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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.

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AI Overlords, Battling Covid-19 and Algorithmic Bias: a conversation about the importance of Human Goodness in AI.

Julie Shin Choi, VP & GM of AI Marketing at Intel AI, at Girl Geek X, Elevate 2020

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 takeaways from a talk by Julie Shin Choi, VP & GM of Artificial Intelligence Products & Research Marketing at Intel AI. Prior to joining Intel, Julie led product marketing at HPE, Mozilla, and Yahoo. In addition to the YouTube video replay, a full transcript from Julie’s talk is also available.

One of the reasons that Julie Shin Choi chose to join Intel, she told us, was the opportunity and the scale that Intel’s AI technology platform would provide from a career perspective, but she never anticipating falling in love with the people of Intel.

“It is really this human goodness at Intel that keeps me here.”

One of the things that we’ve learned in recent years is that AI is a powerful agent for helping people around the world. Intel CEO Bob Swan shared an example from the Red Cross earlier this year at CES. As we all know, the Red Cross is an amazing relief organization dedicated to helping people in times of disaster.

Julie explains that Intel, the Red Cross, Mila (an AI think tank in Montreal), and other organizations recently formed a data science partnership alliance — their objective was to map unmapped parts of Uganda and to identify, through deep learning, different bridges that the Red Cross could take to deliver aid in times of disaster.

In addition to viral outbreaks (a case of Ebola emerged last June), Uganda is also prone to severe flooding.

“Bridges are often washed out or impassable,” said Red Cross CEO Dale Kunce. That “can mean that your 20-minute drive all of a sudden becomes several hours.”

Ultimately, Intel and their data partners were able to examine huge satellite images and come up with algorithms that could automatically identify bridges that could be utilized by disaster relief workers — they labelled and identified over 70 previously unmapped bridges in southern Uganda.

This is just one example of why human goodness matters when we think about AI application development. There are endless applications, some of which are especially current and relevant right now.

AI is playing a huge role in fighting the spread of Covid-19.

Everyone has heard about and is taking precautions against the global Covid-19 pandemic, but are we talking about the important role AI is playing in fighting the spread of this deadly virus?

“Globally,” Julie informs us, “We’re using big data — we’re analyzing different databases of where people have gone and the different symptoms that they may present.”

State, federal and local governments are turning to big data to make policy decisions and measure the impact and effectiveness of their policies in near real-time.

“One novel use case that we [at Intel AI] identified in Singapore is of a company that’s using IoT [Internet of Things] technology to help scan people and identify thermal readings — so basically fevers — without human contact.

Intel AI’s technology is powering thermal screening that’s helping keep people safe by catching more Covid-19 cases earlier, and with less manual input from healthcare professionals.

This AI-aided screening method is proving to be about three to four times more efficient, so they can scan 7 to 10 people with this AI device, as compared to using human healthcare practitioners. They’re able to free up limited resources and keep more healthcare workers on the front lines where they’re most needed right now.”

The utilization of AI is really helping manage a lot of the issues related to coronavirus in Singapore.

We’re seeing other innovations like this cropping up all around the world as technologists team up with big data partners, healthcare providers and policy makers to help track and slow the spread of Covid-19.

AI is new to us, so folks sometimes fear the capabilities… but our kids understand it. And they’re the ones who will be programming them.

“I have two children, 8 and 12. A couple of months ago, we were talking about the world, and the one in junior high, he said, ‘Well, I think that my generation is going to be spending most of its time solving the problems that your generation created.'”

Julie continued, “And then my little one, who’s still in elementary, chimed in right away, and he said, ‘With the help of our AI overlords, right?’

These kids already, they’re so aware, and I think the advice to our children would be to really read books, play with one another, learn how to have friends from many different backgrounds, become the best humans they can be, because it’s not going to be robot overlords. We’re going to need good humans to program those AIs.“

Good humans are the key.

“In AI, good humans are needed because it’s such a powerful technology and it’s such an accelerant that really depends on algorithms at the heart, and these algorithms are coded based on assumptions that we make about data.

AI starts with data but ends with humans. It’s technology that’s being built for humans. I think it’s very important that we partner with people who really understand the human problems that we’re trying to solve. We need to partner with domain experts.”

AI is going to take a diversity of talents and tools.

There’s really no one size fits all, Julie explains: “We’re going to need CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, these are all different kinds of hardware. Tiny edge processors. We’re going to need a host of different software tools. We’re going to need data scientists and social scientists, psychologists and physicists, marketers and coders to all work together to come up with solutions that are creative. It’s really going to take a village. Be open-minded.”

“And let us always be thoughtful,” she added.

“I know that in Silicon Valley, people often say it’s important to go fast and to fail fast, but in AI, I don’t think so. I think we need to take time. We should be thoughtful and really, really careful and considerate about the assumptions we make as we create the tools that create the algorithms that feed the AIs.”

Good humans will be needed every step of the way.

A lot of people worry that AI is going to take our jobs and replace humans.

Julie Shin Choi, Vice President & General Manager, AI Marketing at Intel AI

“I’m a firm believer that AI will not be replacing humans, it will be augmenting humans. So it’s helping us, not replacing us.

For example, radiology is a major transformation area that’s being transformed by AI faster than most because of the applicability of computer vision for x-ray imaging. “But what we’re seeing is that physicians actually are welcoming the help of AI. It’s a great double check.

When you have a 97% accurate algorithm that’s going to ensure that your patient gets the right diagnosis — even though the algorithm is sometimes even more accurate than you, especially if you’re tired — it’s an absolutely phenomenal double check. The end goal for the human in that case, in medicine, is to go and help that patient with the most accurate information that the human doctor has.

What we’re seeing is that AI is helpful to humanity. It’s truly an augmenting type of technology and not a replacement.”

We talk a lot about the impact of bias in AI and how to limit it.

“Bias is certainly a problem and it’s something that we, as a community of technologists, policy makers and social scientists — all different backgrounds — we need to attack this together.

A lot of it just comes down to being intentional. There are audits of algorithms. There are ethics checklists, actually. There are best practices that have been set up, and I can actually introduce [the Girl Geek X community] to Intel’s AI for Good leader, Anna Bethke, who is an expert in this domain and a wealth of knowledge.

We need to address bias with intentional and very purposeful conversations, because again, the algorithms are based on assumptions that humans code. So the only way that we can eradicate and deal with the bias issue is by talking to one another. The right experts in the room ensuring and asking, ‘have we checked that bias off the list?’

Don’t just assume that coders know how to create a fair algorithm. I don’t think we can assume that. This is a very intentional action that we need to build into our AI development life cycles. The bias check.”

For more from Julie Shin Choi, watch the full video on YouTube, read the transcript of Julie’s talk during Girl Geek X Elevate, or follow her on Twitter.

To be notified of future Girl Geek X events and receive our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the Girl Geek X mailing list.

Interested in partnering with Girl Geek X to feature your female leaders or promote your current job openings to our community of 20,000+ mid-to-senior level women in technology? Email sponsors@girlgeek.io

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“Intel AI Coffee Break: Making Connections at Work”: Banu Nagasundaram with Intel AI (Video + Transcript)

Transcript of Elevate 2020 Session

Angie Chang: We are back. In this Intel AI coffee Break, we will hear from Banu about optimizing connections to win at work. Take it away.

Banu Nagasundaram: Hey everybody, thank you for having me here and I’m very excited to be sharing what I have. Today, I just wanted to share with you a little bit of who I am, my background, and how do I use connections in order to provide value, and add value to those in my network. So, with that a little bit about me. So I started off in 2006 in STMicroelectronics, and moved through different semiconductor companies.

Banu Nagasundaram: So, I’ve always been a semiconductor girl moving through these different roles that I have had in manufacturing, in design, in engineering roles. And from within Intel, in the last four years, I transitioned from an engineering to a product marketing role, and I’ll go through a little bit more of that, as well. So currently I work in the Intel AI group, where we focus on multiple technologies across the company, be it like evangelizing our products, hardware, software, having the ecosystem work with us, and then also focus on the software products for AI, where we are putting our customer needs first, and building the industry standard open platforms.

Banu Nagasundaram: And then of course, the hardware where we have a focus on AI products from the edge, which is user touch devices, hardware for those, up to the data centers, either in the enterprise or in the cloud segment. So this is the landscape, within which I fit in. So, to give you some background about my role in this landscape, I work, like I mentioned, in a product marketing role, and the best way that I have realized to explain my role to people, is that I’m like a Netflix within the organization. On one side, where you have content generators, and content producers, and Netflix connects them to consumers. In the same way I connect with engineers, and product managers on one end, who are closer to the hardware and software products we build.

Banu Nagasundaram: I learn from them, I work with them in order to aggregate content. I create content myself and then evangelize it on the other end, to the customers across different segments, and different modes and channels to reach those customers, evangelize our products, our use case to our ecosystem of software developers. And then I also work closely with the sales team, where I translate the value prop of our products to sales in our organization.

Banu Nagasundaram: In this background and landscape, one of the things that I’ve taken upon myself is that I’m also a student at Berkeley Haas. I’m currently doing my MBA program. And on a typical day, this is how I look, trying to juggle the school, work, and life. And I know many of you may relate to this graphic here, but this is me trying to balance the different opportunities, and the different learnings that I have across the board. And as I go through this, one of the things that I’ve realized that has helped me be successful in building this balance, has been the power of the connections.

Banu Nagasundaram: And the best way to explain that, I felt was through a Candy Crush analogy. So most of you know this game, it’s on the phone where you connect candies of the same color, so that you get points. So this is how I interpret my role, is I help make connections between people across the board, that is relevant. They may have needs which are mapped to, maybe the colors on the board at a given point. And when I make these connections or try to bring people together, then there are associated network effects that happen on the side because of the connection that I enabled. One thing that is different from that of a Candy Crush environment to what happens in real life at work is that I’ve had to build this board for myself.

Banu Nagasundaram: Who are these people who I can rely on, who I know have… And what are the qualities that they have to offer, and connecting whom with whom makes most sense, is something I have had to figure out throughout my career in terms of building that board, and making those connections. One of the examples when I’m asked is, how to think out of the box in order to make connections. Let’s say you are looking for your next role or an opportunity, and you come across an executive VP in that process, who says they’re hiring for a VP. Hey, maybe you can connect your current manager to that executive VP to make that network happen. Even if there is nothing in it for you, but you are acting as an agent in order making that connections that makes you a better networker.

Banu Nagasundaram: And that is what has helped me throughout my career to achieve the best out of the network that I’ve built. But through this, it’s not been of course, a smooth ride. All of us face challenges every day in terms of pushing forward or trying to get to the solution or facing failures and trying to bounce back from it. That portion is what I define as resilience. They are able to push the ceiling and take control of the situation, and then find the solution in that situation, and bounce back. That has been the resilience part. But what I’ve learned through my years of working in large corporations has been that resilience is one part of it. But when you are faced with opportunities that try and test you, what are the opportunities you can find to grow in those is key.

Banu Nagasundaram: So what I mean by that is, as an example, in 2015-2016 time frame, the organization that I was in went through a lot of changes in terms of organizational movement. I used that as an opportunity to explore, how I can switch from an engineering role to a marketing role. What are the skills that are needed? I took public speaking classes, I did a technical course in AI, and I built my profile and used that tumultuous situation as an opportunity to grow. 

Banu Nagasundaram: That is how the analogy of starfish plays into the picture, where you are finding that opportunity or the challenge that is posed to you as a way to regenerate and move forward. So, that is most of what I had to share today. And in this process, a lot of people have been super supportive in helping me grow, and as I make these connections, there’s more people who offered to help, and you just build that network in a Candy Crush environment and think of yourself as the starfish and you’re able to grow.

Banu Nagasundaram: And that’s been my experience. So with that, I’m open to answering any questions you may have and you may also reach out to me on LinkedIn. Feel free to ping me, and we can connect through that. And quickly, for the lift as you climb theme, I also have my VP who has helped me climb and who has lifted me through this process and she’s talking later today, Julie Choi, and I’m excited to hear from her.

Angie Chang: Awesome. Wonderful. We are out of time. In fact, we’re running a little over into Julie’s time. So, I just wanted to say thank you so much to Intel AI for being a sponsor of Girl Geek X Elevate and to check out their job opportunities at girlgeek.io/opportunities. And now we will be going to our next speaker. So thank you so much, Banu-

Banu Nagasundaram: Thank you.

Angie Chang: … For your talk and we’ll be back soon. Thank you.

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“In AI, Human Goodness Matters”: Julie Shin Choi with Intel AI (Video + Transcript)

Transcript of Elevate 2020 Session

Rachel Jones: Doing our afternoon keynote is Julie Shin Choi. Julie is the Vice President and General Manager of artificial intelligence products and research marketing at Intel Corporation. Prior to Intel, she led product marketing at HP, Mozilla, and Yahoo. So we are so excited to have Julie’s expertise this afternoon. She will be talking about how, in AI, human goodness matters. So welcome Julie.

Julie Shin Choi: Thanks so much. So let me just… I do have some slides. All right everyone. It is really good to be here with you today. Thank you so much for the intro. I am so glad to be here. It is Women’s History Month and in two days we’ll be celebrating International Women’s Day and what better way than to be together here at Girl Geek X Elevate Virtual Conference. Thank you so much to the Girl Geek X team and everyone behind the scenes for giving us this platform and this opportunity to connect. So let me share a little bit about myself. I am a VP at Intel, responsible for AI marketing, but really it’s been a long journey to get to this point. I absolutely love the job that I’m in and I thought it would be good to just share a little bit about that journey.

Julie Shin Choi: It’s been a 20 year career in tech, so far, mostly in Silicon Valley. I started my career in Boston and moved to the Valley in 2003, I think, so I’ve been here for about 17 years. When I thought about how my career has unfolded, I created this two by two, basically dividing the way I’ve been focusing my energy over the past 21 years. And as you can see, it’s an interesting graph that shows roughly 50% of the energy has been around life and 50% has been around career, and there’s different peaks and dips in how much I spend on each of these portions. But what’s been fascinating is that life and career converge in the same space time continuum, and it’s been an incredible journey. What I’ve learned about career and life is that it really is a series of choices that lead to opportunities and that these opportunities ultimately have led me to personal and career learning and growth.

Julie Shin Choi: So a very important choice that I made in 2016 was to join Intel, and joining Intel really did… It was a rocket ship moment for me. By that point, I joined Intel, I was a director at HPE prior to Intel. That was an amazing time as well. In between HPE and Intel, I met a startup called Nirvana and the CEO and the founding team of that startup and they got acquired into Intel and asked me to help do this AI thing at Intel. I did not know much about Intel other than it was the giant of computer processors and a hardware company and it was just too much of an opportunity to pass up. And so that choice was really profound because it led me to begin the AI journey with Intel. And we’ve come such a long way in the past nearly four years and we have evolved to really understand our place in the AI universe.

Julie Shin Choi: This is just a small slide. I want to thank Banu for the excellent talk she just gave. I had a chance to listen in and I’m just going to say a little bit because she did such a great explanation, but Intel AI, you can think of it as all the parts that you would need as a technologist, from hardware to enabling software to the memory, storage, and fabric. So many components go into building AI, and Intel is massively passionate and committed to building those components so that we can power this AI evolution and transformation across virtually every industry. But one of the reasons that I chose Intel was the opportunity and the scale that this technology platform would provide from a career perspective, but I did not anticipate that I would also fall in love with the people of Intel.

Julie Shin Choi: It is really this human goodness at Intel that keeps me here. At Intel we are really building technology to enrich the lives of every person on earth, that’s what Bob says, and I really believe that and I think it’s for the team that I remain, and it’s an incredible team. So let’s talk about some of the work that the team is doing. The title of this talk was “AI and the Importance of Human Goodness,” and one of the things that we’ve learned over the past three years is that AI is a powerful agent for helping people around the world, and this example comes to us from the Red Cross. We shared this example earlier this year at CES. Bob actually talked about it and there’s a video and I will tweet the video out after this talk, but basically this partnership is between Red Cross. Everyone knows Red Cross, it’s just an amazing relief organization dedicated to helping people in times of disaster.

Julie Shin Choi: And this partnership between Intel and Red Cross, as well as Mila, which is an AI think tank in Montreal, and other organizations, basically it was a data science partnership alliance, and the end result and objective was to map unmapped parts of Uganda and to identify, through deep learning, different bridges that relief agency Red Cross could take in times of disaster. At the end of the day, we were able to examine huge satellite images and come up with algorithms that could automatically identify the bridges, over 70 bridges in Uganda. So this is our first example of why human goodness matters when we think about AI application development. The second example is a little bit more current and relevant. I’m sure everyone has heard about and is taking precaution against the coronavirus epidemic that’s going on globally. And basically, what’s important is to use AI right now. Globally, we’re using big data, we’re analyzing different databases of where people have gone and the different symptoms that they may present.

Julie Shin Choi: But one novel use case that we identified in Singapore is of a company that’s using IoT technology to help scan people and identify thermal readings, so basically fevers, without human contact. And this is proving to be about three to four times more efficient, so we can scan 7 to 10 people with this AI device, as compared to using human healthcare practitioners. So in this way AI is really helping manage a lot of the issues related to coronavirus in Singapore. And we see other innovations like this cropping up all around the world. Another example of the intersection of AI and human goodness can be found in a collaboration between a company named Hoobox and Intel. Hoobox is a really fascinating company based in Latin America with North American operations as well, and they are dedicated to robotics for helping people with mobility issues and other novel uses of computer vision to aid humans, and this use case is a fascinating one where we collaborated with Hoobox. Intel provided the hardware, so you can see a camera here, it’s a RealSense camera, as well as a micro controller, so Intel NUC, and the Intel camera and the microcontroller were used to help detect up to 11 facial expressions.

Julie Shin Choi: So now the wheelchair user can operate and move using his own facial expressions. This is a whole new range of mobility that was unlocked because of AI. Such a powerful and memorable use case, and it’s just another example of the intersection of AI and human goodness. One more example from the field of healthcare, and I’m really passionate about healthcare and the AI applications that we’re seeing. This application that we see here is found… Again, it’s a collaboration between Intel and GE Healthcare, and in this case, what we see are deep learning algorithms that are inferenced at the edge in this powerful x-ray scanning machine. And the purpose here is to use AI and deep learning to identify cases of pneumothorax, or lung collapse, in record time. And the objective here is to augment physicians and to help prioritize cases so that doctors can get to people who are at higher risk faster than before. And this is really also helpful for parts of the world where doctors are scarce. So places like Asia and Africa, where the percentage of doctors is so low, and this type of AI can really help physicians get to patients much more quickly.

Julie Shin Choi: And one last example I want to bring up is the power and role that AI can have an accelerating diversity and inclusion. Last week, I had the privilege to go to North Carolina and attend an inclusion leadership summit that was organized by Lenovo and Intel’s chief diversity officers. And as we met, we brainstormed ways that AI could be used to eradicate bias in hiring practices, to accelerate ensuring that we have diverse and qualified candidates joining us and our organizations. We had a host of different chief diversity and inclusion officers in the room, as well as experts from law and policy and just AI research. So again, proving that when we bring disciplines together, we can really learn from one another to accelerate the kind of change that we all want to see at our companies.

Julie Shin Choi: So I want to kind of close with a summary slide on key takeaways and then we can have a conversation. In AI, good humans are needed because it’s such a powerful technology and it’s such an accelerant that really depends on algorithms at the heart, and these algorithms are coded based on assumptions that we make about data. So number one, we have to keep in mind, AI starts with data but ends with humans. It’s technology that’s being built for humans. So let us keep the end in mind as we design our AI products and solutions and keep the humans in the loop. Number two, I think it’s very important that we partner with people who really understand the human problems that we’re trying to solve. The Red Cross example, it couldn’t have been possible without the wealth of information that the Red Cross had, and it was truly a cross disciplinary effort. So we need to partner with domain experts.

Julie Shin Choi: Number three, be open-minded. AI is going to take a diversity of talents and tools. There’s really no one size fits all. We’re going to need CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, these are all different kinds of hardware. Tiny edge processors. We’re going to need a host of different software tools. We’re going to need data scientists and social scientists, psychologists and physicists, marketers and coders to all work together to come up with solutions that are creative. It’s really going to take a village. And finally, let us be thoughtful. I know that in Silicon Valley people often say it’s important to go fast and to fail fast, but in AI, I don’t think so. I think we need to take time. We should be thoughtful and really, really careful and considerate about the assumptions we make as we create the tools that create the algorithms that feed the AIs. And certainly good humans will be needed every step of the way. So that is my last slide and I’m going to just now thank you all for listening and open up for questions.

Rachel Jones: Thank you so much, Julie. That was really fascinating. So yeah, everyone please send your questions. I’ve seen some people sending questions into the chat, but please make sure you’re putting them into the actual Q&A, that way people can upvote your questions and make sure that they get asked. So now our first question, is there any industry that you see where AI isn’t being used and what can humans do to bring AI into that industry?

Julie Shin Choi: Yeah, I mean that’s a great question. And honestly, we are seeing AI impacting virtually every industry that our customers are engaged in, from healthcare, to life sciences, to transportation, to retail, to finance, robotics, manufacturing. So most of those classic enterprise verticals are being transformed, are going through their AI transformations. What I will say is it’s still early days, even though it’s been about… I mean, I’ve been working in this space for five years. I always kind of mark that beginning… When you talk to researchers, they’ll say the beginning of AI really was deep learning, which really was 2012, but I kind of count from 2015, because that’s when Google really came out loud and proud as a machine learning company. So virtually every industry is being impacted by AI. Still early days. We’re about five years in and it’ll probably take the rest of, certainly my lifetime, the most of our lifetime, to kind of get to the maturity level that this technology is capable of.

Rachel Jones: Wow. So our next question, a concern that a lot of people have when they hear about AI is, “Oh, this is going to take all of our jobs and replace all the humans.” So what are your thoughts on that kind of anxiety?

Julie Shin Choi: I mean it’s very popular to say that, but I’m a firm believer that AI will not be replacing humans, it will be augmenting humans. So it’s helping us, not replacing us, because the whole… What we’re seeing, even in radiology, for example, radiology is a major transformation area that’s being transformed by AI faster than most because of the applicability of computer vision for x-ray imaging. But what we’re seeing is that physicians actually are welcoming the help of AI. It’s a great double check. When you have a 97% accurate algorithm that’s going to ensure that your patient gets the right diagnosis, even though the algorithm is sometimes even more accurate than you, especially if you’re tired, it’s an absolutely phenomenal double check, and so the end goal for the human in that case, in medicine, is to go and help that patient with the most accurate information that the human doctor has. So what we’re seeing is AI is truly helpful. It’s truly an augmenting type of technology and not a replacement.

Rachel Jones: All right. We just got another question. So this person says, “My daughter is still young, and if you had to mentor her so she’s prepared for the new AI world, what would you tell her?”

Julie Shin Choi: Yeah, that’s a great question. I have two children as well. I have 8 and 12. It’s funny, I will share an anecdote from dinner. A couple of months ago we were talking about the world and I have a junior high and an elementary, and the junior high, he said, “Well, I think that my generation is going to be spending most of its time solving the problems that your generation created.” And then my little one, who’s still elementary, chimed in right away, and he said, “With the help of our AI overlords, right?” These kids already, they’re so aware, and I think the advice to our children would be to really read books, play with one another, learn how to have friends from many different backgrounds, become the best humans they can be, because it’s not going to be robot overlords. We’re going to need good humans to program those AIs.

Rachel Jones: What’s the best way to learn AI?

Julie Shin Choi: Okay, so you guys probably have heard of Dr Andrew Ng and Coursera. Everything from on demand digital learning courses like the ones that Dr Andrew Ng pioneered, to tutorials on Intel’s AI website. There is so much knowledge out there right now around machine learning and deep learning that’s friendly for all levels and certainly Intel, we’re very committed to investing in preparing that kind of content and training. But I would encourage folks to check out all of those resources. We have certifications on our Intel developer community resources and we can connect you to those types of classes that take you step by step. Another partner organization that we like to work with on content delivery is O’Reilly Media. They have great courses online. A lot of these resources are free. I would say similar to the mobile revolution, when iOS and Android, all of those tutorials were popping up and hackathons every other day, we’re kind of seeing the same type of resources becoming available for AI and AI developers.

Rachel Jones: How pervasive is AI in the transportation industry?

Julie Shin Choi: Yeah, transportation is another really fascinating domain. Autonomous vehicles are a huge vertical being invested in. A lot of startup investment, a lot of institutional effort as well, so your established car companies and even airplane companies and shipping companies. We have a great use case from Rolls Royce that we’ve shared in the past. I didn’t realize that Rolls Royce also did transatlantic oceanic transportation autonomously, but they do, and it’s running on Intel. So transportation is going through a renaissance. It’s amazing. I think that actually–my husband works for an autonomous transportation startup, but again, early days. I always tell him, “You take that self-driving ride. For me, I think I’ll wait a little bit longer.” It’s still early days. A lot of innovation, a lot of promise and, yes, transportation is getting transformed.

Rachel Jones: So a big part of the AI conversation is about bias and how it can affect it. So what are your thoughts on that and how to limit bias in AI?

Julie Shin Choi: Yes, and bias is certainly a problem and it’s something that we, as a community of technologists and policymakers and social scientists, all different backgrounds, we need to attack this together. This was something that we discussed at the diversity and inclusion conference last week. A lot of it just comes down to let’s… There’s audits of algorithms. There’s ethics checklists, actually.

Julie Shin Choi: There are best practices that have been set up and I can actually introduce this community to our AI for Good leader, Anna Bethke, who is an expert in this domain and a wealth of knowledge. But we need to address bias with intentional and very purposeful conversations, because again, the algorithms are based on assumptions that humans code. So the only way that we can eradicate and deal with the bias issue is by talking to one another. The right experts in the room ensuring that have we checked that bias off the list? Don’t just assume that the coders know how to create a fair algorithm. I don’t think we can assume that. This is a very intentional action that we need to build into our AI development life cycles. The bias check.

Rachel Jones: All right. This is where we’re going to wrap it up. But Julie, thank you so much again. This was really great.

Julie Shin Choi: Okay. Thank you guys so much. Have a great day. Happy International Women’s Day.

Rachel Jones: Thank you. Happy International Women’s Day.