. Whether you’re looking for a job or you’re not looking for a job, it’s just really important to do in the tech industry, I’ve found.

Tiana S. Clark: Yeah, absolutely. I just want to add a little bit more to what you’re saying about LinkedIn. I am on LinkedIn a lot, and just to give you all some tips, because some people are a little bit nervous about starting out in that social space. I’m really not into a lot of the other social platforms, so this one is just … It’s so beneficial to me professionally, so I am on LinkedIn a lot. But I would say make sure that you are connecting with people. You can do searches and finding someone in a career that maybe you are aspiring to enter into. Start building up your network early. The best thing you can do is build your network before you actually need it, right? We’ve got to make sure it already exists.

Tiana S. Clark: Then another thing, this is another tip. You can comment on people’s posts. That’s a way to engage with them. A lot of times they’ll say thank you or they’ll comment back. Then later on, a couple months down the line if we say, “Hey, let’s have a 15 minute virtual coffee,” which I like to do, it doesn’t seem like some stranger reached out to you. It’s like you’re starting to develop a rapport just by engaging with people a little bit on LinkedIn. So that’s just a couple of tips, but start early. Please don’t wait, because I have friends who literally just got out the military and they’re just now starting their LinkedIn page.

Tiana S. Clark: I’m like, “You should’ve worked on this a little bit earlier.” So just think about that. I think, Theresa, you just mentioned something about self advocacy, so I do want to talk about mobility in the military versus in the civilian world. For me, when I speak to large groups, often I talk about upward mobility in the military being a lot more objective. It was like you had a list of things you needed to do, so you’re just like, “Okay, check, check, check, check. Boom, I’m done. Give me my stripe.” But in the civilian world it’s very subjective. You have to figure out how to navigate this thing you absolutely have to advocate for yourself.

Tiana S. Clark: So would any of you, and maybe, Theresa, you can start since you brought it up, but I’d love to hear your experiences there.

Theresa Piasta: Yeah. When I was in banking, it was clear that as I mentored more junior employees that they thought it was a structure. “Oh, I’ll meet this and then I’ll get promoted. I’ll have this happen.” Those who didn’t advocate for themselves, their bosses may have thought that they were fine and instead, if they only could promote one person or two people a year, what happens, they have to put a lot of their energy or their one vote to somebody else who really was advocating for themselves. Whether or not that happens with that case every way, I just saw it enough that, talk to people, get over coffee chat. If you really like your current job but you’re thinking about that next stop and trying to get that promotion, et cetera, focusing on mobility and moving upward in your career, building a board of advisors, personal board of advisors. Or people in your network to help train you through that process. Again, I mentioned diplomacy before. You want to do it in a diplomatic way with your senior leadership while advocating for yourself.

Rachel Jones: All right, so we do want to leave a little time for questions from the audience. Our first question comes from someone who is an engineer with a PhD in Biology. They say they get a lot of comments that they’re confused, so how do you communicate that being a jack of all trades can actually be just as valuable or even more valuable than being an expert at just one skill?

Molly Laufer: I guess I’ll jump in and take that since that was my line that got me into the tech world, and that is I think even when you are a jack of all trades, you have to have really specific concrete examples of the things that you’ve done. Whether that’s the impact that you’ve made, something that you’ve started, a process that you’ve improved, a new skill set that you’ve picked up. So that’s,, I think the first thing, is that even when you’re considered that jack of all, being able to have really specific examples.

Molly Laufer: Then the second thing that I would say is it has to be directed towards the right opportunity. That’s where my mismatch really was at the beginning, was that I was trying to find an opportunity as this jack of all trades in an environment where something specific was needed. So my recommendation would be to seek out somewhere where the sort of expert is not needed in that regard and they really are looking for someone who can come in, own multiple things, own different challenges, pick up different projects.

Molly Laufer: Then it becomes a better match for that skillset. When there isn’t that match there of what it is that you’ve done and what it is that they’re looking for, no matter if you’re an engineer, if you were in the military, if your background is in literature, you were an editor, when there’s that mismatch there, it’s just never going to work. So you have to kind of find the right environment to pitch the value of being a jack of all trades.

Rachel Jones: Great. Our next question, what’s one skill that you wish you had had before beginning your transition?

Mellisa Walker: I can answer this one. I kind of already answered it in the Q&A, so if someone else wants to jump in and kind of give their point of view, please go ahead. But you know, what I put is really leveraging my military experience as a positive thing and what I bring to the table. Coming in here, like I said, when I was 27, I didn’t know what was going on.

Mellisa Walker: I immediately put myself behind the other people on my team just because I didn’t deserve to be on the forefront. I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t have any experience in the tech world, and I kept bringing myself down for no reason at all. It took me a year or two in this role to really find my confidence and look back and look at this role that I knew nothing about, and now I’m really flourishing in because I’m able to learn on the job and get things done.

Mellisa Walker: So that’s,, I guess what I would say as my skill, is kind of just to make sure that we are giving ourselves enough credit, because we can get stuff done.

Rachel Jones: Does anyone else have an answer for this one? Okay, we can move on. So our next question … Oh sorry, Theresa, were you about to say something?

Theresa Piasta: Oh, whenever somebody wants to learn anything, like with Adobe products or just teaching yourself new skills if you’re looking at that transition. As a startup founder, Adobe products have been so incredibly helpful to me. On the other side too, if you can learn how to code, those skills are incredibly valuable at startups or somewhere else in the tech industry. So taking up those extra classes, et cetera, what you’re learning today, those technical skills are very valued here.

Rachel Jones: Great. Did you expect your military service to be a stepping stone into your civilian careers, and if so were you surprised when you got out and didn’t see a clear path immediately?

Mellisa Walker: Well, I personally did not want my military experience to be my job. I was in supply aviation, which is a glorified warehouse. So I could be in supply logistics, I could do that right now and have a very easy transition. I could be picked up by those people, and I had all the requirements, but I didn’t want to do that. So I pretty much threw everything else that I learned in the military out the window. I was like, “I have to start fresh. I’m going to go to school, get my marketing degree, and I’m going to go into the fashion corporate world and kind of do my own thing.”

Mellisa Walker: So going back on really leveraging what I learned in the military, and I was able to have this really awesome opportunity here at Workday at the CAP program, and that’s based completely off of my military experience, it kind of just brought me back to doing that.

Theresa Piasta: If there are any [crosstalk 00:44:07] I highly recommend just looking at those who have veteran background, as everyone here has been talking about, that the transition of being able to think quickly on your feet and making impact and being that activator and making change, and doing things in harsh environments, veterans can bring a lot to the table. So if you see veteran applications coming your way, consider all those skills that they can bring to the team too, and that they can learn up really quickly.

Tiana S. Clark: Yeah, absolutely. One thing that I also just wanted to mention, at Microsoft we do have a program that you all might find interesting. You can look this up on Bing, not Google. It’s called The Microsoft Software and Systems Academy. It’s an 18 week program that provides training in, I think it’s three different areas. Cloud, application development, cyber security, and then server and cloud administration. So just something to think about. You can go look that up and find a program near you.

Rachel Jones: Great. Well thank you so much, ladies. And thank you for your service. I also want to say a quick thank you to Charles Way Stewart from Workday for providing the inspiration for this panel and helping us put it together. Yeah, so that is the end of this panel. Yeah, stick around for a quick wrap up from the Girl Geek X team.