Girl Geek X + Indeed Lightning Talks and Panel (Video + Transcript)

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Angie Chang, Allison Dingler

Girl Geek X founder Angie Chang and Indeed Global Diversity & Inclusion Program Manager Allison Dingler from Austin, Texas kick off an Indeed Girl Geek Dinner in San Francisco, California.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

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

Angie Chang: Hello, and thank you all for coming out to Indeed Girl Geek dinner tonight. My name is Angie Chang and I’m the founder of Girl Geek X. We’ve been doing these Girl Geek Dinners at companies in the San Francisco Bay area now for a very long time, but I’m really glad that you’re here tonight for Indeed’s second Girl Geek Dinner.

Angie Chang: I’m really excited for all the talks that we’re going to hear tonight and please enjoy yourselves and meet someone new. At least one or two, maybe even three new people, get their LinkedIn, exchange LinkedIn information and maybe grab coffee later, ask about jobs, ask about jobs here. There’s always opportunities to level up and that’s why we keep doing this is because we like learning and hearing from other women in tech and other industries about things they learned on the way, and also what are the cool things they’re doing.

Angie Chang: So, please feel free to network afterwards. We also have things like a Girl Geek Podcast, in case you would like to find us on iTunes and all of the different podcasting services, we have a podcast. We also have a conference coming up. It’s a virtual conference we do every year for International Women’s Day. That’s going to be in March, so stay tuned. But I want to turn the microphone over to Alison, but say thank you so much for hosting us, Indeed.

Allison Dingler: Thank you. Thanks, Angie. All right, awesome. Thanks so much, everybody, for coming. This room is so packed, I love it. Yes, everybody excited? Yes. Ooh, energy. I’m about it. I’ve had a lot of caffeine today. I’m going to kick it off and start with our first tech talk of the evening.

Lindsay Brothers

Product Manager Lindsay Brothers gives a talk on “A/B Testing Pitfalls and Lessons Learned” at Indeed Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Lindsay Brothers: Hello. Beautiful. Hi, how are you doing? Good. It’s Tuesday. Okay, so I’m going to be talking about “A/B Testing Pitfalls and Lessons Learned”. Experimentation. It’s how we learn about the world around us. It’s something we started doing very early on as humans. It’s something we start as babies. How do we learn as babies? Well, we run the original A/B test, which is stick things into our mouths. And we learn, maybe we have a question, a hypothesis, is this edible? I can eat this.

Lindsay Brothers: Unfortunately, sometimes not so successful. It turns out to be dirt, and that test was not a success. Some tests fail. And other times when babies run this experiment, this A/B test, congratulations they’re tacos. Yay, it was a successful test. And we get to celebrate, we’ve learned something new and we ate tacos.

Lindsay Brothers: I’m Lindsay Brothers, I’m a product manager at Indeed. You can follow me on Twitter @LindsayBro. You may know Indeed, number one job search site worldwide. Who here has heard of Indeed? Everyone raise your hands. And who’s gotten a job through Indeed. Yes. That’s awesome. I love it. Yeah.

Lindsay Brothers: Okay, a little bit about Indeed so you have context for this talk. We help people get jobs. This is our mission. This is something we cared deeply about. And some context about just how big we are. We have 250 million unique visitors, 150 million resumes, 600 million salaries, and 25 million jobs. So, a lot of job seekers looking at a lot of jobs, millions of job seekers, millions of jobs.

Lindsay Brothers: We’re a very data driven company. We want to learn about job seekers and how do we do this? Well, A/B testing. What is A/B testing? A/B testing is a randomized experiment in which a new variant is tested against a control A to measure how they perform relative to each other. I just realized I don’t have a timer. Cool. So at any given time, we’re running hundreds of A/B tests to learn about job seekers, which leads to thousands of experiences. We’re running hundreds of A/B tests, which leads to thousands of experiences at any time.

Lindsay Brothers: Which means the person sitting next to you likely sees a very different Indeed than you do. This leads to many different lessons learned. We’re constantly running A/B tests and we’re constantly learning. Now this test, this talk is really about things that have gone not so well, pitfalls. We run a lot of A/B tests and we’ve made some very expensive, painful mistakes that I want to share with you.

Lindsay Brothers: The first pitfall, your metrics don’t matter. Second pitfall, big test, big failure. Pitfall three, most tests fail. And pitfall four, where does vision fit in? As we go through these pitfalls, I’ll share lessons learned. Let’s dive into the first pitfall.

Lindsay Brothers: Your metrics don’t matter. Or in this case my metrics didn’t matter and no one cared. This is a job alert, and you’ll hear more about Job Alerts in the next talk, as well. But this is the most common email we send out. It’s new jobs based on a query that a user has run. In this case, it’s a email developer jobs in San Francisco. Done a search on Indeed, signed up for this Job Alert, and they’re getting new jobs in their inbox, so they can apply to them as soon as they’re posted.

Lindsay Brothers: I was on this team as a product manager on this team and I was highly motivated to get more subscriptions, to get more people to sign up for these Job Alerts. This is an Indeed apply form. If a job is posted on Indeed, you go to apply for that job, you’ll see this form and you’ll apply directly on Indeed. What I wanted to test was adding a simple checkbox. Notify me when similar jobs are available. A job seeker will just check this check box, and the next day begin to receive new jobs in their email inbox. Pretty simple, right?

Lindsay Brothers: A versus B, no checkbox, that’s standard form, versus the test group with that checkbox. Now, it looks simple. It’s just a small change. But this test had a tremendous amount of data. Sure, it’s just one variable in a single test group, but look at all the things that are on this form. You can be logged in, you can be logged out, you can use your Indeed resume, you can attach your resume, you can attach a cover letter, you can add a phone number. So there’s all these different things you could do, just in a single form. So we had a lot of data to analyze.

Lindsay Brothers: And the first metric was really bad. We saw 0.1% decrease in applies. So just adding that single checkbox, less job seekers were going to fill out that form and apply to that job. And this was really scary. Not good. So there’s another team that exists, indeed.com is not just the Job Alerts team. There’s a team called the Indeed Apply team and they own this form, and their metric for success was the completion rate of this form. They wanted job seekers to apply to jobs on Indeed and to finish this form.

Lindsay Brothers: So, 0.1% may not sound like a lot, but we’re talking about millions of job seekers, millions of jobs. That actually can equal hundreds of thousands of applies lost by adding a single checkbox. So this team says to me, “What are you doing? Okay, we’re here to help people get jobs, not email subscriptions.” Yeah, I got some angry emails about that. This was our secondary metric. This was a metric I was keeping an eye on during the analysis of the tests, but it was their primary metric. It was what they cared most about, and they didn’t really care that I was getting more email subscriptions. I was getting a lot. Come on, I can put this on my eval. 50% increase in subscriptions. That looks really good, but they don’t care.

Lindsay Brothers: It felt like a massive win but we were losing applies. So, the question was, are we helping people get jobs or are we just helping them get email subscriptions? So, what is the impact of this test? Now keep in mind, they click that checkbox, they’re getting that job alert, they’re getting that new subscription, and there’s a lot of jobs in here. So, they got to be doing something with those jobs.

Lindsay Brothers: Well, let’s start looking at the standard email engagement metrics. They’re getting this new subscription, how are they engaging with it? Well, okay, they’re less likely to open it. That’s awesome. So, job seekers were checking this check box, maybe less likely to apply and less likely to open this email. And they were less likely to click through by 12%, so open rate was 12% lower, click through rate was 12% lower. Am I tricking people into this email? Is this spam? What am I doing?

Lindsay Brothers: But we had to look further down the funnel and what we found was the apply rate was actually higher. So, job seekers were less likely to open it, they’re less likely to click through, but they were more likely to apply to a job in that email by 0.25%, and this was very, very exciting. This meant that we were actually helping people get jobs. But we had to figure out the total impact. So had to do some math and we had to figure out the total downstream applies, more subscriptions and looking at that higher apply rate, how many additional applies were we getting? Was it making up for those lost applies? And it was, we were getting millions of additional applies from that email subscription. So, it was a success. Yeah, it looked real good on that eval.

Lindsay Brothers: Something to keep in mind is that looking at only short term metrics, that makes [inaudible]. Looking at only short term metrics can mean missing downstream impact. And they really didn’t care about getting additional email subscriptions, which of course they shouldn’t. But we were really aligned on the impact of applies and the power of applies. So, the first lesson I’d like to share is that downstream analysis is a powerful tool, but it does take time. It took time to figure out that we were having a higher apply rate in that email and we were getting those downstream applies. Cool.

Lindsay Brothers: So, second pitfall, big test, big failure. In 2017 this is what indeed.com looked like. And we were due for a facelift. The UX design team really wanted to update this and improve it. This was the vision. This is where we wanted to go. We wanted to modernize Indeed. Again, this is 2017.

Lindsay Brothers: Generally, when you’re doing an A/B test, you have a change and you have a result. You’re changing something on the product, a small variable change, then you see results. Well, okay, now keep in mind this is the entire search results page of Indeed. There’s a lot of things going on, and it was a really, really massive test. We were looking at, we were testing this old version versus this new version, and lots and lots of changes. Okay, lots and lots of changes going on on the site and then more changes we’re starting to see lots of metrics, and then there was lots of results, and more results, and more results and we couldn’t quite figure out what was going on and what changes were causing what metric going up or down. And it got really messy. It looked like that.

Lindsay Brothers: We had changed too many things at once. We wanted to run this massive A/B test where we were updating the old Indeed with this new, beautiful, massive, redesigned, gorgeous. Let’s skip ahead. Let’s go with this big vision. But we had changed too many things at once. And that meant our A/B tests were losing, metrics were going down, but we didn’t know why. And this is really expensive. Now, keep in mind, this is redoing the search on Indeed, that involves a lot of engineering effort.

Lindsay Brothers: We had to go back to the drawing board. 2017, we wanted to test this brand new, beautiful redesign, let’s modernize Indeed. So let’s start out where we started. We had understood when we were doing this test that too many changes at once meant we didn’t really understand what was happening. So we had to start from scratch. We had to really just redo this whole thing. What we had to do was test a single element at a time.

Lindsay Brothers: Now, this is a job card, so you do a search on Indeed, you’re going to see these job cards, which is job title, company location, maybe salary, some additional details. And this is an example of how we could test a single element at a time. You’re like, what’s changing here? It’s the spacing. So this is spacing as a single element. So a single variable in A/B test.

Lindsay Brothers: Another thing we had to do, like I had mentioned, we have this old older design that we wanted to update and originally it was just, let’s test all these elements at once. Something we also had to do was we had to switch to multi-variate tests. And so I say multivariate test, what do I mean? An A/B test in which all possible combinations of variations are tested at the same time.

Lindsay Brothers: Now let’s go back to that job card. We wanted to test a single element at a time. We want to break up all those elements so we can understand their impact. But we also want to A/B… the multivariate testing so we can go through all these different combinations. Now this is a job card. We got job title, company, location. There’s all these different elements to test. Well, let’s dive deep into a single element, which is salary. Let’s look at salary. Salary important. We like to make money at our job.

Lindsay Brothers: This is a single test where we’re just testing the element of salary, but what we’re going to do is a multivariate test to really dive deep into the UI of it. This is control, font size, 13.33 pixels. It’s not bolded and the color is gray. So, one element of the multivariate test is the font size variance, 12 pixels, 13.33, 14, and 16 pixels. Another part of the multivariate test is font weight, regular versus bolded, and finally color: gray, black, orange, and green.

Lindsay Brothers: That’s a lot. So we got four sizes, two weights, four colors. This is 32 groups. And were there spreadsheets? You know there were spreadsheets. I love spreadsheets. So, you’re like, whoa, that’s a lot going on there. Now, if we had not done a multivariate test, if we’ve just done A/B tests, so color as a single A/B test, font weight as a single A/B test, size as single A/B test, it would… like, here’s the control. Okay, that’s control. These would just be the groups.

Lindsay Brothers: So colors, one group, size, one group, you would only have eight different groups. But when you do multivariate testing, you get, you miss 24. So, 32 groups, well that’s a lot. But you get to explore how these elements play against each other. And we would have lost our winners. So if we had only done tests around those single UI elements one at a time, we would have totally missed these. And we would have not picked these. No UX designer would have picked these, because this one looks like Hulk. We call this one Hulk. It’s big. It’s green. It’s bold. No one was going to go with that. But we learned from this and we learned a lot.

Lindsay Brothers: Now, multivariate tests, of course, have some challenges. Well, you need sufficient traffic. I mentioned 32 different groups. Okay, you need enough traffic to learn anything from those groups. Also, significantly more complex analysis. So there’s a really good blog post. Robyn Rap is a data scientist on the Indeed engineering blog. You can look it up. And she actually talks about this specific test, and there’s literally equations in the blog posts about how to analyze it. It’s a lot of math. There’s some really strange combinations that you can get from multivariate tests, like the Hulk. No one was expecting that. We’re like, “All right, what do we do with that?” Okay.

Lindsay Brothers: But it really helps you optimize your UI at a very high velocity, which is really, really cool. We’re learning fast, we’re moving fast. And since August of 2018, we’ve run over 50 tests with over 500 groups, just on that search results page alone, and we’ve learned some really surprising things. Now remember when we started this test, it was old design, new design. All these changes and we couldn’t see what was going on. Metrics going up, metrics going down, not understanding the impact. But we saw really surprising things when we broke it up via by element, and then broke it up into multivariate tests so we could really learn quickly.

Lindsay Brothers: And something we totally missed was that changes were way more impactful on mobile. This data point lost, totally lost in that confusing analysis where everything was going up and down. But we had missed this, so when we broke up the elements, we learned more about the UI changes and their impact.

Lindsay Brothers: So, the lesson here, again, this was a very, very, very expensive mistake to make. We thought we could just skip ahead, come up with the new design. Let’s go there. Oh, we’re so modern. Wrong. Very, very expensive. So when we changed to testing small changes and testing them quickly, we learned a lot more, faster. Which goes directly into the next pitfall, which is most tests fail. And at Indeed, 70% of A/B tests fail. That means there’s not a clear winner. We know we put out this test group, it’s not amazing. It’s not going up. Whatever your metric is, it looks bad.

Lindsay Brothers: It’s really sad. It’s like, what’s the point of this? Why am I here? Why am I running all these tests if they all fail? Why did I make my engineers build this or build this test if it just… It’s just sad. Want to hide under a blanket. There are three different reasons, really, to run A/B tests. We can get faster wins, we can get a better design and we can get a better understanding of the product. So how exactly do we get to these things?

Lindsay Brothers: Well, let’s say we run a test and the test is positive. Your metric goes up. Well, awesome, you have a KPI win. Woo hoo. That’s great when that happens. Or okay, let’s say the test is neutral. It did not change. And this was actually quite common in that test I just discussed, where we were testing all these around elements, all many, many multivariate tests, spreadsheets galore, lots of neutral stuff. That actually means there’s a lot more design flexibility. So if it’s neutral, it means you can play with that element. You can maybe make it a little more prominent or you can do things with it. It’s not a fixed element. It’s more, you can be creative with it. And so that’s actually really exciting.

Lindsay Brothers: And, of course, if something’s negative, what we found is, okay, don’t touch it. Do not touch that element. Like I said, we broke up all these different elements. We’re testing many different variations of these elements, and some things came back consistently negative, and we’re like job seekers like that, we’re not going to do anything with it. And so you’re still winning. Even if a test is neutral, you learn that you can do things with that element. If it’s negative, don’t touch that element. Move on, try something new.

Lindsay Brothers: So, it is successful. Sometimes it’s disappointing when it doesn’t go the way you planned or your hypothesis is totally off, but we do get wins from this. And the lesson here is to change what winning means. So, even when we’re running all these different A/B tests, the metrics aren’t looking great. You’re still learning about your users, are still learning about, for us we’re learning about job seekers and how they interact with Indeed and how they look for jobs.

Lindsay Brothers: So that goes directly into pitfall four, where does vision fit into all of this? We have this big vision. Okay, so let’s go back to that test. This is where we were. So this is again that job card, you do a search on Indeed. You see all these jobs. This was the first iteration after testing. There’s a lot of stuff going on there. And this was the vision. We like to empower design at Indeed. We love to have visions. We love to think about where are we going with things. But when you’re doing a lot of A/B testing and, where does this all fit in? I’m running all these different, I’m testing all these elements. I’m trying to learn. I have these hypotheses. But where does the vision fit into this?

Lindsay Brothers: Well, even failures can inform design vision. Let’s go back to… Now which one is this? Okay, so this is the vision. This is the vision we originally started with, 2017. This is our vision. This is where we wanted to go in 2017. And we started to remember that first big test, not so good. Then we started to break up elements, did multivariate testing, lots of spreadsheets, and we started learning. We got lots of negative and neutral and positive, and we learned things like no blue or underlined needed on the job title. Doesn’t matter if you have that, job seekers are still going to click on the job.

Lindsay Brothers: We can add more spacing. Like I mentioned, spacing was a single A/B test where we’re looking at that element and playing with spacing. We can add more white space. We can do more there. Salary needs to be more prominent. Like I talked about that salary test, we could make it big and green and bold and people love it, they’re clicking through. Do not touch this. If you can apply on Indeed, that Indeed apply little tag, if we changed it, negative. Any change, negative. Do not touch it, keep it there. Font size. We played with font size, of course, the font size was way too small.

Lindsay Brothers: So again, this is where we started after that first iteration, that first iteration of testing, this was our vision, but then we ran all these tests, testing all these different elements, many variations, and we ended up here. Now, you can see salary’s a lot more prominent. There’s more spacing. We don’t need that underline. We played with underline, you don’t need that. So, as we learned about these different elements, tests were negative, tests were positive, tests were a lot were neutral, we were able to take these learnings and put it back into the vision. So we had a vision that more aligned with how job seekers were using our site.

Lindsay Brothers: Sometimes it can feel like a vision is just this beautiful thing you create and it doesn’t always align with how people use your products. And with A/B testing and with learning from many, in fact, failed tests, we were able to take that back and have a vision that aligned with how job seekers use Indeed. So it’s not just a design win, it’s also a business win. We had a lot of KPI wins, many tests not so great, but we did have ones that were delivering KPI wins and we’re able to implement that back into the vision.

Lindsay Brothers: So the lesson here is both, of course, the design vision guides your testing. We had UX designers who were thinking about where Indeed should be, where we could go, and that led us to define some of these tests. But also those A/B tests, as we’re running them, went back into the vision. So, to recap, your metrics don’t matter. Remember we ran this amazing checkbox test and it looked horrible. At first, applies were going down on that page. So, we had to align our metrics, we had to agree on those downstream applies. And downstream impact can take longer. It can take much longer to pan out, but it can prove really valuable.

Lindsay Brothers: Next up, big tests, big failures. That’s when we ran this massive redesign of the Indeed search, and we thought we could just skip ahead from this old design to this new beautiful design. We were wrong. That was big mistake. So, breaking up tests really helps understand impact. So breaking up these tests into different elements, multivariate tests, those multivariate tests really help us understand the different UI elements. And most tests fail. So indeed 70% of tests fail and that meant that we had to redefine winning.

Lindsay Brothers: So, failed test just means there’s lack of flexibility. That element is important to users. They care about it, maybe don’t change it. And a neutral test means that there is flexibility. So, if something’s neutral, maybe we can do more with it, maybe we can play with it. And then finally, where does vision fit in? So, that big redesign test, we had a vision of where we wanted to go. We’d tried testing it all by itself, didn’t work, but we were able to use it to guide those single element tests, the multivariate test, and it helped us define a test plan. But also as we ran those tests, it helped us inform the vision and we adapted our vision to what made more sense for our users and our job seekers.

Lindsay Brothers: So my question for you is, where will your testing failures take you? If you run A/B tests, if you run tests with your users, they will fail and things will go wrong, and you will run tests and will feel like an engineering waste of time. Oh boy. But there’s still learnings to be had, so where will those failures take you? Thank you so much for your time. Please clap. Here’s my information, so feel free to shoot me an email, LindsayB@indeed.com or Twitter, @LindsayBro. If you tweet, I get metrics. Awesome. Thank you so much. So Allie is going to give a little intro.

Allison Dingler: Thanks, Lindsey. Everyone give it up one more time for Lindsay, A/B testing. Yes, I’m here for it. Awesome. Everyone having a good time so far. Getting some good food in your belly, some good drinks, some good friends, yes? Awesome. So I’m going to kick it off. We have our next tech talk that’s about to get started. We have Janie and Rohan here, so I’ll have y’all come on up and get you going. Do you want another microphone?

Janie Clarke: Yeah.

Allison Dingler: Microphone.

Janie Clarke: Thank you.

Rohan Kapoor: [inaudible].

Janie Clarke: Can you get a timer?

Allison Dingler: Timer.

Janie Clarke speaking

Senior Product Manager Janie Clarke gives a talk on “AMP for Email” at Indeed Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Janie Clarke: Hi everyone. My name is Janie Clark and I’m a product manager here at Indeed. I’m here today with Rohan Kapoor who’s a software engineer on my team, and we’re here to talk about our adventures with AMP for Email. Did you click? All right, there’s a little bit of content here that might be repeated from Lindsay’s talk. As you probably just learned, we are very data driven company here. We test a lot of things. And Rohan and I work on Job Alerts, which Lindsay also used to work on.

Janie Clarke: It’s an important product for Indeed. I assure you it’s not the only product, even though we’re talking about a lot tonight. Job Alerts is a big product. We have over 250 million active Job Alerts subscriptions. We send it to over 60 countries in 28 different languages. And we do a lot of A/B testing within this email. At any given time we have dozens of A/B tests running.

Janie Clarke: You’ve also seen this before. This is a Job Alert email. Basically it’s a way for job seekers to get the newest jobs emailed to them. We’re here today to talk about our adventures in AMP. So first, I’ll give a quick background about traditional email development and some of the challenges that we had faced with it, and we were hoping AMP would solve these challenges for us. And then Rohan will go into some technical considerations and obstacles that we faced and how we solved them. And finally, we’ll share some of the results of our testing so far.

Janie Clarke: So first up, traditional email development, or why email development sucks. Do we have any email developers in the room or anyone who has worked on it before? Woo! Email geeks. So you may have heard, email development can be difficult. Because emails are sent out as static HTML content, it has to be able to support whatever old arcane email client that your users may be using to read their email. Outlook 2007, being a good example of this.

Janie Clarke: Many different email clients have their own special rules about what kind of content and markup they require and can render. And if your inspect the source of an email, that in your inbox, you may notice that it’s a mess. Lots of nested tables, inline CSS with special rules for different Outlook versions. Again, some of you may have noticed this before. But Outlook aside, even modern email clients like Gmail have issues of their own.

Janie Clarke: So remember, at Indeed our mission is to help people get jobs, and on our team we do that by sending Job Alert emails to millions of job seekers every day, so that they can get the latest results for their search. We know from extensive experimentation on the site, as you know, and also within our email, that job seekers get a lot of value from personalized contextual information about the jobs that they’re looking at. Providing them with this information helps them make better decisions about which job they want to click on. It helps them apply to the right jobs and it helps people get jobs.

Janie Clarke: But whenever we do a test in the Job Alert email to add this information, we run into a problem. And this happens. Have you seen this before in Gmail? The email clips, since traditional email cannot load any external content, no JavaScript, no external CSS files, all the content has to be static and contained within the HTML. And along with all those nested tables that you need for Outlook and custom inline CSS, for the older email clients, it can be a real challenge to squeeze in all of the information that you want.

Janie Clarke: So it’s something we’re constantly trying to find the right balance on our team. I’m including as much information and as many jobs in the email as we can, while also not running into clipping. So there’s a certain size limit that Gmail hits, when the email will clip if the HTML is over that limit. So we’ve tested adding more jobs to the Job Alert, more content always leads to more clicks, more engagement, more applies. But the more jobs we add, the more it clips. Right now, about 5% of our emails clip.

Janie Clarke: Another problem we’ve run into with Job Alerts is how to include the most Up-to-date information. I’m going to go into a little bit about sponsored jobs. A sponsored job is one where the employer is paying to promote that job and get it in front of job seekers. When we’re sending Job Alerts, we send out both sponsored and organic jobs. We will not send the job alert if there are no new organic jobs, but we do allow the sponsor jobs to be a little bit older.

Janie Clarke: And the thinking there is that, if the employer is paying to get this job promoted to more job seekers, they’re actively trying to fill that position. So, we want to help them do that by including the older job. But it’s also a challenge because job seekers can open their email hours or even days after we send it. And if a job is older, it’s more likely to be closed by the time they see it. If you look closely at this screenshot, you might notice a difference between the job at the top, which is sponsored, and the organic job below it.

Janie Clarke: In our Job Alerts, we worked around this problem in a pretty clever way. When the user opens their Job Alert, a request will be sent to our server to fetch the latest sponsor job for that slot and that alert, and a screenshot would be taken and we would render it into an image. So we call this image ads. Image ads were really clever workaround for the problem of how to show the latest sponsored jobs, but they came with their very own problems. So, every email renders HTML a little bit differently. Many of them render poorly, and different clients have handled different images in very strange ways.

Janie Clarke: So some problems that we’ve faced with this are giant sponsor jobs or tiny sponsor jobs, grainy images, you name it, we’ve run into it and fixed it. So getting image ads right was something we had struggled with on our team for a long time. And because of this, when Google first announced AMP for Email, using it to replace image ads was the first thought that we had. We are also very excited about how AMP for Email wouldn’t necessarily need to include all of the older markup that’s required by older clients because it’s only supported by a certain newer clients. Now I’ll give a little bit of background about AMP.

Janie Clarke: AMP is a web component framework that is used to help create interactive websites, stories, emails and ads. AMP is designed to create a user first experience, which they define as being mobile first and loading fast. And it’s especially helpful for users on poor quality connections because they try to load the most important content first. AMP also does not allow for content to change positions once it’s loaded. Meaning that all the page elements have to have a fixed width and height.

Janie Clarke: The reason for this is they want to avoid the page jumping around as it loads, which you’ve probably noticed a lot on the internet is the thing that happens, especially on slower connections. And AMP achieves these goals by providing a set of predefined components that you can use to build web pages. AMP for Email is a way to offer email users an interactive experience within email, by allowing certain AMP components to be used in email. It brings a lot of modern app functionality directly into emails that has been impossible before.

Janie Clarke: If you use Google Docs, you may have seen this email, which allows you to reply to a comment directly from your inbox without having to leave. It’s pretty amazing. I use it every day. It’s a killer use of the AMP functionality. Some of the benefits of AMP for Email are, it can dynamically load content from a remote server, not just images, but also text. Users can also submit forms and information to a remote server. So users can submit feedback and content to you. And lastly, the layout can change as the user interacts with it.

Janie Clarke: So in some ways this allows email developers to build an entire web application inside of an email. AMP for Email allows for a level of customization that has literally never been possible before in email. It’s very pretty exciting if you’re an email person like me. So back to our use case. Google opened up the AMP for Email preview in April of 2018, and we jumped on the opportunity to participate in the developer preview. The timing was really good because we had an intern starting for the summer in May, and at the time Google expected their launch to be around September. So it would be perfect for an intern project. He’d be able to see his functionality go live, sound really great. So we assigned him the project of creating an AMP version of the Job Alert that loads the sponsor jobs using AMP.

Janie Clarke: Now the reason we assigned it to an intern, it was hard to justify putting full time resources from the team onto this, due to the large time frame before launch and the general unpredictability. And this has been consistently a challenge when working with AMP, which we’ll go into more later. So now Rohan is going to talk about what it was like to actually work with AMP.

Rohan Kapoor: Before jumping into AMP, I wanted to take a second to talk about emails traditional development. Traditionally emails have had two MIME types, the text MIME type and an HTML MIME type. So a modern email client, such as a Gmail or Outlook on the web, that can support HTML will read HTML, and text only clients that run into terminal, something like Mutt, will read only the text part.

Rohan Kapoor: So then came AMP, which was implemented as a new third MIME type. Clients that support the AMP MIME type will read the AMP part and display that, while other clients will fall back naturally to HTML and text. So, there’s full backwards compatibility, there’s no risk that an email client will display incorrect content or garbage just because you start sending AMP.

Rohan Kapoor: As Janie mentioned, one of the biggest considerations that Google had when they built AMP was mobile first experiences. In a mobile world, it’s quite common for the user’s device to lose their connection as they’re moving around from place to place. And on the web, AMP works around this by using AMP caching and caching some components on the user’s device. This reduces the network traffic required to load pages. But, we’re talking about email. And in email, developers have to send fallback content like above, which can be used if the network request fails to return data. So in this case, this email failed to load this data, and so this data that was preloaded as fallback content shows up so that there’s not a giant white space where it should be.

Rohan Kapoor: With AMP’s emphasis on user first design and development, there’re some imperatives that we found particularly tricky to work with. For example, AMP requires that all content has an integer valued width and height. For an email system, that means that at the time you’re sending it, the system needs to know what the width and height of all of your dynamically generated content will be, even though that content doesn’t exist yet.

Rohan Kapoor: So, in our case, we fetch text like the job snippet dynamically. And it can lead to situations where the content is too long and gets truncated. See the text sponsored on the image on the slide. Or too short with extra padding on the ends. And on this slide we can see that the difference in height is pretty remarkable between the job in the middle and the one above and below it.

Rohan Kapoor: Now AMP also suffers from the clipping problem that Janie was mentioning, but it behaves very differently than the traditional HTML email. If the AMP MIME type is larger than 100 kilobytes, the email client silently drops it and falls back to the HTML MIME type. There’s also additional limitations on the size of the entire MIME tree that can cause the whole email to just disappear into the void. It’s also important to keep in mind that this is still an email. Everything is still happening inside an email client, inside the user’s browser. And UI elements such as lightboxes may not work exactly the way you expect them to.

Rohan Kapoor: So we had created mock ups for replicating an Indeed view job page inside our Job Alert email. This was a little bit of a slimmed down version, just because you know it’s running inside an email. And the idea would be that the user clicks on the job and instead of leaving the email, inside the email themselves, inside the email itself, they can view the job description. However, it didn’t quite work the way that we expected it to.

Rohan Kapoor: So the video loads, so you can see, when you click on the job at the top, you get a normal job description. But as you scroll down and then click in, it never scrolled up. The job description is up there. And if you go all the way down to the bottom and then click in, the job description is gone. But actually it’s all the way up there. Because of the way AMP content is rendered, for security reasons it all runs inside an iframe. It has no idea what the viewport is and so lightboxes don’t quite work the way we would think they would.

Rohan Kapoor: So we emailed the team at Google, filed a ticket, and a little bit of back and forth happened, and then they closed the ticket, and said that they’re going to remove AMP lightbox from the list of email approved components because they couldn’t find a way to make it work. So, at Indeed, we’ve built our own email service provider or ESP. And so our journey with AMP begun by adding support for sending the AMP MIME type through that platform. As I said earlier, the AMP MIME type, oops. The AMP MIME type is backwards compatible, so any Indeed application that doesn’t support sending AMP would have no change in behavior. But any application that is sending AMP is received by a client that supports AMP, everything will work fine.

Rohan Kapoor: We also ran into a bunch of specific challenges while working with AMP, and there’s some interesting workarounds that we wanted to share. As Janie mentioned, we started working with AMP during a developer preview period, and at the time AMP for Email was considered bleeding edge. As many of you may know, when you’re working with bleeding edge software, sometimes you have to be ready to bleed. One of the biggest challenges that we ran into was that AMP specifications changed a lot during this time, and the documentation frequently lagged behind. And here’s one such story.

Rohan Kapoor: One day a QA in our team reached out to me and he was telling me that none of our AMP emails were working anymore. And keep in mind that these were emails that were in his inbox from yesterday and worked fine yesterday, but it’s dynamic. So what worked yesterday may not work today. What happened was that where the sponsor jobs were supposed to be, there was just a large white boxes. So we opened the developer tools, looked in the error console, and it’s full of incomprehensible red error text. And all of the error text is minified, so no idea what any of it means.

Rohan Kapoor: So we reached out again to our developer contacts at Google, and they told us that, “Oh yeah, they have now enforcing Gmail-specific CORS headers. The documentation doesn’t come out yet, but it’ll be there in like a week.” And they sent us a quick and dirty version, but basically we had to now add the Gmail-specific CORS headers. That’s an example that we use, and without those all the Ajax requests to fetch the content failed.

Rohan Kapoor: So AMP initially required that the domain that it sends requests to matches the email sender domain, and at Indeed we use alertatindeed.com when we’re sending Job Alerts. However, jobs can live on a variety of different domains depending on what country they’re for. So jobs in the UK live at www.indeed.co.uk, for example. You’ll notice that indeed.com, where the email is coming from, and indeed.co.UK where the job is hosted don’t match.

Rohan Kapoor: So, one possibility that we had was to change the sender email address to match the job domain, but this raised another potential issue for us. It could dilute the sender reputation of the indeed.com domain. So, for those of you that send a lot of email, you’re probably familiar with the concept of sender reputation. Basically, all of the incoming email providers like Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, have a score that they assign to emails coming from your domain. And switching to a new domain like indeed.co.uk would have no sender reputation and we’d lose all of the reputation we had from indeed.com. So this was not really something we wanted to do.

Rohan Kapoor: What did we end up doing? Well, the most straightforward solution that we could come up with was creating a proxy web app. This web app lived at an indeed.com sub domain. In our case it was called ampxy.indeed.com, and it accepted a base 64 encoded URL that told it which domain to actually go fetch the job from. And it handled all of the AMP security validation, handled the CORS headers, and then did the request to the real domain to get the data and passed it back. We called this solution AMPXY for AMP Proxy, and it effectively allowed us to perform cross-site origin requests while masking them, so that as far as AMP and the Gmail client were concerned, we were still hitting indeed.com.

Rohan Kapoor: Ironically, a few weeks after we built this solution, the team at Google reached out to us and told us that based on our feedback, they were removing the same domain requirement. Again, bleeding edge software developer preview all of that. Well, fortunately there was some other benefits that AMPXY gave us, so it wasn’t all just wasted effort. AMP for Email doesn’t allow for any redirects, and if redirects are present, requests fail automatically with no error. AMPXY allows us to proxy the redirect on the server side and once again hide it from Google and make it look like everything’s fine.

Rohan Kapoor: Second, QA testing. So, since AMPXY exposes a single endpoint, we can put that through the QA firewall and have a very simple, straightforward way to test in QA rather than having to open up a bunch of different end points for various functionality. But there’s one significant downside: URL lengths. Because we’re using a base 64 encoding, your URLs ended up almost twice as long as before they started, which makes email clipping much, much worse. In the future we’re planning on building a URL shortening system, which we will integrate into AMPXY, which will hopefully allow us to have shortened URLs and use them in AMP and everything will hopefully work, but it hasn’t been built yet.

Rohan Kapoor: Unlike regular HTML, email AMP does have strict validation requirements. If AMP content validates, it shows up. If it doesn’t validate, you get HTML content instead. And this doesn’t actually show up in any way that you can see. So, one such scenario here is that the AMP spec doesn’t allow you to import functions and then not use them. We use AMP list components for sponsored jobs, and every time we have a sponsor job, it goes in its own unique AMP list.

Rohan Kapoor: So if we have no sponsor jobs at the time, we’re rendering an email, then we don’t use any of our AMP list components, but the import was still there. We learned the hard way that we had to remove the import, and so now it’s wrapped in a nice if-statement to make sure that we don’t fail validation that way.

Rohan Kapoor: As I mentioned, when emails fail validation, there’s no reporting back from the Gmail system as to why it failed or the quantity that failed or anything like that. There is however, this very convenient developer sandbox where you can copy and paste in your entire email, and it will tell you line by line what you did wrong. So, in this example, the tag image is disallowed, because AMP doesn’t allow you to use images, you have to use AMP images instead. Some dynamic caching magic stuff, I’m sure.

Rohan Kapoor: So as a result we are adding AMP validation to our internal ESP because as you’ve probably heard, Indeed is a data driven company. We love our metrics. We want to know how many of our emails that are leaving fail validation and why and hopefully correct them.

Rohan Kapoor: One last thing with AMP is that there’s additional security requirements than traditional email. It’s a trend here. You take traditional email and then add a bunch more requirements and then you get AMP. So to pass AMP validation, you must always pass DKIM, SPF, and DMARC, and email is must always be encrypted in transit using TLS. If not, they magically disappear into the ether. We learned that one the hard way, too.

Rohan Kapoor: So, rounding up the list of important considerations with AMP is that users probably aren’t reading your email exactly at the time you’re sending them. So Gmail supports rendering AMP up to 30 days after the email has been sent, at which point it will permanently switch over to the HTML content forever. So this means that as a developer, when you’re sending out your emails, all your URL endpoints, all of your paths, all of that has to be valid for 30 days, otherwise the email fails. Another use case for fallback content, which can be displayed if those requests do fail.

Rohan Kapoor: So, few technical takeaways. Working with bleeding edge software is hard. Specifications change frequently and you have to be willing to adapt at all times. You have to plan for fallback content with AMP. You are in a mobile world, network connections change all the time and you don’t want large holes in your email where the dynamic content was supposed to be. And you have to find a way to work around the fixed width and height limitations. Basically, you want to make sure that parts of your email don’t clip internally. There’s no giant white spaces, so find some sort of an easy medium. Make sure all of your content that’s coming dynamically is capped at that limit.

Rohan Kapoor: And now I’m going to hand it back to Janie to talk about some of our tests results and conclusion so far.

Janie Clarke: Thank you. How is our test going so far? You learned all about A/B tests before. We test everything, and AMP is no different. We are running AMP in an A/B test right now, that’s targeted at gmail.com users only. So the control group does not send the AMP MIME type at all and the test group does send the AMP MIME type. When we are also testing a few other little functionalities, but the main thing we’re testing right now is the sponsor jobs. So far when we look at our test at the aggregate level, we’re not seeing much change in our test group, and there’s a reason for that.

Janie Clarke: When we compare emails that were opened as AMP to emails that were not opened as AMP, they were just opened as regular HTML, we do see two times more clicks in the AMP opened emails, which is a really great promising early results. So, the reason for this is mobile. Google has not started to roll out AMP for mobile gmail.com yet–for the Gmail app. And in Job Alerts, 82% of our opens are on mobile. So that means most of the users that are getting that AMP MIME type aren’t seeing it. So since AMP is currently not supported on mobile, our test results are pretty limited.

Janie Clarke: It’s hard to spot many behavior changes when we look at the test at the aggregate level. And so we’re waiting right now for Google to start rolling out the AMP functionality for the Gmail app, so that we can really see how it does at full scale. We’re in a little bit of a holding pattern right now, just watching and waiting. We do have some future ideas for features that take advantage of AMP that we’re really looking forward to testing and we’re working on them right now. One of them is an interactive NPS survey as shown here, so we can show NPS right at the bottom of the email and users can answer the question, even type in some feedback for us without even leaving Gmail.

Janie Clarke: We also working on an interactive unsubscribed surveys, similar idea, someone can unsubscribe and tell us why they’re unsubscribing right there. So, it’s a great way to capture some user feedback from your email users. So here are a few things to consider about AMP from a product manager’s point of view. Firstly, be aware of the current limitations when you’re planning. As I mentioned before, there are some challenges with mobile support and with how certain components behave.

Janie Clarke: And secondly, you have to plan out how you’re going to measure your test. We didn’t go into much detail about that, but since AMP adds interactivity to your emails, you need to know what actions you might want to measure and make sure that you’re logging those, tracking them and whatever system they use, so that you can see what’s happening inside the email. And lastly, designing for AMP brings new challenges. So it’s different from designing for a traditional email and it’s also different from designing for the web or mobile. Like the lightbox case that we mentioned, the design that you have in mind when you first do it might not be how it actually works in real life. So you have to be aware of that and be ready to adapt.

Janie Clarke: So we’re very excited about AMP but cautiously. So as I mentioned, it totally changes email. It lets email do some things that have never been possible before. It brings the whole conversion funnel directly inside the email. In short, we think it’s awesome. If you’re excited about AMP as we are, we recommend giving it a try. You do need to have some development bandwidth to work on it. But there may be dragons. So there are some challenges when it comes to working with AMP, so just make sure you’re prepared. Thank you.

Allison Dingler: Everyone hyped? Everyone ready? Yeah? Can I get woo hoo? Y’all can do better than that. Here we go, awesome. I’m going to pass it over to Galina.

Galina Merzheritaskaya, Nitya Malhotra, Erin McGowan, Alison Yu

Indeed girl geeks: Galina Merzheritaskaya, Nitya Malhotra, Erin McGowan, and Alison Yu speaking on women in leadership at Indeed Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Galina Merzheritskaya: Hi, everyone. My name is Galina. I’m a QA Engineer on the data science platform at Indeed. I have a few question we got from panelists tonight, and once I finish them, I would like to move to the audience and hear your questions. Before I start with my questions I would like all panelists to introduce themselves.

Nitya Malhotra: Hi everyone. My name is Nitya. I’ve been at Indeed for about five years now. I’m an Engineering Manager. I transitioned from an IC to engineering manager about two years ago. Before that, I was a product manager with Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, and then Indeed. And yes, that’s where I’ve been ever since.

Erin McGowan: I’m Erin McGowan. I’ve been at Indeed for three and a half years. I’m our Associate Site Lead in Seattle. That’s part of our chief of staff organization, so we’re looking at overall site health and ensuring engineering growth across the site.

Alison Yu: Hi everyone. I am Alison. I am the Open Source Community Manager here at Indeed. I’m part of the Open Source Program office and I report directly into the Engineering Capabilities Organization. I’ve been here a year and a half. I think I said that. I have a little bit of a cold, so if I start to cough, I’ll exit to stage left.

Galina Merzheritskaya: Thank you. I think all of us know that tech is a male dominated industry statistically. You have this number. Does anyone know the ratio between men and women in tech for the past five years? Okay.

Audience Member: 10:1.

Galina Merzheritskaya: 10:1. Close. So, Catalyst is a nonprofit organization collects a lot of data to help women at workplace, and they provide the data that 30% of women in tech industry, only 20% in a leadership position, and Forbes also did their own research showing that you have some growth coming from 3% to 6%, from average 15 to 17. So there’s some work done, there are some changes, probably it’s why you’re here.

Galina Merzheritskaya: So I want to ask panelists, what do you think can be done to change the situation? To make it better and have more female, the women in a male dominated industry?

Erin McGowan: [inaudible].

Nitya Malhotra: Hang on for a second. I think something that in my mind would really make a difference is A, seeing more women in leadership positions. This is something that I personally find motivating, or demotivating sometimes, to not see. But how do we do that? How do we actually get to that place? Now, I know that from Indeed, I’m again speaking from Indeed’s perspective, I know that support, having either great mentors or great support within your organization has also been really helpful.

Nitya Malhotra: Another thing that Indeed has been doing is we’ve actually been partnering with a few programs. I’m actually more familiar with the program in the Seattle office where we’ve been partnering with the Ada Developers Academy. The Ada Developers Academy is a training program for women who have not necessarily been through the traditional CS program in school, and it’s basically a bootcamp after which they go through an internship and then end up joining a bunch of tech companies.

Nitya Malhotra: So the Ada program in Seattle has actually been pretty amazing. I actually ended up working with a lot of ADs as we call them in Seattle, and it’s been great to see so many women in the Seattle office, thanks to the Ada program, and they’ve all been doing such an amazing job. So that in itself has been pretty encouraging to see more women in general in a lot of the offices. So, I think just it’s a numbers game out there and seeing more women in tech is I think what is going to solve the problem in the end.

Galina Merzheritskaya: And [inaudible]. Is it a major program for anyone who works at Indeed or anyone from outside [inaudible].

Nitya Malhotra: It’s actually outside Indeed but they end up partnering with Indeed and a bunch of other tech companies as well, and do internships at Indeed and end up getting them full-time offers with tech companies.

Galina Merzheritskaya: Thank you.

Erin McGowan: And in San Francisco, Indeed is also partnering with Techtonica. They are hosting a cohort of 15 on site now. It’s the second cohort. The first cohort has four interns that are currently interning here at Indeed. The other from that cohort are in interning at other tech offices. So San Francisco is also helping to increase the funnel to help grow women in these engineering roles.

Alison Yu: And I can expand on Techtonica. I am based on the San Francisco office so I work closely with them. One of Techtonica’s missions is to make sure that women and non-binary individuals who have non-traditional tech backgrounds have a way to join the tech industry. So they put them through a bootcamp, essentially, and then help place them with jobs. At Indeed, we not only host them but we, let’s last quarter, also help get them to Grace Hopper. So we did sponsor travel and passes for Tectonicans who went and hosted a project at Grace Hopper’s open source day, which the Open Source Program office did sponsor.

Alison Yu: So, we’re trying to make sure that their name is getting out there, that there is more ways for people to get involved with tech. And then just being a part of the Open Source industry as well is, one thing that we like to stress is that technology isn’t all about codes. So there’s so many different jobs within tech that don’t require you to be a hard engineer or a coder, even. So there’s so many different facets of tech that have roles open. So marketing, legal, et cetera. So, I think there’s a lot of other ways that people can evolve in tech, which aren’t traditionally thought of.

Galina Merzheritskaya: That’s right. Thank you, Alison. You all [inaudible]. Great. Based on the value you see right now, have you, having mentioned of leadership roles, how did you land there? How do you get to this current destination where you’re right now?

Erin McGowan: Sure. I’ll take this one first. I didn’t always start in tech. I actually started in hard science as a lab tech, and it was awful. If you think tech has low men to women ratios, hard sciences has nothing on that. I was the only woman in both labs that I worked in. And looking at it and as we’re using computers, running instruments, it was interesting and fascinating way more than the hard science. So at that point I transitioned into tech largely in quality assurance. I learned how to become an [S debt 01:09:45] at Microsoft way back when. And I always said, “I don’t want to be a manager. I don’t want to be a manager. That’s awful.”

Erin McGowan: And then I started mentoring people and seeing them grow and I was like, “Oh, this is what management is about. I can help drive careers.” At one of my jobs prior to Indeed, I took the plunge and I accepted a leadership role. I had an awesome, awesome female advocate who was big on ensuring that women had access to those leadership roles, and I loved it. When I joined Indeed, I came in as a quality assurance manager, actually in Austin, and I grew my team from four, and before I transitioned I had a team, teams in Tokyo, Austin, and Seattle, and tried to help them grow.

Erin McGowan: And also growing the next generation of leaders really helped fill my bucket. So even if you think you don’t want to be a manager right now, you never know, don’t close that door, leave it open.

Galina Merzheritskaya: You’d like to add anything?

Nitya Malhotra: Yeah, I can go. I actually started as a product manager in, I was working with Merrill Lynch. So I ended up being a product manager. Now after school, despite good grades, et cetera, I had a computer science degree, I wasn’t really sure if I was maybe cut out for software engineering. And I know a lot of women who have gone through similar experiences, it’s amazing how many women I know who have basically had similar experiences. Anyways, so at that point, it was when I missed getting my hands dirty and actually coding. And that’s when I realized that, “Oh, this is maybe something that I do want to get into.” And at Indeed is when I would say I completely transitioned back to a software engineer.

Nitya Malhotra: And again, I think my journey, even at Indeed was, it took a lot of work, a lot of, I would say a lot of coaching and a lot of mentoring from really great managers, really good mentors, that really helped. Because there was always this, [inaudible] I did this, but is it really that great? Everyone could have done this. And it required a lot of my manager be like, hey, you know what, this is actually something good that you’ve accomplished, et cetera.

Nitya Malhotra: So, I would say it was a lot of that. It was a lot of help from my managers and mentors to actually get me to a state where I felt that I was confident enough to go ahead and then ultimately make a switch from IC to tech lead to then engineering manager. And I think that transition off of that has happened really smoothly.

Alison Yu: Yeah. I started out in clean tech in solar, right, if anyone remembers when [inaudible] happened. That was a fun time. I really got thrown into the tech bubble in a sink or swim situation. From there I transitioned from clean tech into tech. I was really lucky. I had a great manager who I actually followed from one company to the next, and she really encouraged growth. And here’s some different ways you can help expand what you’re doing.

Alison Yu: Manage some vendors, manage different contractors, figure out how your style is, and that’s how I’ve gotten to where I am. I don’t currently manage any people, but I do manage many different relationships cross departmentally and within my own program. So, external and internal. That’s how I’ve navigated the waters.

Galina Merzheritskaya: It sounds like you can come from individual contribution to a manager. Maybe you can advise something, what steps look like to come from IC to manager.

Nitya Malhotra: I can take this one one first. When I was thinking about moving, becoming an engineering manager, I think my biggest question was, am I going to lose technical focus? My goal was to be an engineering manager who was also really technically strong. And I was really worried about either plunging into management a little too early and losing the technical focus.

Nitya Malhotra: Fortunately that has not happened. What I have learned over time is that being an engineering manager has given me, I might not be directly making a lot of technical contributions, but it’s given me the chance to make those contributions by influencing others. And that has been the big switch in my thinking. So I can still be involved in really big, really technical changes.

Nitya Malhotra: The only difference is I’m influencing those changes rather than actually executing on them. And that has also been pretty, I still feel technically involved, at the same point in time, I’ve still felt that I could influence others careers. Coaching has also been really, really rewarding and I have no regrets.

Erin McGowan: I think what I would tell someone who is interested in going from being an IC into management, is to try mentoring. See if there’s an opportunity to mentor an intern or a new hire, and see how you like that. As that is successful, working with your manager to say, you know what, I want to do this full time. Where do you see my skill gaps? What do you see that I need? Is there any training that you can attend, books that you would suggest? And making sure that your manager is aware.

Erin McGowan: If your manager is not receptive, finding someone who has seen some of that leadership, your mentorship to get as an ally. Unfortunately, sometimes we need to have that external ally who’s not our direct manager. But the biggest thing is doing it, showing leadership, stepping up in meetings, stepping up to volunteer to take on some of that extra unofficial leadership. As people see you in that role, it is a lot easier for them to see you in a full time management role.

Alison Yu: Yeah, and I would expand on that as well. Not only just finding one-on-one mentorship, but if you can try to step into a leadership position in what we would call here a ERG, like Lena is leading the women in tech group at in the San Francisco office for Indeed. If you can find different programs where you can help lead and bring people together, it makes a big impact. People see you. It’s a highly visible role and it’s really easy way to also find other people who can help mentor you.

Alison Yu: Because otherwise, unless you’re asking for mentorship or asking for help, if you don’t raise your hand and look for those opportunities, people don’t know. So I think the first step is really asking and looking for those opportunities. Prior to joining Indeed, for example, I led the philanthropy efforts at my last company for about three and a half years prior to joining Indeed, but I didn’t have a formal role there. But that gave me the tools to actually be able to step into more of a leadership role where I had the experience behind me.

Alison Yu: And it was something that, even though it wasn’t official, I could put on my resume, I could talk about my experience. So, I think as Erin said, getting your hands dirty and actually doing it is really 80% of the work.

Galina Merzheritskaya: Yeah, I can probably [inaudible]. You try and you like it but we have [inaudible]. You probably had a lot of advice in your career path. Can you guys discuss for some areas, some industries that at least have [inaudible] of sharing? can you share maybe one of the advice with us?

Alison Yu: Sure. I’ll start. One of the things, one of the pieces of advice that I’m still grappling with is, don’t focus so much on perfection and don’t burn yourself out. I am probably a Type A type of person. If you know me, I very much focus on perfection. But one thing I’ve learned over the years is, if you’re burned out, you’re not putting out your best work. You might be running for perfection but you’re not going to get there if you’re completely burned out. So, take time for yourself and rest. I know it seems counterintuitive, but recharging is really one of the most important things that you can do.

Galina Merzheritskaya: That’s great

Erin McGowan: Sure. I think the piece of advice that has stuck with me the most is, if you’re not uncomfortable, you’re not growing. It can be easy to get into a role or into a position where you’re comfortable, you know what you’re doing, you know you have this. But when you’re in that steady state, you’re not pushing yourself and you’re not growing. So it’s okay to get comfortable for a little bit, but then bump yourself to that next level and look for that harder challenge, because that is when you’re going to grow and take your career to the next step.

Nitya Malhotra: Completely second that, by the way, completely. My end, I would say the biggest career advice that I have received is–something that I’ve also really followed, is I’ve really looked out for mentors outside my manager as well. Whether it’s peers or managers on another team, basically looked around the office for people that I know I can go to with questions about various different things. I have a mentor that I go to for technical questions. I have a mentor that I go to if I have questions around being a manager.

Nitya Malhotra: There’re so many different ways. There’s so many different people that I know to reach out to if I have questions on so many different things, and having that these are often the people who will end up supporting you and end up giving you that additional visibility as well within the office. That’s something.

Nitya Malhotra: Another thing that this applies specifically to mentoring, and this advice that I received while mentoring which I’ve always moved–paid forward is, when mentoring, always think about the why rather than, focus on the why rather than the what. No matter what it is that you’re teaching someone, focusing on why something is important rather than what, actually really helps a concept stick. I think this is just in general, good advice that I’ve always passed on.

Galina Merzheritskaya: Okay. So really great advice. I don’t [inaudible]. This is a good time to take questions. If you have a question, they have a mic over there [inaudible] so we can [inaudible].

Vanessa: Hi [inaudible]. Is this working?

Galina Merzheritskaya: No.

Vanessa: Hi, can you hear me?

Galina Merzheritskaya: Yeah.

Vanessa: Cool. My name is Vanessa and I was wondering if you could give me some advice for a situation I find myself in pretty often, which is I oftentimes find that when giving my opinion on a situation, it’s either implied or explicit that I back my decision up with data. Whereas I find a lot of male colleagues can just give their opinion and not back it up with data, and be considered credible. When I back up my decision with data, sometimes it’s met amicably and sometimes it’s met with skepticism, even if it’s based in reality. So I’m wondering if you have any advice for those kinds of situations.

Galina Merzheritskaya: Tough one [inaudible].

Erin McGowan: That’s a tough one. I am really, really happy that Indeed does not have a culture like that. I think the biggest thing is to be consistent. And I would also, with those men being questioned, ask. Be the one to stand up and ask them, what are you basing this on? What did you see that led you to this result? And be consistent with that and they can come to expect the same level of questioning as yourself.

Nitya Malhotra: I would ask the other questions, are there others in the room who probably feel similarly? Are you the only one in the room who is feeling that way or there may be others who are feeling similarly. Maybe this is a wider problem as well and needs to be addressed in a wider way, but that’s the other avenue that I would go down, and the me–

Alison Yu: Yeah. I would also say, if you feel like this is the only… you’re the only one on the team for example, bring it up to your manager, talk about it. If they don’t realize that it’s an un-bias–or an unconscious bias, then how can they address it? So, I think that’s something that we should be talking about more in the workplace, anyways, I am very happy that we don’t have that culture here at Indeed. But I think that until you raise that issue with others and even talking to your teammates one-on-one, pull them aside, say, “Hey, why are you questioning me about this?” Until you have those open conversations with them, I don’t think the situation can change. But I think that’s your first step.

Nitya Malhotra: And I think it’s fair to ask for data, but I think it should be applied consistently. I think it’s absolutely fair to ask for data when you’re making a statement. But the inconsistency is the issue. And the other thing that I would say is don’t let that stop you from actually providing your input. Even if you have to back it by data, go ahead, keep going strong with providing your opinions, even if you have to back it with data. But don’t stop doing that.

Vanessa: Thanks.

Galina Merzheritskaya: Anyone else? Everyone seem to ask big questions, tough questions. Okay it’s 8 o’clock already.

Audience Member: I’m not sure if anyone, any of you, y’all said this already, but can you tell me how long it took you to get into leadership and are there any other steps that could take to be there?

Erin McGowan: Sure. I’ll go first. From the time that I really decided I wanted to move into leadership, was probably about 12 months, and that included doing an extensive six month leadership program that had some very intensive training sessions, talking with other leaders in the organization. This was prior to Indeed. It’s really going to vary, depending on your organization. I’ve had people on my team that I was able to get from an IC into a management, that was anywhere between say six months and 18 months, depending on where they were at on their career when they started addressing interest and wanting to go to management.

Nitya Malhotra: And I was actually similar situation once I figured out that I wanted to be in a leadership position, was about asking, “Hey, what are the next steps that I can take, move into a tech lead role?” And tested that out for a while, then moved on to engineering management. It was a similar 12 month period for me. The advice would be if that’s something that you’re interested in, I would say ask for it and test it out, see how it goes.

Galina Merzheritskaya: One time I got advice that if you’re solving problems, you lead something. It can be project, a team, a team has issues and so you have to handle them, overcome them, failure. Then it’s just next step if you want to make them official or if you want to just [inaudible]. If you want to make official you speak with the manager and [inaudible] talk with what you want and how fast you want it.

Nitya Malhotra: Yes.

Galina Merzheritskaya: What should I do to make manager? Steps just what can [inaudible] and what can make a [inaudible]. If it’s two months, three months [inaudible] you solve the basic problem [inaudible]. For [inaudible] company, tomorrow you [inaudible] [inaudible]. Yeah.

Alison Yu: Yeah. It seems like it really does vary depending on where you start in your career path. If you start very early on, knowing that you want to manage someone, it’ll take you much longer than if you’ve been in your career for five, 10 years. So I think it’s just knowing what you want and going after it. When I manage people, I actually did a job switch and looked for particular roles that had managing positions and where I would hire on a team. I know that’s not always the most ideal way to do it, but sometimes the company that you’re currently at lacks resources. Here at Indeed, we thankfully don’t lack resources. I just decided that that wasn’t the path that I wanted to be on at the moment. So, many different ways.

Galina Merzheritskaya: [inaudible]. Anyone else?

Audience Member: Hi. I just wanted to ask, what advice do you have for somebody who is starting off in their career but wants to have influence within the team? What kind of strategies or what did you do when you were in that position to influence the decisions that your team makes or just to have some influence, because as a leader, obviously you have to make decisions and have influence over your team. So do you have any advice for people and they’re starting their careers?

Nitya Malhotra: So, actually this is a good question back to you. I would ask yourself what is the thing–What is the… there’s always, no matter what the team, what the company, there is always some room and some scope for improvement. And finding things that either you are passionate about getting… about the team getting better about team’s process improving, about how the development processes. Or if you want to let’s say, if you’re really passionate about this particular, it could even be at this particular class in your service that you think is not tested for example. Or you see a bunch of errors and no one’s caring, but there’s so many.

Nitya Malhotra: I would say pick something that, let’s say, that you are passionate about that, let’s say, bothers you and go ahead and fix it. Things like these, the tiny, tiny things that you spot and as you keep improving these, people are going to notice that you’re taking the initiative to go ahead, find something that you don’t like, and improve it. I think that is a great leadership quality in itself. And once you start doing that in the small level, you will start doing that on a larger scale, as well.

Erin McGowan: I would say one of the mistakes I made early in my career, is I was afraid to speak up. I would be sitting in a meeting room and I would be afraid to actually voice my opinion. I would have the thoughts and I would just be afraid to actually put them out there. Put yourself out there. Don’t be afraid to say, what about this? Have we considered this? You know what, I tried this and it really didn’t work. They’re not going to bite. At least if you’re in a good workplace, they’re not going to bite. So I would say just go ahead and speak up. They want to hear your voice. You’re in that room for a reason, so don’t be afraid to use it.

Nitya Malhotra: Also to be fair, that never gets easy. Today there have been times where I am like, “Oh, should I see this? Everyone else seems to know.” But that never gets easy and that’s always a struggle. That’ll continue to be a struggle, times you just have to push past it.

Alison Yu: I would say try to find gaps and try to become a subject matter expert in one of those areas. I was on a marketing and communications team across multiple different companies. I specialized in social media for a while, then I became more broad. And because of my expertise in one area, people came to me from many different departments, from different business units. Even though I was in the marketing team and I sat in marketing, people from different engineering teams would come to me and ask, “How do I market my product better?”

Alison Yu: So once you get your name out there and you’re proven that you’ve done the research, you’re doing a good job, people will seek you out anyway. So focused on something that you’re passionate about, that really fires you up because that’s something that will be recognized that you’re doing a good job and then they will naturally follow.

Galina Merzheritskaya: I can add the two pieces. One as jealous [inaudible]. If you think I don’t know team, I was like, “Oh my God, she loves this team, loves the product, what can I improve? Like everything’s great.” And then, “Oh is it [inaudible] feels great.” And he’s [inaudible] today [inaudible] every day since 5:00 PM, do you guys use [inaudible] and then he’s trying to give [inaudible] aspect. Not [inaudible] but [inaudible]. Whereas where I can help to improve this. And as it little by little you have this guy like, “Hey, this is actually not a big problem.” And [inaudible] somewhere you can show the need to do such.

Galina Merzheritskaya: You’re also independently and [inaudible] are like this is my research and definitely how can you grow. And I’ve learned [inaudible] goals, that sometimes will follow when you lose everyone else, you just have your own goals, but for [inaudible] before breaking them, bring on some rules that exist. And knowing how everything works. So like okay then you can figure out different ways that basically can prosper in that area.

Alison Yu: I’m just going to add to that I think different perspectives and the way that different people will look at a problem or a situation, can only make a product or a team stronger. So even if you think, “Hey, my opinion, what is it really valid?” Your opinion is valid so never question that. But also know that the different ways that you look at a problem is a different way that someone might have never seen it, and you can be revealing something about a weakness that maybe no one else on the team had thought about and that can be a really great thing for you and for the team.

Galina Merzheritskaya: That’s true. Okay.

Audience Member: Hi there. I have a question about how do you grow on the job? I know that you mentioned that there is a women in leadership program that you went to to get a lot of training before you became a manager. What if there’s no training like that or you’ve thought about becoming a manager maybe down the road, how do… what kind of things have you done, maybe in the past, to prepare yourself to get to this road? Do you read books? Do you listen to podcast or do you go to meet up to meet mentors? Yeah.

Erin McGowan: Yes. All of the above. I think the biggest thing, if you’re looking for some leadership training and your organization doesn’t offer it, look external and ask. Often time your organization will pay for external training. Most of the time there are budgets for that and people don’t even know to ask. So ask for it. Perhaps they can bring some in. You’re probably not the only one. There are a number of books that you can help read. I [inaudble] in the management before podcasts were a big thing, but I know that a lot of people now are using podcasts to help learn and having a mentor. Having a manager mentor that is not within your organization can be huge.

Erin McGowan: You’re able to really have good conversations with them without any fear of bias or… I asked this question, is my manager going to think I’m not ready? So having someone who’s outside, whether they’re outside just your group or your company, is invaluable to really help understand where you as a person need to go.

Nitya Malhotra: I’m not great with podcasts or it reading outside work. For some reason after work, I just switch off and I… it’s really hard. So a lot of my growing I feel happens, majority of it for me has happened at work. Something that I found useful is putting myself in, let’s say my manager’s shoes, and thinking about A, how would I have done this differently? How would I have done this better, or do I like what they’re doing? As time has gone by, this has created a mental model of how it is that I want to be as a manager, and that has really helped me model my experiences with my reports as well.

Alison Yu: Yeah, I am also the same way. I do not want to read or listen to a podcast about work after work. I work enough, so I think one of the things that I try to do, is at work or when I travel for work, so speaking at conferences, et cetera, one of the things that I try to do is make sure I go to the networking events at those things. Talking to my peers in the same industry, seeing where they are in their careers, how they’ve been able to progress, and then finding other people who are already in other higher management roles and seeing and talking to them about what was their career path, if they’d be open to mentoring.

Alison Yu: I think that’s really important that you want to see what other people in your same industry are doing, and not just only stick to what’s the norm in your company. Because sometimes when you’re so isolated and so siloed in your own company, you might not notice that the path that your management runs, it’s not the same as the rest of the industry. So I think that’s also very important to keep just a tab on.

Galina Merzheritskaya: Yeah. Sometime it’s called shadowing, if you think you would like to try some role and be like a measurable, you speak with your and you’re like, “Hey, I want to see what you do so I can know what you do from seeing what you’re doing.” And then you will have questions and then you will have a pass while you actually [inaudible]. And then you always say, “Oh, I did [inaudible].” And if you have an opportunity to speak with the manager be clear what you want, or how will the manager help me.

Galina Merzheritskaya: Or like if it’s not in your company, there are so many programs outside. We have so many mentorship right now. There are many [inaudible] to step up higher and you learn. It’s a great time to do it now because, if you can do more then you can do tomorrow [inaudible]. It makes it so that managers who are [inaudible] can draw a time just to help you to grow as well. Yeah. I think that’s fine. And we have time for a few more questions if you have any. Yes, okay.

Audience Member: Hi. Just wanted to firstly thank you guys for sharing your experience. My question was around conflict and some strategies that you use when you experience conflict in the workplace. I know sometimes women can be more of the supportive or the accommodating role, where men can be more dominant in that conflict situation, so just wondering what tips and tricks you have for dealing conflict.

Erin McGowan: I think the first tip is to make sure that both parties are leaving emotion at the door. If either party starts to escalate with emotions, asking for a timeout and table, and have that conversation at a later time. You’re not going to have any kind of a productive conversation if someone is angry, yelling, or on the flip side, if someone is upset, perhaps crying. You’re not going to be able to have a good healthy conversation, table it and schedule time. If you need to involve a neutral third party, either your manager or that person’s manager, or both, to help, if you are afraid of emotions escalating again.

Erin McGowan: I think the other thing is that some conflict is healthy. It’s okay to disagree, but you want to make sure that you are disagreeing respectfully, and making sure that you’re not crossing any of those professional lines disagreeing. Having data can really help. This is where I am on this because one, two, three, can you help me understand how you came to this?

Erin McGowan: So, really understanding their point of view can help bridge. You might be closer than you thought, but you’re talking sideways. You’re just in a different place, but you might still actually be really close to each other. So taking the time to understand where they’re coming from and how they got there. And helping them to do the same on your side.

Nitya Malhotra: I might have slightly different opinion, especially around the emotions. I know emotions in general are turned on as this bad term. I actually don’t think they’re bad. I think that a lot of times when there are strong emotions associated with how someone’s feeling, there’s generally a reason behind it, and it’s always, I think it’s important to figure out what that reason is. So even if there is emotion around it, obviously we don’t want things to escalate, but that emotion is stemming from something and it’s really important to figure out where that’s coming from.

Nitya Malhotra: So stating, let’s say in a conflict, stating exactly why you’re saying something, you’re stating where you’re coming from, what your intentions are. My intentions are not to disagree with you, but I really think that this is the right thing that we should bring. I’m just giving a stupid example. But stating your intentions, where you’re coming from, I think that really helps clarify and make someone understand that you’re not actually attacking them and that you’re coming from a place of logical reason.

Nitya Malhotra: Crucial conversations was this class that actually I took at, it was one of the trainings that was offered at Indeed. I thought it to be super helpful, not just in my work life, but also in my personal life. I would recommend, I would look into it as well.

Alison Yu: I think for me it’s making sure that everyone’s on a neutral playing field. Making sure that someone doesn’t feel ganged up on. For example, taking any of those external situational feelings that could happen if you were to say, “Hey, I want to address this.” But you’re doing it, for example, in the cafeteria or in a meeting room full of other people. I think there’s a time and place for everything, so if you are feeling those emotions, I don’t think they’re necessarily bad, but I do think that you do need that time to have everyone simmer down a little bit, so you have the root of the issue that you’re actually trying to get to, versus the feelings that are really getting there.

Alison Yu: I do agree that when you have those charged feelings, there is something that is sparking that and you need to get to the issue and resolve that, but you need to also do it in a cool, calm, collected manner, because you going in there guns blazing is not going to help with anything, neither you or the other party. But making sure to have it on a neutral ground, I would say before you really escalate it to managers, try to see if, hey, can you work this out with your peer? Is there a way you can take this out? Try going for a coffee and just going and talking it out. Usually that, I think, helps it.

Alison Yu: It’s not necessarily in the office or in front of others, but it gives you a neutral ground and it’s time away where other people can’t really hear what’s going on, and I think that’s very important when you’re trying to hash out the details when there’s a serious conflict.

Galina Merzheritskaya: And I’ll just maybe say super [inaudible] personal. If you personally got offended or someone’s [inaudible]. All my [inaudible] and game matters. I’ve been thinking about it and [inaudible] up there. You guys [inaudible]. And I [inaudible] solve problems, do it once I think. I’ve been told if you have to do [inaudible] five times breathe in, and breathe out five times [inaudible], you will get more oxygen to your brain and you will be feeling a little more rational. You cool down and then you can move on to the next step. You can also agree to [inaudible] partner [inaudible]. Thank you.

Audience Member: Thank you.

Galina Merzheritskaya: And I think one more question then we’ll close. Okay. One, two, three. Okay, I [inaudible]. Thank you so much for your time.

Allison Dingler: Awesome. I won’t take up any more time. Another round of applause for our amazing panelists up here, yes.

Alison Yu, Erin McGowan, Lindsay Brothers, Janie Clarke, Rohan Kapoor, Galina Merzheritskaya

Thank you to Indeed’s Alison Yu, Erin McGowan, Lindsay Brothers, Janie Clarke, Rohan Kapoor and Galina Merzheritskaya for speaking at Indeed Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Indeed Girl Geek Dinner attendees

Thanks to all the girl geeks who came out to Indeed for dinner, networking, talks, panel discussion and more networking!  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Our mission-aligned Girl Geek X partners are hiring!

Win FREE tickets to 12 Girl Geek Dinners in our 12 Days of Girl Geek Giveaway! UPDATE: Winners announced!

Girl Geek X - 12 Days of Giveaways Holiday Sweepstakes

What’s better than a free Girl Geek Dinner? How about 12 free Girl Geek Dinners!? That’s exactly what’s in store for ONE lucky girl geek this month! But we’re not stopping there — 11 more girl geeks & allies will be winning too!

We’re super excited to announce that we’re giving away a whopping total of 78 totally FREE Girl Geek Dinner passes in our December contest — which we’re launching TODAY!

Day 1 - 12 Days of Girl Geek X Giveaways - Pack of Playing Cards and a Dinner Ticket

The grand prize (12 tickets to Girl Geek Dinners plus a Girl Geek X hoodie or jacket) will go to the entrant who has referred the most friends to enter the contest & sign up for the Girl Geek X weekly newsletter during the contest period, which ends on December 20, 2019 at 11:59am PST.

The other 11 winners will be selected at random — 1 each day for 12 days, beginning Monday, December 9, 2019 at noon PST. The first drawing is just a few days away, and we’ll kick off the fun by giving away 1 free Girl Geek X Dinner ticket and a pair of Girl Geek X socks!

The number of tickets we give away will increase each day, until we award the grand prize. The Girl Geek X swag item we’re giving away will get a little better every day as well — we’re starting with a super cute pair of Girl Geek X socks, and working our way up through coffee mugs and t-shirts! (See the full prize list and official rules in the widget below.)

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12 Days of Girl Geek X Giveaway

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Speaker submissions for Elevate 2020 are now open!

We are seeking session proposals for the 3rd Annual Girl Geek X ELEVATE 2020 Virtual Conference to be held March 6th, 2020.

We’re inviting women technologists, innovators and tech leaders from around the world to participate in Girl Geek Elevate to share the latest in tech and leadership with fellow mid-and-senior level professional women.

This virtual conference is FREE for attendees – last year, over 2,500 women signed up to attend – tuning in from 31 countries around the world – to be inspired by speakers on the latest in tech trends and leadership.

Sessions may reflect the theme of this year’s conference – “Lift As You Climb” – and content typically covers the following topics:

  • Lightning Tech Talks – Dive deep into an area that’s unique/critical to your business or role (i.e. machine learning, security, usability, UX/UI, ethics in building product, data analysis, etc.)
  • Technical Skills & Tactics – Tutorials, walkthroughs, or deep dives into a skillset or tactical approach to how you solved a real-world challenge.
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  • Inclusion, Equality, and Allyship – Topics include being a better ally, lifting other women up, and actionable advice for individual contributors or managers.
  • Interesting Life/Career Journeys/Distance-Traveled Stories – Did you overcome socioeconomic challenges (i.e. first in family to go to college, raised in poverty/rural area/etc.) while giving back or contributing to the greater good?

Work on a unique technical project or have interesting insights you’d love to share with other other women & allies? We want to hear from you!

Tip: The best proposals include 3-5 key takeaways — things attendees can expect to learn from your talk!

Submit your proposal for a talk and/or panel here by December 24, 2019 11:59PM PDT for Girl Geek Elevate virtual conference.

We’re looking for speakers with unique perspectives to share their successes, failures, insights, advice, personal journeys and learnings with the community! Come share your story and elevate fellow Girl Geeks as they navigate the choppy waters of their own tech careers.

Both first-time and experienced speakers are welcome to apply. All nominations will be considered, and all selected speakers will participate in a speaker prep session with the Girl Geek team and your fellow panelists and moderators.

Why Speak at Elevate Virtual Conference?

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  • Elevating other women is a fun & rewarding experience

We’re open to presentations, one-on-one interviews, and panels… choose the format you’re comfortable with!

Submit your proposal for a talk and/or panel here by December 24, 2019 11:59PM PDT for Girl Geek Elevate virtual conference.

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Toyota Research Institute Girl Geek Lightning Talks (Video + Transcript)

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Kelly Kay, Rita Yau, Suzanne Basalla, Jen Cohen, Carrie Bobier-Tiu, Ha-Kyung Kwon, Steffi Paepcke, Fatima Alloo

Toyota Research Institute (TRI) girl geeks: Kelly Kay, Rita Yau, Suzanne Basalla, Jen Cohen, Carrie Bobier-Tiu, Ha-Kyung Kwon, Steffi Paepcke, and Fatima Alloo, at TRI Girl Geek Dinner in Los Altos, California.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Transcript of TRI Girl Geek Dinner – Lightning Talks:

Angie Chang: Okay. Hi. Thank you all for coming out tonight. My name is Angie Chang and I’m the founder of Girl Geek X. If this is your first time, welcome. I’ve heard several stories of women who have got tickets for Girl Geek dinners over the last decade and missed one, two, three and four and they’re here tonight. So thank you so much for coming after a long day of work and having fun with us at Toyota Research Institute. I’m really excited to be here and learn all about the cool things. I wanted to point out at these actually really fun stickers. They have the robot arm and the car. If you want to pick them up, they’re not business cards. You can pick them up and take them home with you.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Hi everybody. I’m Gretchen also with Girl Geek. How is that food? Can we just all applaud for how amazing that was? You guys, Toyota has just killed it tonight unlike every level. It’s [inaudible] and I’m not jinxing anything. I swear. And if this looks fun, you can do it at your company too. We do these almost every week and a different company hosts. And so grab someone in a red t-shirt who can put you in touch with someone who actually did the planning, who can tell you how much work it takes, that it’s really fun, that you can bond with your colleagues, that you’re elevating women in your company. You have a cool video to submit to Grace Hopper next year. All these awesome things that can come out of it. So with that, how many of you it’s your first time? Okay, so we want to see you. You can come all the time now. You can do this all the time with all these awesome women. Okay, perfect. I would like to welcome Rita from team Toyota.

Rita Yau: Thank you, Angie and Gretchen. Hi, everybody. Thank you for coming tonight. Hopefully you guys are full with all the food and have a beverage in hand. A few shout outs. We have a few of our executives here this evening. We have our SVP of our autonomous driving organization, Ryan Eustice, as well as his two VPs, Wolfram Burgard and Steve Winston here with us as well. And then we have Max Bajracharya, who is head of our robotics organization. And so we’re really excited to have you guys and have them supporting us. And with that I just wanted to give the platform to our Executive Vice President and CFO, Kelly Kay, who’s going to go over our mission statement.

Kelly Kay speaking

EVP and CFO Kelly Kay gives a talk on “TRI’s Mission: Improving the Quality of Life” at Toyota Research Institute Girl Geek Dinner.

Kelly Kay: Welcome everybody. I’m super excited to have you all here today, and it’s been so much fun to wander about and hear everyone talking and learning more about what we do here at TRI. It feels like we’ve been living in the shadow and now that so many wonderful people have come to learn more about what we do, I’m hoping we could do more events like that here at TRI. I need the clicker. Okay. So I want to talk a little bit about improving the quality of life and TRI’s mission, but I’m going to actually start with myself and my journey that actually brought me here to TRI.

Kelly Kay: I actually went to Ohio State, go Buckeyes IO. So really excited, especially since we have partnerships with the University of Michigan and when I go to Michigan, I have to wear my Ohio gear. Sorry Ryan. I also went to law school, so I’m actually a lawyer. I practiced law for over 20 years before I made it to TRI and I did so kind of in a unique way. My life was actually really focused around taking traditional products and turning them into online products. So I started in the banking industry, so and I don’t want to date myself, but back in the day before you could actually log into a website and look at your bank balance or pay your bills online or apply for a credit card, I was working at a bank trying to make those products possible.

Kelly Kay: So it kind of progressed through my life of kind of taking these really old fashioned, old school regulated industries and turning them into something that was cool and new and innovative. And it kind of ended most recently at Lyft, where I was working as the VP of Operations and helping them actually take their product around America and working in negotiating with different regulators on how you actually take what’s traditionally a taxi industry and turning into a ride sharing industry. So it was really fun to help Lyft grow. And I came to TRI, actually, to be the Chief Operating Officer almost three years ago, and it hit me at just the right time.

Kelly Kay: So Lyft is an amazing company. I was doing amazing things, in my opinion, changing the world as it came to transportation. And when I was approached by TRI, they came to be in the first conversation was more about the mission at TRI. And I was in a really unique place in my life where my stepmother had just had two strokes. My father had fallen trying to help her get up. They ended up on the floor or calling me and calling 911 and they’re like, “Wow,” I’m like, “What’s going to happen to my parents when I live so far away and I have to find a way to actually make sure that they can take care of themselves at home because we can’t always be there and it’s really hard and expensive to afford a home to put them in.” At the same time, my dad could no longer really drive well because he’s disabled and I was thinking, what am I going to do?

Kelly Kay: And when I was talking to the recruiter, they were telling me about the vision and the mission at TRI and what it was all about. You guys have learned quite a bit about it tonight and I was thinking, wow, this company, I could go work at a company that’s actually going to change the future and enable people like my father and my stepmother to actually be able to stay home and age in place and not have to worry about caregivers coming in and being embarrassed by caregivers coming in and taking care of them all the time. And my dad’s not going to have to worry about how is he going to get to his doctor’s appointment or how is he going to get to the grocery store because he can’t drive anymore, because we’re going to have autonomous cars and I’m going to work for a company that can help solve these problems for people in my life that I care about, and ultimately for myself.

Kelly Kay: This probably isn’t going to be around when my dad is still alive, but it’s going to be around when I need it most. I’m an only child. What happens when I’m by myself at my house and I need to get to the doctor? So our vision and mission is really about that. We are actually envisioning a future where Toyota products dramatically improve the quality of life for everyone. And our mission is to develop automated driving robotics and other human amplification technology for Toyota in this space that will enable us to actually allow people like my father and your parents to age in place gracefully, to be able to still move around the home and have robots help them move around the home, and help us transport ourselves from point A to point B in a safe way through autonomous vehicles. So, our leadership team was another thing that really inspired me to come to TRI.

Kelly Kay: We’ve got some of the most amazing minds when it comes to autonomous driving and robotics here at TRI. And the best part about them, is I was very scared, I’m a lawyer, I’m not an engineer. What am I going to do? How am I going to sit at the table with these people because they are so smart and they don’t have the egos that you think these people would have. There’s a lot of doctors that you’re seeing. So most of these folks are PhDs and they really bring a lot to the table without the ego that usually comes with it. And I found that to be one of the other amazing things when I was thinking about coming to TRI, is the people I’m going to be working with really matter.

Kelly Kay: And we just spent three days together, everyone on this screen, actually, learning and thinking together about how to design the future of TRI and what should we be thinking about? How do we even be more innovative than we’re being today? It’s a constant question that we’re asking here everyday at TRI is how do we do more? How do we think about the next great thing that we’re going to do to help transform Toyota and the world today to be more mobile. And our values are another reason why I wanted to come to TRI. When I came here there were… Toyota has principles and it’s got these 10 principles that they bring from Japan and they exist and it’s really, how do you think about working at Toyota? But I wanted TRI to have its own values.

Kelly Kay: And what I did with the team was really think through what we want them to be. And I wanted to put a lot of myself into this because at that point in a lot of what my role is, is really about enabling the company as a whole to be more effective, to helping them design the future, to work with the HR team on the type of people in the culture we want here, to work with the engineering team to get things done, which should the processes be that we have to get things done, building all of that within the company. And the values really are the contract that we have. And when we think about how we work together at TRI, the be yourself value is the one that is the most important to me. And I’m kind of the sponsor of that value, if you could possibly sponsor a value.

Kelly Kay: And we spent some time during our retreat with a famous actor, a Japanese actor, and if anyone watched the TV show Heroes? Yes. So, the Japanese character that reads the comic book and goes back in time. So he came to our retreat with us and worked with us on actually being yourself even more and kind of almost being a child. And we were doing improv and he’s like, “Make a blue doctor machine.” And we’re like, “What?” So we all had to act out a blue doctor machine. It was really like anything you could think of to really be yourself. And he’s like, “Everyone is a genius.” And he really got us to think of our internal genius. So even though we all bring different skills to the table and we all have different levels of education, we actually are in each individual a genius in and amongst themselves.

Kelly Kay: So what my genius is may not be the same as somebody else’s, but we each have individual characteristics and at TRI, it’s really important that everyone has a seat at the table and a voice at the table to bring their unique characteristics to what we’re doing here. The next is respect one another. And that one is just as important as being yourself. And I think they balance each other out really well because if you’re a jerk, you still have to respect somebody else. So we think about these of kind of making sure that we’re really thinking about all of these as a whole and respecting one another is another one. It’s super important. Again, we might not all have the same opinion, but we want to hear everyone’s opinion.

Kelly Kay: We want to think about it, we want to debate, we want to make informed decisions. So we have to sit back and respect everyone’s opinion here at TRI. And the next is assume best intentions. And this picture is mine. And I will explain the picture to you. I foster kittens throughout the kitten season here in Silicon Valley. We do about 2,400 foster kittens every season here. And I have a German shepherd and he loves to play with the kittens. He’s always licking the kittens and things like that. And the question is, is this dog eating the kitten or is he saving the kitten? He’s in fact saving the kitten. And even dogs are basically good. So we’d like to assume here at TRI that people are basically good. We need to assume best intentions.

Kelly Kay: We’re working in an interesting environment. We have offices all over the world. A lot of email and email can always lead to miscommunication and misunderstanding. So we’d like to make sure that when we’re like, when we get upset, when we read that flaming email, it could be a cultural issue because people are speaking many different languages at Toyota. It could be an issue someone’s just grumpy because they worked late and they just sent something out they shouldn’t send. So we like to think about things of always step back, don’t get upset, assume best intentions, and that really allows us to interact in a different way here at TRI than you would find in other companies where you’re like, people come in very aggressively into meetings like, “Well, why did you send that?” We are like, “Hey, now I assume you didn’t really mean this, but this is how I took it. Let’s talk.”

Kelly Kay: So we just take a different approach to things here. And then thinking globally, again, we’re a global company. TRI’s a small part of a really large company. There’s 360,000 people at Toyota. We are 350, 340 people. So we need to make sure we’re thinking globally on everything we’re doing when we’re designing the car, when we’re designing a robot, we’re actually looking at it from a broader perspective than most companies would. And then finally, make it happen. We’re here, we’re in Silicon Valley, we need to move quick. Japanese companies are historically slow. TRI I was created to actually move faster than a traditional Japanese company. So we’d like to think of ourselves as kind of this company of making things happen.

Kelly Kay: That means taking risks, doesn’t mean jeopardizing safety, but it means taking risks and making decisions and things like that to allow us to move as quickly as possible. I probably completely failed to talk about what I was supposed to talk about, which is what I do here, but these are the things that I put together that are a main part of what I do here at TRI. I have CFO in the title. It’s about this much of what I do. I spend a lot of my time in meetings, just making sure things actually get done. Sometimes it’s coaching people, sometimes it’s helping with reorganizations, sometimes it’s figuring out what should we do strategically? How should we design a program? Why should we do things in a certain way?

Kelly Kay: So I spend a lot of time with the executive team, with anyone who wants to come and talk to me. I believe in an open door policy, and I work really closely with the CEO as well. So, if you want to know anything about TRI, I probably know it. If you wanted something technical you should probably talk to somebody else. But I am a work in progress. So a lot of the professors have taken me under their wing and have been teaching me a little bit more about the technology behind what we do. But again, I think we have a great lineup of some amazing technical people who are going to come up and talk to you and some of our really good leaders here at TRI. So thank you for all coming out. And again, if you have any questions, feel free to ask me or anyone on the staff. We’re super excited to have you here tonight and hopefully you learn a lot about TRI. Thanks. And I didn’t do everything and that’s what really matters.

Rita: Thank you, Kelly.

Kelly Kay: Do you want this?

Rita: All right. So I also just wanted to add to that, one of the reasons why I joined TRI was because of the amazing, awesome things that we do here. And everybody here at TRI really does have the same mission and goal to better the world. And so I’m super privileged to be working with a bunch of amazing, awesome people. And with that we are going to kick off our next round of lightning speakers and we’re going to have the next couple of speakers come up. And Carrie Bobier-Tu, who is our manager of the… Or one of our managers in our autonomous driving organization is going to come up and give us her overview of why she’s here.

Carrie Bobier-Tiu speaking

Manager of Control, Planning and Control Driving Team Carrie Bobier-Tiu gives a talk on “Building the Uncrashable Car” at TRI Girl Geek Dinner.

Carrie Bobier-Tiu: Thanks everybody for coming. I’m really glad to see so many people here. My name is Carrie Bobier-Tu, and I’m the manager of our control team, which is part of our autonomous driving team. And I’ll talk a little bit more about what that means in a minute. But first I’m also going to tell you kind of how I got to TRI. So, the first kind of engineering project, hands on project that I worked on was, I was a member of the Solar Car team at Stanford University when I was an undergrad. So it’s the picture of upper left for you guys.

Carrie Bobier-Tiu: But I worked, as you can see, on a team of me and a bunch of guys, pretty much, and we built this solar car and raced it from Texas to Canada–cutting out–over a week one summer. And that was kind of my entry into cars and my love for cars. A lot of hands on experience there in engineering and also met who would become my advisor for my PhD and kind of build the next many years of my life at Stanford. So Chris Gerdes is a professor at Stanford in vehicle dynamics and control, and I started talking to him about suspension design for the solar car, really got along with him and his students [inaudible] lab and ended up staying in the lab for the next eight years to do my masters and PhD there.

Carrie Bobier-Tiu: The two cars that you see that kind of looked like black dune buggies are the vehicles that I worked on there. The top one I used for my research, which was based around safety systems and advanced stability control and how we can kind of take the stability control that we have and vehicles on the road to the next level by having advanced sensing capabilities. And I also worked on building a new platform, which is the car on the bottom, two students and many after us, kind of, we worked on this car together and I worked on designing a suspension system that can enhance friction estimation capabilities. So I really got deep into vehicle dynamics and engineering here. I was really hands on with it.

Carrie Bobier-Tiu: I liked building cars in our test beds and working with all the sensors and computers, but when I graduated not that long ago, even, there weren’t really any autonomous driving or vehicle control jobs in the Bay Area. So I went to work at HGST, which is a hard drive company. It’s now part of Western Digital. But I am really glad that I went and worked there because I got the experience of designing a control system for a product that you had to have this controller that worked on millions and millions of devices that were going out to customers. So I think having that product experience early in my career was really helpful to me in seeing how to design a robust product and a robust controller. I also got into CrossFit there and got to work with my husband, who’s the second from the left in that picture with all of the red shirts.

Carrie Bobier-Tiu: They had a CrossFit company, or CrossFit gym, at the company, which was really cool and kind of has spurred my interest in health since then, which I’m really appreciative. But I really missed working on cars. So after a couple of years, the autonomous driving business was kind of starting to pop up and I went to work with a few of my old lab mates at Renault, which is the sister company of Nissan for those of us in the United States who aren’t familiar with Renault. But they have a small outlet here in Sunnyvale. So we built this a test vehicle, Callie, the white car with the stripes, and it was just a team of three of us. We were working on controls research. It was basically an extension of my PhD. We were all kind of coming from that same background.

Carrie Bobier-Tiu: So I had kind of the research experience there that I was really enjoying, but it wasn’t going anywhere into a product or out into the company. And we didn’t have a lot of support from the Renault or Nissan itself to do that. So I was starting to look for something different. And what drew me to TRI, it was a couple of things. One was that continued ability to do the research that I was really engaged with, and continuing on for my PhD and bringing that experience with me. And the other piece of it was the ability to work on a safety system that would go into real vehicles. So around the time that I was at Renault, I had a son. So it became very important to me.

Carrie Bobier-Tiu: It’s kind of like figuring out how to make cars safer for my family and for everyone that I know and since I have that background and expertise, I was really excited to come here and work on the guardian system that we have, which I’ll get into in a minute. The other thing that’s really great about TRI is our ability to do research with universities. That’s been mentioned a few times before, but this is the bottom of the last picture is me with some of the students at Stanford. We went out and got to drivers around with one of Toyota’s Drift drivers.

Carrie Bobier-Tiu: So, TRI, we have kind of two approaches to automated driving. So we’ve talked, think of it as one system, but two modes that are built on the same technologies. The first one is Guardian, which is a parallel autonomy system where the driver is still in control of the car. So we try to follow the driver’s intended commands but with minimal and intuitive interventions to maintain safety. And then the second half of our automated driving stack is the one that more people are familiar with, in general in the industry, which is the fully autonomous system where the autonomy system is determining some kind of policy for the vehicle to drive.

Carrie Bobier-Tiu: And we calculate commands that can maintain the safety of the vehicle, like for steering, acceleration and braking. So how does my team’s work fit into this? In the autonomous driving stack, as we call it, which is kind of the full set of software that runs the autonomous vehicle, we have some large groups of kind of algorithmic expertise or design. So there’s a perception system, which is taking in all the information from the sensors of the vehicle and figuring out what does the road look like, who’s on the road around us? And then on top of that comes the prediction system, which is, we know what’s happening now, but what’s going to happen in the future?

Carrie Bobier-Tiu: And finally, planning. So what should the car do, given what the environment looks like or in the Guardian case, what do we think the driver’s going to do in the near future? And control is a part of this planning problem. So what my team does, is something that we call Envelope Control. It’s something that I started developing, as I mentioned when I was doing my PhD. Envelope Control is a holistic control scheme that keeps a given system inside a safe operating regime or envelope. So we have a few things that we have to do. One, is stay on the road and don’t hit anything.

Carrie Bobier-Tiu: Two, is to maintain stability of the car. So, for example, if you’re driving on an icy road, you can lose control of the car and spin out. So we’re trying to prevent situations like that or situations where like a kid runs out in front of the car and you might not have time to stop, so you have to swerve around them. We also don’t want to ask the car to do something it can’t. So if it can’t swerve around for some reason, there’s something in the way, don’t ask it to do that.

Carrie Bobier-Tiu: If we don’t have enough steering capability or enough or the ability to brake fast enough, we can’t ask the car to do that. So we need to know what the limits are. And finally, for the Guardian system, we want to give the driver as much control of the car as possible, but help them maintain the safety of that vehicle. So the technology that we build kind of incorporates all of these things together. And that’s how we, here at TRI on the control team, are trying to create an uncrashable car. Thanks.

Ha-Kyung Kwon speaking

Research Scientist Ha-Kyung Kwon gives a talk on “Accelerating Materials Discovery by Helping You Fail Faster” at TRI Girl Geek Dinner.

Ha-Kyung Kwon: Hi, my name is Ha-Kyung Kwon, research scientist on the Accelerated Materials Design and Discovery or AMDD team here at TRI. So I’m also going to talk about my path to TRI, but I’m going to start from the very beginning. So I was born in Seoul, South Korea. Spent most of my childhood and adolescent years in Manila, in the Philippines, where my dad’s job took us. And it was fantastic growing up in the Philippines. There’s warm tropical weather, great food, white sandy beaches, which was on the picture there. But my favorite part was meeting friends from all over the world.

Ha-Kyung Kwon: And in fact, when I’m not here talking about science on a Thursday night, I’m out there playing flag football with my high school friends, their college friends, and their friends. So anyway, when I graduated from high school, I went to Princeton to study chemical and biological engineering. And my first year at Princeton I started doing research in an organic solar cells lab, and I loved it so much that I continued to do research in the same lab for the next three years. When I graduated from Princeton, I decided that I wanted to do even more polymer science research.

Ha-Kyung Kwon: So I went to Northwestern to get a PhD in material science and engineering. My PhD work was on the face behavior of ion containing polymers. These are polymers that are great candidates for polymer or plastic batteries. Plastic batteries, you might ask. But think about all the plastics or polymers that you know, and their rich properties, like styrofoam, which is light but rigid, nylons and polyesters, which you can wear, and Kevlar, which is extremely tough. It’s Bulletproof. Think about this wide array of properties that polymers have and imagine the possibilities. A polymer battery that is flexible, lightweight, safe, and even recyclable is not out of the question, but it’s going to take many, many years before we can get there and that’s because the scientific research process is incredibly slow.

Ha-Kyung Kwon: First, you have to understand the problem. What are the technical challenges of making a polymer battery? What’s been tried, what hasn’t been tried? Then you have to formulate a hypothesis. Maybe this material has a mechanical strength in the ionic conductivity that’s relevant for a polymer battery. Then you have to figure out how to make that material. Then you test it to see if it has the properties that you want. Once you have the results, you analyze them. Did your hypothesis work? Yes, no, maybe you don’t know. So you have to repeat the entire process. And this process is slow, not only because each step can take a long time, but because many scientific hypotheses end in failures, and that’s part of the process.

Ha-Kyung Kwon: It’s what enables us to learn, to refine our understanding of science and to take a step in the right direction. But this necessary process is unnecessarily slow. In a traditional industrial lab, the R&D cycle can take anywhere between five and 25 years, even more. And we don’t have this kind of time to solve the challenges that we face today. As of 2017, transportation accounted for more than 29% of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, and more than 82% of that came from driving. The technologies that we have in our cars and trucks today simply aren’t cutting it. For a sustainable future we need new materials and new technologies, and we can’t wait tens of years. So how do we accelerate this materials discovery process while enhancing scientists’ ability to learn, to discover, and to advance scientific knowledge?

Ha-Kyung Kwon: And that’s where my team comes in. Using big data, machine learning methods, and high throughput automated experiments that are driven by these methods, we develop tools to accelerate the design of advanced materials for zero emission technology, such as batteries and fuel cells. Our tools accelerate materials discovery by helping researchers fail faster. And what does that mean? Here are some of the projects that our team’s been working on. Matscholar uses natural language processing that contains over… Sorry. It contains information from over four million scientific abstracts. In the matter of minutes, it can help you discover whether materials that are similar to yours in composition, property, or application have already been studied.

Ha-Kyung Kwon: Something that without this tool could have taken you years, if not decades, to achieve. Using machine learning methods, we’ve also created beep, which can predict the lifetime of a battery from just the first hundred cycles. And this saves a ton of time on the battery development cycle because currently in order to test a battery’s lifetime, you have to cycle it until it dies, which can take more than thousands of cycles. In addition, using optimal experiment design, we can recommend the next set of experiments to run, given the last set that you ran and its results. We can even teach a scientific tool the scientific method in CAMD.

Ha-Kyung Kwon: Given an objective, such as discover a new stable material, it can formulate its own hypothesis, launch simulations according to that hypothesis, refine its hypothesis according to failed simulations, and keep running them until it discovers a new stable material, and it does the leg work so that you as a researcher don’t have to start from ground zero. As you can see, our work in AMDD really spans many materials, many applications, and many scientific disciplines. And this brings me to my favorite part, the people. Our team really brings together scientists and engineers from a diverse set of backgrounds anywhere from computational physics, applied math, to software engineering, who are passionate about discovering materials and accelerating materials discovery for zero emission technology.

Ha-Kyung Kwon: Our tools are interdisciplinary because they’ve been developed, tested, and used firsthand by researchers with diverse backgrounds: us. We also maintain deep connections to fundamental science. Our tools really draw from and build upon the intuition and knowledge of scientists and seek to empower scientists in their learning. And to do this, we work very closely with our consortium of more than 10 university partners and 125 researchers from those academic institutions. Our goal is to accelerate materials discovery, not just for the autonomous vehicle industry, but for the scientific community as a whole. By building tools, we’re building connections and communities because we believe that working together and failing together is the fastest way to sustainable solutions. Thank you.

Rita Yau: Thank you, Ha-Kyung. All right. Okay. To kick off the next section, we are going to be having Jen Cohen, our VP of Operations to tell us about her journey.

Jen Cohen speaking

VP of Operations Jen Cohens gives a talk on “I am the IT Guy” at TRI Girl Geek Dinner.

Jen Cohen: Hi, everyone. I’m so glad you’re here tonight. Thank you, Rita, for the introduction. My name is Jen Cohen, I’m VP of Operations for TRI. You’ll notice my presentation is I am the IT Guy. I promise I’ll explain that. How many people here are in IT? All right, I guess I kind I am. Ian, did you raise your hand back there?

Ian: Halfway.

Jen Cohen: Okay. Halfway. How many of you have had to say, “I am the IT guy?” Okay, so it’s not just me. I feel better. So I’m going to talk to you a little bit about my journey, a little bit about operations, and some of my hacks for high performance teams. So over the years I’ve had to say I am the IT guy. And recently I had to do a presentation talking about my career, and I realized that not only have I had to say it a lot, but I’ve actually learned to love it. I love that surprise when they realize that it’s actually me who’s going to be giving them the answer. And, you know, Facebook’s great about reminding us of what’s happened in the past. So I found this memory recently from 2011.

Jen Cohen: So apparently I’ve been saying the same thing for a while, “Wow, just had another vendor say, ‘Your IT guy needs to…’ It’s funny and sad that they never assume it could be a woman.” But at the end of the day, I love it now. I’ll share that way back when those were popular phones, I started my career as a sys admin at Cisco and I grew my career to do IT management at companies like Smith and Hawkin, which is gone now, but Birkenstock, anybody rocking the Birkenstocks tonight? The big question is do you have socks on? And then I grew from there to do technology development and platform management.

Jen Cohen: So platforms in the convention and real estate industry and the gift about doing technology, the gift about being in IT is that you get to see problems across the entire organization. And I really love to problem solve, but I realized technology wasn’t going to be enough. And so recently, a few years back, got into operations management at Line2, and then here at TRI. I will also share with you that I’m a mom. I have a daughter, Sabrina, who is a junior in college. She’s a computer science major, but she thinks she’s totally different than me. And I have my son Logan, he is a senior in high school and he’s an artist. And based on these slides we know he didn’t get it from me.

Jen Cohen: And then I’d like to talk to you a little bit about operations at TRI. So the teams that I am either responsible for or support some of them, IT of course, because I am the IT guy. But there’s more than me and the amazing team that does that work. CyberSecurity. I co-sponsor the Infrastructure Engineering team. So, that’s essentially a fancy way of saying dev ops. Facilities, Internal Comp, I’m not going to go through the list, but a good group of people who support a lot of fun things here. We have three sites in California, in Michigan, and where am I missing? Massachusetts. I can’t believe I forgot that. I was born there. I should remember.

Jen Cohen: We manage over a hundred key systems, and we support over 300 employees, contractors, and interns. And I decided to show you a picture of some of the amazing folks we have in our ops team because while I say I’m the IT guy, these are the really, the folks who make it happen. And the challenges that we have as Operations at TRI are speed. And while I’d like to have that car, that’s not actually the speed I’m talking about. We move really fast. Our researchers, they need things. We need to make sure that they have what they need at the right time, and we need them to be able to move quickly. We need to be, as has been mentioned, able to fail fast, and we need to get it done at my absolute favorite deadline, which is yesterday.

Jen Cohen: Ask anyone on the team. But we also have to have balance. Part of our job is to protect the company, to protect ourselves. And so we need to make sure we have things like cybersecurity. At the same time we need to enable people to use the technology and get out of their way. We need to have freedom within constraints. And we have these amazing, really smart researchers and software developers. And so we want to make sure that they have the time to work on the things that they’re there for and don’t have to build the technology. But at the same time, some of them know far more about the tech at their desk than we do. So we want to make sure that they have the self-service.

Jen Cohen: So we’re not blocking them. And finally we want to make sure that we’re flexible because there are things that are failing fast, and we need to make sure that we can pivot when the direction of research changes. And we need to build platforms that don’t pin us into a corner. So flexibility. So that’s a little bit about TRI, and the fun things that we do in our Operations team. And then I will briefly share with you three of my hacks for building high performance teams. So how many people here have heard of the concept tank in relation to support teams? Lauren, you don’t count. You know what that is. Anyone else?

Jen Cohen: So learned about tank, a few companies back at a PagerDuty summit, and the idea comes from video games, and I hate to say it, but it’s the person who takes all the hits in a video game, right? So from a support perspective, we have tier one and we have tier two and we want to make sure that our tier two teams who are handling escalations also have time to do the projects that they need to do to help our researchers be successful. And so if they’re handling escalations all day long, they’re not getting the chance to do their project work. So the idea of tank is that one day a week, each sys admin takes on the escalation, they get all the interruptions, they have to deal with it, they don’t get to do their project work, but they get four days the rest of the week relatively uninterrupted.

Jen Cohen: The nice thing about this is it absolutely forces cross training. So if Ian is the only one who knows how to fix the mics and Ian is on vacation, somebody else knows how because they’ve had to handle it on their escalation day. So that’s probably the most powerful thing I think we’ve brought to IT and Infrastructure Engineering here at TRI. My next hack is to celebrate wins. Now I know this can sound a little bit Pollyanna, but I will say, how many people here are problem solvers, and how often do you think about the ones behind you that you finished? Are you mostly looking at the ones coming forward? Yeah, so the problem with that is it’s easy to burn out. So I think it’s really important that we celebrate our wins, not just look forward to the next problem.

Jen Cohen: So in our weekly meetings, our teams list their wins first, so we get a chance to memorialize them and then we list our challenges, so that we have that moment of really acknowledging the work that we’ve done. The other nice thing about this as we put it into a deck that we can go back and look at, because I don’t know about you, but I have no idea what problems I was working on in January, February, March. Anybody here remember theirs? So the nice thing is because we memorialize this, we can go back at the end of the year and look back at what we’ve done and have that moment to remember. And I think that’s really important for support teams, especially, to keep moving forward.

Jen Cohen: And my final hack, and I am the IT guy and I love my technology, but is get off your keyboard. How many of you have been on the email, the GChat, the Slack that has turned into a book? Yeah, not just me. One of the things I found a few years back, I was working with these two developers who were, I think, on GChat and they were going at each other, but they were saying the same thing. They just didn’t realize it. We got them on the phone and within five minutes, they realized they were saying the same thing. The argument was over and they were coding the solution. And I realized at that point how about some part of my job is making sure that people connect.

Jen Cohen: So how many of you have seen the keyboard warrior at work? How many of you have been the keyboard warrior? I’ll admit it, I’ve been there, I’ve sent a flame email I probably shouldn’t have. So the reason I put this up here, and whether you’re a manager or you’re an individual contributor, doesn’t matter. Get off your keyboard. If that’s starting to happen, get on a call. I hate the phone too, but get on a call, get on a VTC, go to somebody’s desk. Because that really will help to work out those problems. And I will also say use Kelly’s tip. Assume best intentions when you do. All right, that’s it for me. Thank you guys so much.

Fatima Alloo speaking

Legal Counsel Fatima Alloo gives a talk on “Navigating the Intersection of Law and Technology” at TRI Girl Geek Dinner.

Fatima Alloo: Hello? Looks like it’s working. Thank you. Hi, everyone. My name is Fatima Alloo and I’m part of the legal team here at TRI. Thank you for coming. So many of you. So, I actually will be talking about navigating. It’s actually a less daunting presentation that’s, than my title might indicate. But what I really want to do is share a little bit about what it is that I do here and some of the awesome issues that we get engage on here as part of the legal team at TRI. And, first I’ll go ahead and start with my career background. So for me, it all started a long time ago when I graduated from law school. And there I am with my parents who are super proud and excited at the time.

Fatima Alloo: After law school, I went into patent litigation, and essentially, I was defending clients in patent infringement lawsuits. So that meant that I had to get quickly up to speed on the mechanics of various technologies, including fun topics like semiconductor fabrication and audio and visual signal processing. And while I loved it, the more I interacted with various tech companies, I started realizing that I was more interested in how the technologies that I was defending were actually developed. So I knew someone at an augmented reality startup called Meta, and it turned out that they needed some legal support. So, I convinced my law firm to second me there, part-time.

Fatima Alloo: And in short, I absolutely loved it. And since that time, I was just so eager to find a way to work full time for a cutting edge tech company with a heart. And that’s how I ended up here at TRI. Now, from all in working with these clients and companies on various, on existing and new technologies, what I realized is, I actually discovered something about the law. And what I realized is that while it’s obviously really important as a lawyer to know what the existing laws are, the law is actually a pretty dynamic and adaptable and can actually be shaped by individuals in this space. In short, the law can actually be fun. Surprise, surprise.

Fatima Alloo: So let me take a quick poll. Who gets excited when you hear the words, “legal’s involved”? Wow, thank you. Wow. It’s more than I expected. Most of you probably think something closer to this. And don’t worry, I’m not going to take any offense. Sometimes these feelings or thoughts are justified, but at TRI, as part of the legal team at TRI, we like to see ourselves a little bit differently instead of trying to attack or pounce on your project, we’re here to support it. And while I can’t help you with the technical side of things, what I can do is amplify your voice in how the next generation of tech is received. I can enable you to partner with other players in this space and I can help ensure that all of your hard work is properly secured.

Fatima Alloo: And ultimately for me, this is what makes it super rewarding to be part of legal team here at TRI. Now, I’m sure all of you are just itching to know, what does my day to day role look like as a lawyer at TRI? Fear not. I have put together three words to describe what I do here, and my team does here. Pioneer, partner and protect. First as a lawyer at TRI, we get to pioneer and all of you have heard Carrie’s presentation, all of the awesome work that we’re doing in the automated vehicle space. And we all have some sense in terms of how automated vehicles are going to disrupt the automotive industry. But the big question on the legal side of the equation is what should the laws and regulations that govern automated driving look like?

Fatima Alloo: What standards should manufacturers that are making automated vehicles adhere to? So, imagine with me for a moment that you are in an automated vehicle and it’s taking you to your destination, but for some reason you need to stop abruptly. Where is the stop button? What does it look like? What color is it? What shape is it, where is it located? And is it located in the same place across vehicles made by different car manufacturers? These all might seem like trivial questions, but it’s important to build a consensus with commercial players in the space for the industry to flourish. Now, we’re super lucky here at TRI because we’re part of Toyota and one of the biggest automobile makers in the world.

Fatima Alloo: And because Toyota is also part of the automated vehicle space, we actually get a seat at the table in determining how these laws are developed. And as a lawyer, consensus building, negotiation, drafting laws and regulations and standards, those are right in the wheelhouse of my skillset and our skillset. But what we need to do is hear and understand from our engineers on what they think the solutions to be to issues like this. And once we do hear from them, we can actually advocate on their behalf. The second thing that we get to do is partner kind of like C3PO and R2D2. Anyway, so as you’re on your way to bringing, onto building groundbreaking technologies, you’re going to need some support. And while we have many brilliant minds here at TRI, many of whom you’ve heard from and will hear from, no company can do this alone.

Fatima Alloo: So you might need to find support outside of our company. Maybe you want to partner with a university or a consultant or a startup that’s developing a component that you just need to have to make your solution come to life. Our job then becomes to make that partnership happen, support the development of your tech, and then to think through about whether this project is really in the business’s best interest. So let’s say, for example, you’ve decided to partner with one of our universities and, as Carrie mentioned, we partner with so many universities, and Ha-Kyung. And so let’s say one thing you might want to think through is, what does each player want to get out of that deal?

Fatima Alloo: The university might want to ensure that they own the IP that’s generated in a joint collaboration. TRI might then want to ensure that we have licenses to that jointly developed technology in case we want to commercialize the tech down the line. The point is, that as lawyers, we often have to think through these situations and then memorialize these agreements in writing. The last thing that we do is protect. Now while you’re engaging with different partners, one big question for TRI is how do we make sure that we’re protected in the process? So I often, am asking several questions, basically. For example, does the partner have access to our systems, data, or code?

Fatima Alloo: Has a partner agreed to be liable if they fail to protect our systems, data, or code? And, sometimes it’s more along the lines of are their cybersecurity standards strong enough to actually guard our code? Occasionally I ask the question of–sometimes the questions are very different in, might be something closer to, as a TRI employee, you think copyrighted images that they don’t have a license for when giving a presentation before hundreds of people. The point is that because we’re in a very hot space, that being self-driving car research and robotics for mobility, we’re subject to a lot of both malicious and inadvertent threats that could cause a company like ours to lose their competitive edge.

Fatima Alloo: And for you Black Panther fans out there, I like to think of our role as protecting the secrets of Wakanda. So, now that you’d have a better idea of what it is that I do here at TRI, and what a lawyer does more generally at a tech company in terms of pioneering, partnering, and protecting, I hope that the next time you have a project you might be the one to get legal involved, and see how we can help you get to wherever you’re going. Thank you.

Rita: Thank you, Fatima. All right. With that, we’re going to welcome Steffi Paepcke who is a Senior UX Designer on our robotics team to the stage.

Steffi Paepcke: All right. Am I on? Can you hear me?

Audience Member: Yes.

Steffi Paepcke speaking

Senior UX Designer of Robotics Steffi Paepcke gives a talk on “Designing Robots to Serve an Aging Population” at TRI Girl Geek Dinner.

Steffi Paepcke: Yes. Okay, great. Cool. Hi everyone. My name is Steffi Paepcke. I’m a Senior UX Designer here. I work on the robotic side of the world and I don’t want to leave you hanging. I’m going to tell you how I got here as well. I started by studying psychology at UC Santa Cruz and after that I kind of didn’t really know what to do. I thought about being a therapist. That had been sort of my goal for a long time. And I wound up at Willow Garage as a research assistant.

Audience Member: Oh.

Steffi Paepcke: Oh, someone’s heard of Willow?

Audience Member: Yes.

Steffi Paepcke: Yeah, cool. Willow Garage, for those of you who don’t know, it was a now defunct privately funded research company. We did all kinds of really exciting work. The PR2 robot, we made turtle bots. We made what now is beam telepresence robots and we did a lot of the maintenance, the primary maintenance on ROS robot operating system and it was at Willow Garage, it was really a pivotal position for me is where I realized that I can combine my interest in humans and how they think and feel and interact with other people and objects. I could combine that with technology and in this case robotics.

Steffi Paepcke: And that was a really big sort of turning point for me where I kind of found robotics is the field that I wanted to work in. I realized also that I needed more training. So I went to Carnegie Mellon and received a Masters in Human-Computer Interaction. And then after that I came back to the Bay Area where I grew up and co-founded Open Source Robotics Foundation, which is now just called Open Robotics. And they are now the primary maintainers of ROS and Gazebo, which is a physics-based robot simulator. One of the biggest projects OSRF worked on was the DARPA Robotics Challenge.

Steffi Paepcke: Which was a little while ago now, but it was a very impressive program put on by DARPA where teams competed in search and rescue tasks with an Atlas humanoid robot or with a robot that they had built themselves. And the program manager of that project was Gill Pratt, who is the TRI CEO now. So I ended up here and have been working on really exciting robots since arriving about three years ago. So I’m part of the UX team. We have user experience researchers, designers and industrial designers. And our main goal is to help TRI figure out what sorts of robotic capabilities to make to improve the quality of life for an aging population.

Steffi Paepcke: So you’ve probably heard that the population is aging relatively quickly in the world right now, approximately 8% of the population is 65 and older. By 2050, that’s supposed to double to 16%. And in Japan, this problem is the most pressing. That’s where the population is aging the fastest. Currently about a quarter of the population in Japan is 65 and older. And by 2050, that number is supposed to be one third. If you think about it, that is staggering, it’s one out of three people will be 65 and older in Japan in 2050. So it’s critical that we find solutions also to the shortage, the caregiver shortage.

Steffi Paepcke: The goal is to make robotic capabilities that can support older adults aging in place longer, taking care of tasks they don’t want to do anymore or can no longer perform. And also alleviating some of the sort of day to day tasks that caregivers need to take care of. So alleviating the chore-like tasks so that they can focus on the human to human interactions that really make caregiving what it is. So that’s our main goal as a UX team here and user experience as a field has become a lot more prevalent in tech companies over the years. It took a little while for companies to really understand that UX was a critical part of creating a successful product.

Steffi Paepcke: And it’s been similarly slow now with robotics as more and more robotics companies crop up. Some of them have user experience teams, a lot of them don’t. I think hardware is obviously very challenging and takes longer than software in terms of development process, but it’s really critical that we have UX in the workflow from the very beginning because you can spend a whole lot of time creating a hardware solution and then you get to the point where you realize you were solving the wrong problem or a problem that doesn’t even exist and then you’re really sort of in trouble.

Steffi Paepcke: So I’m going to walk you through some of the methodologies we use to combine user experience with robotics. What you probably have heard of is just interviews and focus groups. So we do those. Those are pretty standard in UX and we also do participatory design sessions, which is when you work with your target population, in our case, older adults, to come up with solutions together. So you’re not just doing the research and then going back to your office and coming up with the solution. You’re actually sitting down with an older adult and designing something together and co-creating it. Another really valuable methodology we use is called contextual inquiry, which is when you follow someone around and observe them doing a task that you want to learn more about without really interrupting, just sort of asking questions so that you understand the process.

Steffi Paepcke: And in our case we wanted to understand the grocery shopping process for older adults. So we followed them, we met them at their house, followed them in their car to the grocery store, did the whole loop around the store, came home, watched them bring the groceries in, put them away. And it was very illuminating. You can see on the bottom there’s one kitchen that we saw, which has pretty much no mess in it. It’s pretty sparse, a lot of cabinetry, really spacious. And then compared to the kitchen above, it was a very small little apartment with items stacked on the walls and the cabinets were very full.

Steffi Paepcke: So it’s important for us as designers to understand the workspace that our robots will be functioning in, but also very important for the engineers to see what sort of dynamic environment their robot needs to be successful in. You can also see the white cabinetry is pretty reflective, which can cause problems for certain sensors on robots. This is all really important information to bring back to the engineering teams and we try to bring at least one engineer with us when we do these visits so that it’s not just us sort of regurgitating what we saw, but really bringing them along for the ride. Another valuable insight we got was the image with the fridge.

Steffi Paepcke: So we opened the fridge and notice that the woman we were chatting with had kept all of her items at the very edge of the shelves. And when we asked her why that was, she said, “Oh yeah, I just can’t bend over and reach in.” And it’s not something that I would have asked about, “How far back do you put your items on the shelf?” But by being there and really observing it firsthand, we’re able to understand that, that’s one of the problems that comes up a lot. And that turned out to be a really big trend. Being able to stoop safely and without pain is something that is challenging for a lot of older adults, which is sort of common sense, but it helps to see this in the context of people’s lives over and over again. It really drives it home.

Steffi Paepcke: Finally, we do a lot of home walkthroughs, which are probably my favorite. We find people who are pretty open to sharing their lives, which not everyone is, but we meet them at their home and we go into every single room in their home and talk about the tasks that they do in their home, the challenges that they face and the goal there is to figure out if there are any things that we can create solutions for to help them. This again, is really good for context setting for us. There’s one, I apologize that it’s so small, but there’s a person, she wheeled an office chair onto her little patio and she weatherproofed it with plastic bags and whenever she needs to reach the hose that’s on the ground to water the plants, she sits on the chair, lowers herself down, reaches for the hose, raises herself back up and does it that way.

Steffi Paepcke: And that’s not ever something I would have thought to ask about. How do you reach the hose on the floor? But we, by being there with her, we got to witness the trouble she goes through, right? To do something as what I would consider simple as picking up a hose. It can be a real challenge for some people. She also is the owner of the closet next to her and she said that anything above about shoulder height she just pretty much consider as lost and she doesn’t ever expect to get to it again. Yeah. So you really learn about the challenges very viscerally that people face. And then finally, I really like the dishwasher down below.

Steffi Paepcke: This was another participant who doesn’t generate enough dirty dishes to need to run the dishwasher. So she stores her plastic bags and her plastic containers up there. And again, she doesn’t use the lower rack because that’s too far down. So we learned a lot about the importance of designing robots that can reach areas that older adults are not able to, or people with different physical abilities. And yeah, so these are some of the methodologies that I think are really critical in getting on the right track to making a robot that actually solves real problems. You can get pretty far with the interviews, but the data is just much richer when you can actually follow people around. And whenever I have a captive audience, I like to make a plug for getting more diverse folks into robotics. Robots are going to be everywhere in our homes, all over.

Steffi Paepcke: We’re going to be riding around in them. And if robots are not designed by a very diverse group of people, they’re not going to serve people equally and fairly. And we’re at the point now in robotics where it’s really starting to pick up. And if we don’t have diverse designers working on these challenges now, it’s going to take a really long time to catch up in the future. So there’s a niche for everyone really in robotics. You can come at it from the law perspective, mechanical software, electrical engineering, design, psychology. There’s so many ways that you can contribute to the robotics field. And if you’re thinking about making a change, I really encourage you to consider the robotics field and just getting involved. It’s a really exciting time to be a part of this industry, and that’s all I got.

Suzanne Basalla speaking

Chief of Staff Suzanne Basalla gives a talk on “2020 Olympics Showcases Mobility and Inclusion” at TRI Girl Geek Dinner.

Suzanne Basalla: Good evening everybody. I’m Suzanne Basalla. I’m Chief of Staff here at TRI and I’m going to talk to you about mobility and inclusion and really talk about inclusion from two different lenses. Like the speakers before me, I want to tell you a little bit about my path to TRI, which is a little bit different. I did actually take a fair number of STEM courses when I was in college, but I majored in Asian studies and the reason I had STEM courses is because I joined the Navy right out of college and spent 13 years as an intelligence officer in the Navy. And so I took the engineering and physics classes you need for that.

Suzanne Basalla: And the Navy is what gave me the opportunity to go to Japan. And what you’ll see about my career and what brought me to TRI is I’m very passionate about working with US and Japan, both countries, and bringing the best from both countries to solve problems and the issues that are super important to both of our countries, whether it’s our economy or our national security or issues like that. So the Navy, I was with the Navy in Japan for four years and I really fell in love with Japan. And more importantly, I found my passion, which was to really work at that intersection between the United States and Japan, and committed my career to alliance management, which is really focusing more on the national security side first of the relationship.

Suzanne Basalla: And so through my career I’ve had a chance to work between Japan–Tokyo and Washington, DC, mostly on the relationships. So I had a chance to work for brief time at the White House, worked at the department of defense where I was the Japan director working on our defense relationship. And then I also had a chance to serve as the Senior Advisor to our ambassador in Tokyo. And that was a really pivotal time in my life because I was in Japan on March 11th, 2011, which if you may remember, was the triple disaster of the earthquake, tsunami, and the nuclear disaster and was part of the US government’s response on that.

Suzanne Basalla: But I actually then really realized that I wanted to get involved in the nonprofit side of… I’d gotten [inaudible] nonprofit in order to really help the people because fundamentally it’s the people of our two countries that make the relationship strong. So I spent five years as the COO, EVP of a nonprofit, the US-Japan Council. And the bulk of my work that I was doing was helping the next generation for US-Japan relations, particularly a lot of work on women and girls empowerment, which was really exciting for me. Now working in US-Japan relations, Toyota… I, of course, got to know Toyota. Toyota is a global brand.

Suzanne Basalla: If you’re in Japan, Toyota is such a dominant company. There’s even the headquarters is in Toyota City, which gives you a sense of how important Toyota isto Japan. It’s also really important the United States. We have plants in 10 states in this country and many, many jobs are created through Toyota. So when I was invited to come and work at Toyota, at TRI, for me it was a huge opportunity to continue to my work on really solving the most important problems before our countries working in an exciting space of AI and thinking about the important economic and social issues from robotics and automated driving that you heard about earlier tonight.

Suzanne Basalla: So I am Chief of Staff and a lot of people ask me, “What is Chief of Staff?” And I usually tell them that means I’m a Jack of all trades. But today I’m excited to say I’m a Jill of all trades. And so I want to talk to you about two areas that I get to focus on, what my job is to really follow the priorities and strategic issues that are important to my CEO. And the two I want to talk to you about, one is the Olympics. So I hope you all know that the Olympics going to be Tokyo next summer, Tokyo 2020, and Tokyo plans for that to be the most innovative Olympics in the history of the Olympics. You may or may not know that Toyota is the most… The largest sponsor of the Olympics and Paralympics and Special Olympics in history.

Suzanne Basalla: And we’re going to be sponsoring the Olympics all the ways to at least 2024, the Paris Olympics. Here at TRI we’re really privileged because we’re working on a lot of the technology that’s going to be shown in Toyota’s demonstrations at the Olympics. So the bulk of the driving team and much of the robotics team and others in the ops and PR part of TRI are focused on getting ready for Toyota’s presence at the Olympics next year, which is really exciting. My job as Chief of Staff includes kind of helping the leadership team organize across the company so that we are prepared and doing what Toyota needs. And then kind of my sweet spot is engaging with the external stakeholders, especially in Toyota.

Suzanne Basalla: But I also get to work with the Olympic committee. I get to work with other companies that are sponsors, such as Visa or Intel. I also get to work with the broadcasters, and really cool, as occasionally I get to interact with some of the athletes and the Paralympians and they’re super inspiring. Toyota is sponsoring the Olympics because it wants to transform ourselves as a company into a mobility company. And what I’ve been really proud of is, through my work, seeing how much Toyota is using its sponsorship to lift the Paralympics and really focusing on the topic of mobility for all, which aligns with the things you’ve already heard tonight, and accessibility and inclusion.

Suzanne Basalla: The second area that I get to work on is be a champion for diversity and inclusion in the company, which is very important to our CEO. And you heard from Kelly who… Our Executive Vice President. Diversity and inclusion is important throughout the company. It’s not my job to do it. I’m the champion for it within the company, but it’s the responsibility of all the leaders. And you saw that all of our leaders from… Who are here in the headquarters today are here showing their support and that is very typical of the company. But I have the privilege of being the champion for diversity and inclusion in the company, which means I get to be in a lot of different conversations and continue to help us to think about how we can do better and do more.

Suzanne Basalla: Because we want to create as inclusive environment as possible here to attract diversity and get the most out of diversity that’s here. People call employee resource groups different things at different companies. But we at TRI have started three employee resource groups and these are initiated by employees. We’re still a pretty new company. I don’t know if that actually came across in the speeches yet, but we’re pretty new company. We’ve only started our ERG program just a little over a year ago and we’re really excited that we have three employee resource groups already up and running. One is Women and Allies. Yeah. One is LGBTQ, sorry. Plus.

Suzanne Basalla: And then one is Parents, which is our newest ERG and were just started and it’s focusing right now mostly on new parents or parents, young children, but bringing together people who are facing issues as working parents. And so we call these resource groups for a couple of reasons. First of all, they’re a resource for the members of the affinity group that belonged to it. It’s a place for them to get together and share their concerns and work together to find creative ways to address those concerns. They’re also a resource to the TRI leadership, to the CEO and the leadership team because it gives us a way to hear about what are the issues that are important to those communities and they are a resource for the company.

Suzanne Basalla: Because they advance a caring community in a respectful environment in the company, which aligned with the values that Kelly talked about earlier. So hopefully you’ve had a chance to learn about some of the ERGs. If not, ask us more questions. We love to talk about the activities in the ERGs but of course, part of the emphasis we place on diversity is why we’re so pleased to be hosting Girl Geek X tonight. We are so grateful that you’re here tonight. So I want to thank you. I’m going to turn it over, I think to Rita for some final remarks, but thank you very much.

Rita Yau: Thank you. Did all of you guys have a good time tonight? Yeah. Awesome. We again, we are so thankful for Girl Geek. Thank you guys for coming tonight.

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Podcast Highlights: 15 Helpful Insights on Managing Up

In continuing our Podcast Highlights mini series, this week, we’re sharing 19 helpful insights from the Girl Geek X podcast that will help you manage your career by “managing up!”

If you haven’t already subscribed to the Girl Geek X podcast, head on over to iTunesSpotifyStitcher, or Google Play and get ready to start binge listening! 

This week, Girl Geek X Co-Founder & CTO Sukrutha Bhadouria is breaking out quotes and insights from her favorite release on the Girl Geek X Podcast — Episode 15: Managing Up & Working with Your Manager.

Why this topic matters, and why it’s her favorite episode:

Sukrutha Bhadouria, CTO & Co-Founder of Girl Geek X
Sukrutha Bhadouria, Co-Founder & CTO at Girl Geek X and Sr. Manager, Engineering at Salesforce

“I think managing up is so hard that no one really taught me, or it didn’t even come to my attention that I needed to focus on it until at least five or six years into my career. It’s really hard to know what’s expected of you and how you’re being evaluated if you don’t know how to manage up. I think the best way is to get on the same page and understand a bit more about what your manager wants to see, what their goals are and how you can help them reach their goals. We don’t talk about this enough, and learning how to manage up earlier could help so many of us move ahead faster.”

15 Helpful Insights on How to “Manage Up”

15. Make your manager look good.

“If you want to be a better employee, think about ‘What is my manager measured on, what would make them look good to their boss?’ What are the metrics, what are the things that they really care about? Then when you’re prioritizing your time, think about your decisions in the context of ‘How can I get my manager promoted?’ Because if you can get your manager promoted, you make everybody look good.” —Gretchen DeKnikker, COO at Girl Geek X

14. Ask questions.

“Have direct conversations. Do not guess. Do not try to guess. For example, I was hired for a job and two weeks in, my boss was fired. My brand new boss was fired. He and a few other people who were brand new to the company and brand new to the team – we were opening a San Francisco office – they were all I had to turn to.

We had a trip planned to go to New York, and my colleague who’d only been there a few months longer, was like, ‘Well, I don’t know if we should go.’ And I was like, ‘I’m going, and I’m going to sit down with the CEO while I’m in New York and I’m going to ask him, ‘What were your expectations for my role? What were the goals? What are the things I could do in the first 90 days?’ Because I don’t have a manager anymore and I need to know.’ It was a brand new role.

If I hadn’t asked questions, I would have worked on the wrong things. I wouldn’t have prioritized my time in a way that would have allowed me to meet expectations.

And my colleague’s first response was this idea that you shouldn’t go meet, you shouldn’t go ask, and you should just sort of sit back and wait to see what happens. I’m so glad that wasn’t my first instinct and that I went in and had the conversation.” —Gretchen DeKnikker, COO at Girl Geek X

“I’ve asked questions like, ‘What is the thing that’s worrying you the most, work-wise? Or what is your biggest goal? What do you want your org to be known for?’ And through that, I get a sense of where I can insert myself and make my manager successful. That is the main thing. When you’re managing up, you want to make your manager a success in their job by basically managing them.” —Sukrutha Bhadouria, Co-Founder & CTO at Girl Geek X and Sr. Manager, Engineering at Salesforce

13. Be vulnerable.

Sandhya Hegde speaking
Sandhya Hegde, EVP of Marketing at Amplitude

“You have to be vulnerable. You have to say stuff like, “Hey, I care about how you feel about me,” which is a vulnerable place to be. When I worked up the courage to say it, it made a huge difference. Because you are vulnerable, the other person starts being more vulnerable. So yeah, if you feel like you’re working with someone who’s not opening up, honestly the best thing to do is just be vulnerable with them and create that space for them to reciprocate.” —Sandhya Hegde, EVP of Marketing at Amplitude

12. Learn your manager’s working style.

“Try to understand your manager’s style. Do they like going for walks in their one-on-ones or do they prefer it to be a coffee? Or do they prefer to be in a conference room? Trying to understand more about their working style will help you get on the same page. It will break the ice, and then you can get to the real stuff.” —Sukrutha Bhadouria, Co-Founder & CTO at Girl Geek X and Sr. Manager, Engineering at Salesforce

Angie Chang, CEO & Co-Founder of Girl Geek X
Angie Chang, CEO & Co-Founder of Girl Geek X

“Managing up is about the willingness to do a little bit of work and ask more questions instead of just being like, ‘Well, my manager is not giving me what I want and I’m just going to be resentful.’ Ask more questions to figure out what the working relationship is going to be with this type of person. I’m sure there are professional tests that will then name this personality and give you hints on how to best interact with this type of person that you can investigate.” —Angie Chang, Co-Founder & CEO at Girl Geek X

11. There’s an app for that!

“There’s a piece of software if you’re using Gmail for work called Crystal Knows – it’ll tell you how to best communicate with anyone through email. If you were to read mine, it would be like, ‘Use short, concise sentences. Make your point quickly. Don’t use a bunch of flowery language.’ That sort of thing. And I thought it was pretty accurate, but it’s super interesting. I think you can get an initial thing for free and then you have to pay, but it’s pretty amazing. Even if you just run it on your own inbox to see, ‘Oh yeah, that is how I like to get emails.’” —Gretchen DeKnikker, COO at Girl Geek X

10. Talk to your manager’s past reports.

“When I get a new manager or assigned to someone new or move to a new org, I talk to people who reported to them for a long time. I try to get a sense of what it’s like to report to them and what their managing style is. Just so that I’m better prepared. It’s helped me so much to know what kind of things they focus on from someone else’s perspective.

I personally don’t think anyone is a perfect manager. A lot of how good of a manager someone is to you is within your control. I have had some good managers in the recent past, but I’ve also seen other people struggle to report to them. Taking things into my own hands and really, really focusing on the relationship and managing up has helped tremendously. I did my homework to get a sense of what it’s like to report to them, what they like and what they don’t like. And I figured out how to work around their dislikes. I haven’t had a situation in a really long time where things just aren’t working, because I invest a lot very early in the relationship.” —Sukrutha Bhadouria, Co-Founder & CTO at Girl Geek X and Sr. Manager, Engineering at Salesforce

“If you’re reaching out to a new manager’s former team members, you just have to approach it from a positive angle. Like, Hey, I’m just trying to do really great. If you could give me three pieces of advice on how to be successful in working with him, what would you say?” —Gretchen DeKnikker, COO at Girl Geek X

9. Know when to move on.

Gretchen DeKnikker, COO at Girl Geek X
Gretchen DeKnikker, COO at Girl Geek X

“There are people that are just not people that you enjoy working with, and that’s managers or colleagues or subordinates and at some point, there’s only so much you can do to try to smooth that over. Then you just either take that person at face value and accept that there are just times where things aren’t gonna work, or you go somewhere else.

Sometimes you’ll have a manager and you just know that they are never going to lift you up. They are never going to put you center stage. They are always going to keep you in their shadow. I’ve had those, and you have to move on. You absolutely have to move on. You cannot let someone steal your spotlight. Not on your career path.” —Gretchen DeKnikker, COO at Girl Geek X

8. Ask for a performance review.

Sandy Liao speaking
Sandy Liao, Head of Talent, Culture & People Operations at HomeLight.

“Incorporating performance data is crucial to the business, as well as your own career growth. If your manager has not spoken with you for the past quarter or past six months about how you’re doing from a performance standpoint, it’s super important to make that calendar invite and make them have that conversation.

Especially working in a startup, these things kind of get out of hand when we’re trying to do like 100 things at once. But before any of us start analyzing a new opportunity, it is just necessary to have conversations with people that are mentoring you and that are working with you directly.” Sandy Liao, Head of Talent, Culture & People Operations at HomeLight

7. Be objective & use data when navigating a challenging relationship.

“Using data is a great way to ask for help and make progress with your manager. It’s like, ‘Okay, we set these goals and I didn’t meet two of them, so here’s what I need to meet the rest.’ If you’re able to kind of frame these conversations with your manager objectively, then that’s one way to get help.

Take it back to an objective place of like, ‘We’re here to do this job. These are the goals along those lines and can you just tell me the extent to whether or not I’m fulfilling that?’ I think being able to bring the conversation back to that is an effective way to manage a more challenging relationship.” —Rachel Jones, Podcaster at Girl Geek X

6. Be specific when asking for help.

“Probably the hardest part of this when you’re earlier in your career is that you may not know exactly what you need to hit your goals. It’s hard to articulate to your manager, this is exactly why. ‘If I had XYZ, then I feel like ABC would…’ Right?

I think it can be dangerous if you’re like, ‘Oh well if I had this one piece of software, I could do this better. Or if I had an extra person, I could do this better.’ Those are hard cases to make to your manager, particularly if there’s an impression that you’re not hitting your goals already.

You want to be very specific on what it is that you’re asking for and what you think the ROI will be. Because a fuzzy ROI is a hard argument to make to a manager to get additional resources.” —Gretchen DeKnikker, COO at Girl Geek X

5. Take responsibility for your career growth.

Don’t think that your career growth is just fully your manager’s responsibility. It is just as much yours. And so if you don’t see those conversations coming up, you need to be bringing it up. 

As a manager, I’m super excited and motivated to help people who seem like they want to be helped and who are motivated as well. It’s really difficult to grow someone’s career when they’re just not as motivated to do it. And that’s fine too. Sometimes people want to just stay at their level. That’s totally cool. But if you really want to grow, you want to be bringing it up a lot with your manager. —Sukrutha Bhadouria, Co-Founder & CTO at Girl Geek X and Sr. Manager, Engineering at Salesforce

4. Know who your manager is investing in.

“Your manager controls your advancement and your visibility within the company. So if it seems like your manager is investing in other people and not investing in you, rather than just being a manager who doesn’t really invest in anyone in their team, definitely consider whether this is the right place for you. Because a manager can have a huge impact on your career, and you don’t want to be begging for attention from someone who’s just never going to give it to you.” —Gretchen DeKnikker, COO at Girl Geek X

3. Find a mentor.

Vidya Setlur
Vidya Setlur, Staff Research Scientist & Manager at Tableau Software

“Some of the best mentors that I’ve come across have been people who were my managers in the past, maybe at a different company or in a different line whom I have respected and trusted, but because they are not my manager anymore there is a different type of relationship where it can be more mentoring as opposed to managing.

There’s a lovely inflection there that happens. So kind of seek out into your network and find those people that you’ve worked closely with, or that managed you — directly or indirectly. See if they can help mentor you in your next path or next effort.” —Vidya Setlur, Staff Research Scientist & Manager at Tableau Software

2. Maintain relationships with past managers.

“I keep really strong relationships with managers… and they’re people that I go back to when I’m looking for a new job. Not necessarily for them to hire me, but they know me so well, and when I’m trying to figure out what I’m good at, what I like doing, and what direction might I go in, their input is helpful.

A past manager is someone who knows you really well to be able to kind of give their two cents, even if they haven’t been working with you recently.

I mean, not all of your managers are people that you want to necessarily keep taking advice from, but I think I’ve been really fortunate that most of my previous managers are people that I want to reach out to. I still go back and can be like, ‘I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up, help me!’ And they do.” —Gretchen DeKnikker, COO at Girl Geek X

1. Remember that your manager is human.

Rachel Jones, Podcaster at Girl Geek X
Rachel Jones, Podcaster at Girl Geek X

“Knowing how awkward the transition into management can be for people is definitely something to keep in mind when you’re working with your manager. A lot of people are put into this role without getting any kind of specific training or support on what it means to be a manager. Keeping that in mind when you’re interacting with your managers or setting expectations for what that relationship should look like. Definitely focus on the work that you have to do to maintain that relationship and drive your career forward, and involve your manager in that.” —Rachel Jones, Podcaster at Girl Geek X

Check out the full episode or podcast transcript for more great insights on managing up and managing your career, or subscribe to our YouTube channel for even more insightful content on topics that matter to women and allies.


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.

Ritu Narayan, Founder of Zūm, Modern Ride Service for Children, Wins Female Entrepreneur of the Year Award!

Ritu Narayan - Founder & CEO of Zum

Selected from over 1,500 Entries, Zum’s Founder and CEO wins Gold Stevie® Award.

Ritu Narayan, founder and CEO of Zūm, a modern ride service for children, has been selected as the recipient of a Gold Stevie® Award for Female Entrepreneur of the Year in the Consumer Services Category. This news comes on the heels of the company’s recent expansion to six new states. Zūm now serves over 250 school districts and 4,000 schools across seven states.

The Stevie Awards for Women in Business honor women executives, entrepreneurs, employees, and the companies they run — worldwide.  The Stevie Awards have been hailed as the world’s premier business awards. More than 1,500 entries were submitted this year for consideration in more than 90 categories, including Executive of the Year, Entrepreneur of the Year, Women Helping Women, and Women Run Workplace of the Year.

A former executive at Oracle, Yahoo! and eBay, Narayan founded Zūm when she couldn’t find safe and reliable rides for her own children without sacrificing her career.

41% of U.S. women say it’s hard to advance their careers due to childcare issues, and 10 million women have already left the workforce due to a lack of safe and reliable options.

Ritu’s mission was to create a seamless service that makes child transportation easier, safer and more transparent for families and schools.

“As both a female entrepreneur and a working mother, this recognition is very meaningful for me,” says Ritu Narayan, co-founder, and CEO of Zum. “What started as solving a problem for me and my family is now disrupting an entrenched but severely outdated transportation system built around a fleet of 500,000+ yellow buses nationally. We are helping both schools and working parents address the needs of today’s busy schedules and wider transportation needs.”

Under Ritu’s leadership, Zūm continues to fulfill its mission to be the leader in safe and reliable rides for kids, with 3X YoY growth. The company has also doubled its number of employees during the past year, with women now making up around 50% of the Zūm team.

Ritu has successfully raised over $70 million via traditional venture capital funding, including a $19 million Series B led by Spark Capital in 2018, and most recently, a $40 million Series C led by BMW i Ventures with participation from Spark Capital, Sequoia Capital, and Volvo Cars Tech Fund.

In a market with a lot of untapped opportunity, Zūm is poised for exponential growth and might just be poised to become the next woman-led Unicorn startup! Move over, Uber.

About Zūm
Zūm solves transportation challenges facing schools and families by providing a modern ride service for children. The use of Zum’s technology significantly reduces school overhead and commute times by providing the right vehicle for every trip while also providing real-time tracking of rides so parents know where their student is at all times. Zum drivers have clean driving records, several years of childcare experience and earn the highest hourly rate in the industry. Zum, founded in 2015, and based in Silicon Valley, is backed by notable investors including Sequoia Capital, Spark Capital, and BMW iVentures. www.ridezum.com 

About the Stevie Awards
Stevie Awards are conferred in seven programs: the Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards, the German Stevie Awards, The American Business Awards®, The International Business Awards®, the Stevie Awards for Women in Business, the Stevie Awards for Great Employers, and the Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. Stevie Awards competitions receive more than 12,000 nominations each year from organizations in more than 70 nations. Honoring organizations of all types and sizes and the people behind them, the Stevies recognize outstanding performances in the workplace worldwide. Learn more about the Stevie Awards at www.StevieAwards.com.


Mode Girl Geek Dinner & Lightning Talks: “Limitless” (Video + Transcript)

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

Meeting people is fun and easy at Mode Girl Geek Dinner in San Francisco.

Meeting fellow girl geeks is fun and easy at Mode Girl Geek Dinner in San Francisco’s Design District.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Transcript of Mode Girl Geek Dinner – Lightning Talks:

Heather Rivers: Oh my gosh, there are so many of you here. This is very exciting. Welcome to our very first Girl Geek Dinner, I am Heather. I am Mode’s CTO. Let’s see if we can get the technology to work. Yup, there’s me. Yeah. When I started at Mode, I didn’t have gray hair. This is dyed so long ago. So yeah, really, really excited to be hosting. You may have noticed that the theme for tonight is limitless. That can mean a lot of different things in different contexts.

Heather Rivers: Let’s just do a quick poll, why do you think we chose limitless? This is room of self-selected geeks. I am also a geek. Who here thought we meant the SQL LIMIT keyword. Anyone? Okay, not too many. Yeah, we got some Mode employees, definitely. Okay, raise your hand if you thought we meant the Bradley Cooper media franchise? Yup, okay. Yes, you’re all correct. We meant both of those. We also meant it in a third way.

Heather Rivers: So in 2008, at the Democratic National Convention, Michelle Obama famously said, “The only limit to the height of your achievement is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work for them.” You’re about to see seven incredible women who fully embody this quote every day. I work with them, so I can say that.

Heather Rivers: Nobody joins a startup because it’s easy. Some startup people in the audience? Yeah. Any of you join startups because it was easy? No? Cool. Yeah, me either. Or obvious, or because success is guaranteed? No, not seeing a lot of yeses there. So, you join a startup because your dreams are high and because you’re willing to work for them. That’s what all of… Oh, it’s lo-res, sorry. Enhance. Enhance. No, enhance. Okay. Technology.

Heather Rivers: That’s what all of these women have done, along with the rest of the team day by day. They took a chance on the startup, they dreamed big, they worked hard, and as a result, they’ve set both themselves and this company on an incredible growth trajectory.

Heather Rivers: So in the six years that I’ve been in Mode, again, the hair. I’ve seen it go from a pre-seed proof of concept, in a super crowded market, by the way, to a simple but promising little app with a few customers, to a real product with traction and revenue, to a leader among data science platforms.

Heather Rivers: And it’s been really exciting to watch us win power users among data scientists and analysts, but we’re not done. There’s still so much more we can do. We don’t have to limit ourselves to just serving data science teams.

Heather Rivers: And that’s why just a couple weeks ago, we launched the latest step change in Mode’s trajectory. We call it Helix. So Helix is an instant responsive data engine that lets not just data scientists, but anyone, run analysis on huge data stats, up to 10 gigabytes at a time. All in the browser, and all without writing a single line of code.

Heather Rivers: Helix lets you explore your data without limits, SQL or otherwise. And I can’t be 100% sure, but I’m pretty sure that’s what Michelle Obama was talking about in her talk. Don’t try to look that up, that’s not verified.

Heather Rivers: So, in one way or another, everyone you’re about to hear from played a huge part in building, launching, and supporting Helix. So let’s give them a huge round of applause.

Kaitlin Hart speaking

Senior Enterprise Account Executive Kaitlin Hart gives a talk on “Sales is Life, The Rest is Just Details” at Mode Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Kaitlin Hart: I’m super excited to be here, this is my first Girl Geek. I’d like to kick this off with a really quick question. Who here is in sales, can you raise your hands? Okay. All right. You saw the topic title there, I see that.

Kaitlin Hart: I want to start by exploring why I believe everyone in this room should raise their hands, but first I want to start with a little confession. I’ve been field testing this talk for years, usually in ride shares, as weird as that might sound, but it happened just yesterday. So it’s still very relevant.

Kaitlin Hart: And it happens when people ask, “What do you do?” And I tell them I’m in sales. What happens next is this crash between perception and reality that I get to explore for whatever the duration of the ride might be. Because culturally, we perceive sales to look like this. Or maybe this.

Kaitlin Hart: And we associate salespeople with the traits of being aggressive, competitive, maybe selfish and untrustworthy. And apparently, as men with slicked back hair.

Kaitlin Hart: So while it’s nice to know I’m not any of those things, it’s kind of sad for me to hear because none of these things reflect what I love about sales. In reality, sales to me is much more like this. Two strangers trying to devise a plan. A parent listening to their child’s problems. Or two robots trying to form a relationship.

Kaitlin Hart: I know exactly what you’re thinking right now. These looks like everyday interactions, except the robot part, bummer. And you’re absolutely right. There’s a ton of research on how sales and life are intertwined. Daniel Pink is one of those folks, you don’t have to take my word for it. He wrote a book on it, and he said, “If you spend time persuading, influencing, or convincing others, you’re in sales.”

Kaitlin Hart: So, regardless of what business unit you’re in, you might be a PM, you might be in Dev, you might be in marketing, doesn’t matter. Because about half of your job is still spent on sales related activities.

Kaitlin Hart: So, are you reconsidering yet keeping your hand up? The point here is that sales is just life. You don’t need a special degree. We don’t need to learn any special language. And forget about it being your job title, it doesn’t even need to be in your job description. That’s how ingrained it is into your everyday life.

Kaitlin Hart: Basically, you’re all in sales, and now hopefully you know it, congrats. Comp checks are going to be at the end, [inaudible]. But we’re not going to end there. Because the details are also really important. And what really separates us is how we spend our time and focus. I spend my time focusing on developing interactions and trying to make them more effective. You probably spend your time on something else. And maybe, until one slide ago, you didn’t even know you were in sales. So that’s okay, I’ll give you a pass.

Kaitlin Hart: In the meantime, I’d like to help you get up to speed by sharing some specific skills, aka details, that we know lead to success and growth over time. And I’m not just saying this, we have data to back it up. It’s called revenue. So let’s just dive in.

Kaitlin Hart: The first one is being curious, and this one’s super close to my heart because I was born curious. Over time when I started my career, I realized this was much more of a skill than it was a trait. Because when you approach conversations with a genuine curiosity, people feel that. And when you learn, or when you ask questions that are based on understanding them, and then you listen to their responses instead of thinking about your responses, there’s this feeling of trust that’s built in your conversations.

Kaitlin Hart: And then to take it a step further, you’re going to replace judgment with curiosity wherever possible, and you’re going to avoid assumptions by, again, being curious instead of diving into your assumptions. And this is both for your career and your personal lives. Knowing nothing about someone, this is how you build a relationship rooted in respect right out of the gate. If I don’t know you, but I ask you questions that are thoughtful, and I ask and I listen to understand as opposed to respond, that’s the start to a very fruitful relationship. And then you practice this over time and you see as it grows in other areas of your life.

Kaitlin Hart: Another thing people in sales love, plans. We have account plans, territory plans, comp plans. Name it, we probably have a plan for it. But what we know is that there’s no such thing as a perfect plan. So instead, I like to take the approach of being prepared. Because when you think of being prepared, you can think of it as an outline as opposed to a filled out plan to perfection.

Kaitlin Hart: So, as you outline what it is that you want to achieve and you think about your desired outcomes, think about the how. And then you adjust by collaborating with others, being flexible to changes as they might come, and over time you learn. It’s definitely okay to fail here. That’s part of the learning process. And over time, you’ll naturally learn what leads to more successful plans and you’ll be able to grow from there.

Kaitlin Hart: And then third, we have storytelling. Anyone here read Sapiens? Or listened to the audiobook, that counts. Okay, cool. So basically, Yuval says that stories are the reasons humans rule the world. And he even says that society was built by stories. So look at politics, religion, societal norms. And so without stories, we’d be living in a very different world today.

Kaitlin Hart: But the reason stories are powerful is because they tap into emotion or imagination. Data and facts simply can’t do that. But you don’t have to take my word for it, I have a couple examples for you.

Kaitlin Hart: Here’s an ad that uses facts. Okay, this is a shoe that is breathable and supportive. How does it make you feel? Let’s compare. Here’s an ad that uses a story. Note that there’s no features, there’s not even a product clearly defined here. They’re 100% relying on storytelling and the feeling this imagery plus words are making you feel.

Kaitlin Hart: Maya Angelou actually said it best. It’s not about what you feel, I think I’m missing a slide here, that’s okay. It’s not about what people say that you remember, you remember what people make you feel. And when you think about telling a story, then you should think about how it is that you want to make someone feel. Because there’s a lot of power there.

Kaitlin Hart: And so in order to do that, you just apply this really simple framework. Know your audience, have a clear point, and use either emotion or imagination to deliver a why that connects with the audience. Then you practice. And then you field test, I hear ride shares are great for that. And over time, you’ll discover how to deliver your own powerful stories.

Kaitlin Hart: Ultimately, my hope is that you adopt curiosity, preparedness, and storytelling, and then you develop them over time, both separately and together, to unearth your own limitless opportunities. And selfishly, maybe next time when someone asks if you’re in sales, you’ll raise your hands. Thank you.

Heather Rivers: All right, next up we have Senior Product Designer Sam Novak.

Sam Novak speaking

Senior Product Designer Sam Novak gives a talk on “R, Rice Chex, and Re-usable Frameworks” at Mode Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Sam Novak: Hi everyone. I’m excited to be here today. I’m going to be talking to you about rice Chex, R, and reusable design frameworks. Here’s a photo of me with lots of pixels, but to really set the stage for this talk, let’s go with something a bit more historically relevant. There we go. Let me paint the scene. But be warned, you might need to prepare yourselves for a bit of nostalgia.

Sam Novak: The year is 1996. Pokemon has just been introduced to the world. Independence Day is the largest grossing film. The Macarena is a song and dance beloved by all. And I am almost seven years old. My favorite food is, and I quote, “white rice with butter.” But when I’m not eating buttery carbs, you can find me playing video games on my Windows 95. But alas, this story is not about me. This story is about cereal. Chex cereal.

Sam Novak: In fact, I was merely one of about six million children to fall in love with one of the most ingenious computer game strategies in all of history. That’s right, I’m talking about Chex Quest. For those not familiar, Chex Quest was the largest single mass replication of a CD-Rom ever. 6,000,000 free video games delivered as prizes in boxes of Chex cereal. How did they do it?

Sam Novak: The team was six people. The budget, $500K. The deadline, six months. They were tasked with the objective of creating an educational video game with the ultimate goal of reinvigorating the Chex cereal brand. So they set off to invent a video game from the ground up, to teach users about Chex cereal that kids would want to play. In six months, no big deal.

Sam Novak: The original game concept involved navigating around a cornfield with a flashlight, looking for ghosts. But despite their efforts, the game was just not landing with children. Until leadership came to the team and said, “Look, you’ve got 24 hours to come up with a better idea.” Enter Doom. For context, Doom is a first person shooter game that had been released three years prior. The style of gameplay was really landing with kids, and even today it is still often cited as one of the greatest video games in history.

Sam Novak: Now you may have heard this phrase. “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” Well, the team did just that. They relicensed the Doom engine to build Chex Quest. Now, the Doom team was pumped. They actually thought this was a really creative use of the engine. And the Chex team was happy. It was Doom with a facelift. The gameplay was largely unchanged, and this decision sped up the decision making process tremendously. They were now able to focus on creative ways to make the game nonviolent by redesigning the weapons, and by having the main character, yes a piece of Chex cereal, save the world by sending aliens back to their home planet.

Sam Novak: Everything started to come together. Finally it was time to release it to the world. All six million copies sold out in 6 weeks. Chex cereal sales went up 248%. It received major awards for advertising effectiveness and promotional achievements, and despite a bit of initial heat from video game critics, it developed this huge cult following really quickly. All in all, the project was a hit.

Sam Novak: The thing I love about this story is that the team had no pride or fear around leveraging existing technology. And reusing a style of gameplay that was already resonating with children. And as a result, they ended up creating something pretty inventive and magical. By applying this huge limitation, the results became that much more limitless. “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”

Sam Novak: But what does any of this have to do with modern product design? Well, there seems to be this never-ending debate in design that if you merely copy what others are doing around you, you will never truly innovate. And yet, here lies Chex Quest, one of the most innovative promotional strategies of the 90s. So how can we reconcile these points? How can we take this success story and apply it to modern software development?

Sam Novak: After all, relicensing a video game engine isn’t exactly the same thing as copying an interface, and stealing the user experience workflow. But what if it was? What if we weren’t afraid to get up here and talk about our justifications for stealing, when it led to great design schemes?

Sam Novak: So I’m going to use one more recent example from [inaudible]. The introduction of the [inaudible] notebook interface. I’ll justify stealing from two angles. First, you need to have the right intent. And second, you need a goal of building user trust. Are you ready?

Sam Novak: The timeline for the R project was three months, which was a super aggressive deadline. And the goal was to add support for R, a statistical programming language, in addition to Python while fitting in as many design improvements to the interface and experience as we could. Make no mistake though, this was a redesign of our notebooks. A redesign that would involve a fair amount of stealing.

Sam Novak: So my first justification for stealing is having the right intent. What do I mean by that? Well, you could have argued that our goal was to simply add support for R to our existing UI, but in reality RStudio in IDE was far more popular than writing R in a notebook interface among our user base. So in the same way the Chex team looked to Doom, we stepped back and asked ourselves, why do people love RStudio so much, and how can we recreate some of that passion in Mode? So we asked. Not what features do you like, but what makes RStudio a great experience for you? We documented ideas that were resonating and time and time again, in-app documentation came up as being particularly valuable. So we built in-app documentation. It didn’t matter that our interface wasn’t the same as RStudio, or that they had built documentation first. Adding documentation was just a clear user improvement. Now, the intent here was not to check a box. It was to help both Python and R writers learn about having to leave the context of our notebooks.

Sam Novak: My second justification for stealing is building user trust. Predictability and dependability are two of the largest foundations of building trust with your user base. Now, our old UI resembled a notebook, yes. But it didn’t look or work much like Jupiter Notebooks, the most widely adopted notebook interface. And as a result, the switching costs and the cognitive load, the mental energy required to learn our notebooks increased. It felt different, it looked different, and that difference didn’t necessarily lead to immediate user trust.

Sam Novak: Now, imagine trying to get a ride at the airport in a hurry, switching over from Uber to Lyft and having to learn an entirely new paradigm. But you don’t need to do that, it’s extremely easy to jump between the two. The point I want to make here is that there are workflows and patterns out there that are understood, that are resonating with users. You should have really strong reasoning to completely reinvent something new. Significant change will almost always increase the cognitive overhead required for users to adapt a product.

Sam Novak: What I’m not saying here is that there are never good reasons for introducing newer, better ways of doing things because of course there are. What I’m talking about instead is avoiding an NIH, an acronym that stands for “not invented here” syndrome. Don’t be afraid to reference design patterns that are working well just because you yourself didn’t design them. So, we re-skinned our interface to make it more trustworthy. Better accessibility, better usability, and frankly a familiarity you should come to expect after using other notebook products.

Sam Novak: So in closing, I would challenge you to keep these two justifications in mind when you’re looking to steal. First, don’t just steal for the sake of stealing. Your aim is not to win a feature [inaudible] contest or skip the design process altogether. The goal is to recognize great ideas and innovate on them. Your intent should be to learn and improve. And second, know when to steal. Borrow when it helps to build user trust. By creating something that feels familiar, dependable, and predictable, you reduce both cognitive load and switching cost to your platform.

Sam Novak: And finally for the sake of innovation, I’d like to make one slight improvement to Pablo’s phrase. Good artists copy, great artists steal, but the best artists eat Chex cereal. Thanks, y’all.

Heather Rivers: I will immediately apply the lessons I just learned and steal the mic to introduce our People Operations Partner, Josee Smith.

Josee Smith speaking

People Operations Partner Josee Smith gives a talk on “How To Ruin Your Team’s Effectiveness in 5 Easy Steps: A Guide To Eliminating Psychological Safety” at Mode Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Josee Smith: Hi everyone. My name is Josee. As Heather said, I’m the People Operations Partner. Today I’m going to talk a little bit about psychological safety. So here at Mode, I spend my days empowering our managers and building out people programs. In that work with my managers, I bet you all can guess the number one question that I get from our managers here at Mode. How can I make my team less effective?

Josee Smith: Okay, quick story. So, before coming to Mode, I worked as a paralegal at a law firm. And as part of this role as a paralegal, we would have performance reviews every six months with the HR manager. So she would go around to all the different attorneys and ask for feedback on our work, then we’d go over it during the performance review.

Josee Smith: So in the session, she proceeded to tell me about a mistake I had made about four months previously on a project I wasn’t working on anymore. I had some follow-up questions for her, such as was I still making the mistake, did other attorneys think I was making this mistake, or more specific details about the mistake. And she gave me nothing. She had no additional information. And I was really frustrated because here was this person sitting there telling me about this problem, this mistake I had made, but not giving me any information to adjust it or feel like I was being set up for success. I lost a lot of motivation in my work because I felt like they weren’t trying to help me be better at my job.

Josee Smith: So this brings us back to this question. But clearly, this is not what we’re going to talk about today, because no one wants to be less effective or less successful. But I can guarantee that there are companies out there doing things to make their teams less effective.

Josee Smith: So just some ideas of what this can look like. Asking employees for feedback, and then doing nothing with that feedback. Who here has experienced that before? Okay. Making big changes, and then not informing employees affected by those changes. Who’s experienced that? A few more people. My personal favorite. Inconsistent, vague feedback. Anyone, anyone? I think we should all, should all put our hands up. Because I think this is something, it’s a serious problem. A lot of us have gone through some of these things. I’ve experienced a lot of these things, including at the law firm, and I’m no longer at those companies because these actions not only make teams less effective and less successful, but they’ve been shown to drive away diverse talent.

Josee Smith: We’re a values driven team here at Mode, and underlying a lot of those values, there’s this idea of psychological safety. So, for those who haven’t taken a psych 101 course or if you don’t work in HR and think about this all the time. Psychological safety is created when team members feel comfortable taking risks and being vulnerable with each other. Here at Mode, we also see it being created when team members feel comfortable bringing their whole selves to work. Of course, in a way that is respectful of their teammates.

Josee Smith: A climate of psychological safety makes it easier for people to speak up and share their different thoughts and perspectives. And not feeling comfortable sharing your thoughts, or not feeling safe in that environment to speak up, can be a powerful barrier to collaboration and good decision-making. Psychological safety is particularly important in regards to underrepresented groups as a lack of the safety can lead to the kind of undermining behaviors that can drive these groups out of tech, such as feeling excluded from meetings or social events, feeling talked over, or feeling like your thoughts and perspectives aren’t being heard.

Josee Smith: A lot of research has been done on this topic, including a 2015 report from Google summarizing their findings from a two year study of their highest performing teams. And so I’d like to go over some of those traits. At a high level, successful, psychologically safe teams foster curiosity. So just encouraging teammates to study topics outside the scope of their role.

Josee Smith: Taking and encouraging risks. Skydiving, that is me up there. It doesn’t always have to look like skydiving, of course. It can be starting a new project that might fail for the sake of learning from it.

Josee Smith: Promoting respect throughout your company and your team and being thoughtful about how teammates talk about each other. And it also looks like encouraging candid conversations, such as managers asking employees for feedback and then actually doing something with it.

Josee Smith: So, as I mentioned, we’re a values driven team here and I see psychological safety being created through some of those values. I’d like to focus in on one specific value that has been instrumental to my success here at Mode. Honest words, kindly delivered. So I’ve been at Mode for about two and a half years. In that time, I’ve had the same manager, her name is Bailey. Maybe you’ve talked to her tonight. And one of the many great… Obviously one of the many things I can count on from her is consistent, constructive feedback. I know that as soon as I make a mistake, but also as soon as I’m doing really well, she’ll tell me about it because it’s important for her, it’s important to her to make sure I understand how my performance is doing. And that makes me really happy. My performance is not a secret to be talked about every six months.

Josee Smith: Okay, so, you might be sitting there and thinking, “Well great, Josee, that’s excellent for Mode. So happy for you that you found this place, but how do I practice it? How can I go about creating a more psychologically safe team?” Don’t worry, I have some tips. Here at Mode, we make it a habit of appreciating when someone is vulnerable. It can be hard to express yourself and take risks, especially if you don’t know how it’ll be received. So, when someone speaks up in a meeting when they’re normally silent, or if someone says they’re nervous about a project or presentation and then they go in and then absolutely crush it, give them some kudos. Let them know that you appreciate their efforts and you’re proud of them for stepping outside of their comfort zone.

Josee Smith: So I learned this next tip from Heather, actually. She’s somewhere. Oh, there she is. Be mindful about meetings. Not everyone likes to speak up during meetings, nor should they have to. So pay attention during meetings to who is and isn’t speaking, what is and isn’t being said, and encourage your teammates to expand on their thoughts. Consider sending a follow-up message after the meeting summarizing your thoughts, and asking your teammates to chime in with their opinions. You might unearth a perspective that didn’t come through during the meeting, but could be vital to the task at hand.

Josee Smith: So in my experience, the number one way to create a psychologically safe environment is to change your mindset around failure. To some, failure is the worst possible outcome and something to be avoided at all costs. In a psychologically safe environment however, failure can instead be viewed as a stop on the road to success or as something to learn from. So, when considering how failure plays out in your own work, don’t view it as something to be avoid, just the worst thing that could possibly happen. But instead, think about how it can be something to learn from or how it can get you one step closer to the right solution to a tricky problem. Sometimes, you have to fail to get there.

Josee Smith: I encourage all of you to think about how psychological safety plays out in your current workplace. Do you think you could bring up the topic or these ideas with your manager? If you don’t feel like you could bring this up because you think your manager won’t listen, or you worry they’ll think you’re a low performer for caring about this subject, think about how, what kind of workplace you’re going to thrive in, and what role psychological safety will play for you, like I did at the law firm. And, if you feel like you’re not getting anywhere, that your manager isn’t listening, lucky for you, Mode is hiring. Thank you.

Heather Rivers: We have one last talk before a quick break, and this is from Back-end Engineering Manager Max Edmands.

Max Edmands speaking

Backend Engineering Manager Max Edmands gives a talk on “Constructing Feedback Loops for Fun and Profit” at Mode Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Max Edmands: Hi. This is me, kind of. It’s a really pixelated version of me. This is an animation of someone pouring milk for a cappuccino, but this talk is not about being a barista. This is actually a talk about feedback loops. So, I want to start by breaking this term down a little bit.

Max Edmands: Feedback generally means conversations between humans. Someone noticing something about what you’re doing and giving you an opinion about it. Totally true, but feedback is actually more than that. Here is an example of extremely valuable feedback. As the barista’s pouring, they can see and feel the results of what they’re doing. Are they keeping the espresso crema intact? Is the milk the right ratio of liquid to foam? Is the pattern on the top of the milk glass the pattern they wanted to create? Are they filling the glass to top? Is everything the right temperature?

Max Edmands: All of this can be generalized into three attributes for great feedback. One, great feedback is high bandwidth. Lots of information coming in as quickly as possible. There’s the weight of the cup and the milk jug. There’s the temperature of the liquid in the cup. There’s the pattern that the milk is making on the surface. There’s the sound that it makes when it’s pouring. There’s so much there.

Max Edmands: Two, great feedback is relevant. There’s very little distraction here. Everything is signal and there’s no noise. You’re seeing it and you’re holding it, and all of the senses you’re getting are relevant.

Max Edmands: Three, great feedback is timely. It’s actually all in real time. The barista can change the angle of the cup and immediately they see a change in the surface area of the crema and the resulting change in the milk pattern they’re creating. So that’s feedback.

Max Edmands: Now let’s talk about feedback loops. A feedback loop is when you can take the feedback you got and try to use it again, or sorry, use it to try again. But this time, a little bit more effectively. And then use the results to get more information and then do it over and over again.

Max Edmands: So, there are a lot of great examples of feedback loops in video games. This animation is from a game called Celeste. Definitely recommend this game, by the way, it’s super great. Every feedback loop follows five steps.

Max Edmands: So step one, identify a goal. In this case, the goal is get the strawberry and bring it to the top left hand, right hand corner of the screen. Two, take concrete actions toward that goal. So jump on the block and ride it to the other end, and then try and jump off of it onto the platform and, oh no, falling into the spikes. So three, step three, evaluate your feedback. Ask yourself questions like, what did I learn just there? In this case, really clear information, if you jump in that way, then you’re probably going to fall onto the spikes and that’s bad.

Max Edmands: So then four, adjust your approach and try again. Maybe this time let’s try a dash jump when we’re in the air so we jump a little bit higher, so we can get onto that platform. And then see what we can do when we’re up there. And it works. Cool. Do it over and over again until we reach the goal. But now we’re on the platform, we have to figure out what to do next. So now, probably, we’re going to start a new feedback loop with a slightly different challenge. Great. So that’s games.

Max Edmands: But what about stuff you’re probably doing every day? Here’s an at-work example for those of you who write code. Test-driven development. So, here we have two sides of the screen. One of the sides has test results, and the other has the code. We’re adjusting the code in order to make the test suspect something that isn’t true yet. Then, we’re adjusting the code to make the test pass again, and then repeat. We know that something’s, I guess, needing to be fixed when stuff is showing up in red, and we know that stuff needs to be made to fail once stuff is showing up in green. It’s a very clear set of what do I do next.

Max Edmands: There’s another, smaller loop going on there too. As we’re editing the code, the editor is underlining certain things in red to let us know that the syntax isn’t quite right. The moment that we finish typing a line, or the moment we fix the syntax error, the red goes away to let us know it’s fixed. And then repeat.

Max Edmands: Working together with other humans is another great way to create an immediate feedback loop. I think this is a super cool photo. Two early programmers, collaborating on one of the world’s first computers. Early pair programming. I’m not 100% sure what they’re doing here. In my imagination, Esther is holding a specification that says what patch cords need to be connected to which ports. She’s reading the list out to Gloria, giving her time to connect or verify each one, and probably doing a visual check too just to make sure. Esther’s also got a bundle of extra cords ready for when they move onto the next one.

Max Edmands: So together, they’re able to keep track of where they are and move from one step to the next. They’re much more likely to notice and correct mistakes early. They’re somewhat less likely to get distracted, since they’re both concentrating on the same thing at the same time. And they’re way more likely to come up with new approaches or make adjustments to their process as they go.

Max Edmands: Which brings me back to conversational feedback. Retrospectives, one on ones, coffee walks. Words are an incredible way to fit lots of information into a really small space. Setting up regular places to have more of those conversations between either teams or between individuals, you and your manager, you and a peer, gives you way more opportunities to get and give feedback.

Max Edmands: So, how do you go from no loop to a feedback loop? Well first, we have to define the goal. Let’s say I want to draw an owl. So, now we need to figure out how we’re going to do it. I already have a process for drawing an owl. It’s something along the lines of flail along the page with a pen for a while and use a lot of white out. Eventually we got somewhere interesting. If I put it on a timeline, it might look something like this.

Max Edmands: So, next up is we identify specific decision points that’ll get us there. In this case, every time that I’ve scribbled on the page a little bit, I take a step back to figure out where to start adding the next round of details. But which details specifically should I add? This is the perfect place to start getting feedback. So, what feedback would be good here? Feedback could be comparing it against another implementation of the goal and figuring out what tweaks to make. It could also be user testing. Show your picture to another human, ask them what they think. It could also be, try to sell it and see if people will buy it. Would you buy this owl?

Max Edmands: Then iterate. Keep thinking of ways to increase the number of decision points and increase the quality of the feedback you’re getting at each point. Warning though, make sure that the additional process you’re adding is worth the cost you’re paying for it. Too much process is busy work. Nobody likes busy work. Too little process is confusion, doing the wrong thing. There’s a really fine line between the two, and staying in that balance itself is actually pretty tricky. Which is why I recommend, build feedback loops out of the quality of your feedback loops.

Max Edmands: It sounds like a joke, but I’m being completely sincere. The best way to figure out if you’re balancing cost versus benefit of process is to think about the process in exactly the same way that you’re thinking about the thing that you’re doing. Be continuously learning if there’s too much or too little, and be continuously adjusting as you go.

Christin Price speaking

Senior Manager, Business Strategy & Operations Christin Price gives a talk on “Ops, Table for 1” at Mode Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Christin Price: Hey everybody, thanks for coming out tonight. I am Christin Price, and I work in the finance and operations department at Mode. Tomorrow actually happens to be my two year anniversary. So, I joined Mode shortly after we raised our series B and I was our first in-house finance hire. And that sounded extremely cool to me.

Christin Price: So at the time, Mode was experiencing some of the typical growing pains you might see at a series B startup. For example, we’d grown out of our office space. At the same time, I was going through some of my own growing pains. I was getting whiplash from how quickly my job title kept changing. I went from leading an annual planning cycle to doing a deep dive audit on a revenue number to prepare for a series C, and I even inherited a sales ops function.

Christin Price: As these demands kept mounting, I felt like I always needed more time or more people to get anything done. Everything felt like a fire, and I didn’t feel like I was getting to do my best work. As this persisted across multiple months, I began to wonder if I’d made a mistake. My career trajectory felt like it was getting buried under the number of tasks it took just to keep the lights on.

Christin Price: Historically, I may have taken this as a sign that Mode wasn’t invested in me. And a mentor challenged me on this line of thinking. She asked me if I knew what the difference was between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. A fixed mindset was believing that the situation was permanent, and that I had no power to influence or mold it into something different than what it was. Whereas, a growth mindset was to develop a true love of learning and believe that the best learning opportunities are presented through challenges.

Christin Price: Here are some examples of fixed versus growth mindset. Wow, that feedback really hurts my feelings. I’ve been working on this for months and clearly I’m not valued here. Versus, that’s an interesting perspective this person brings. I wonder if I incorporate that feedback into my work how it will change my work product. Or, I’ve never gotten along with this person and we just shouldn’t work together. Versus, these are this person’s strengths and these are my strengths. I’m really interested on iterating on them together to figure out how we can best work together.

Christin Price: So tonight I’d like to share a framework with you that I use to develop a growth mindset while also ensuring my career trajectory doesn’t get buried beneath the day to day. First off, do I have an executive sponsor? A mentor is someone we rely on and learn from their experiences to shape our own viewpoint. A sponsor is someone who will fight for us behind closed doors. I encourage you to ask your direct manager to be this for you. Ask them what would it take for you to have zero hesitation fighting for me?

Christin Price: The second question I ask is, am I soliciting continuous feedback? Y’all, feedback is exceptionally hard. Sometimes I feel like I’m walking to the edge of a cliff and asking someone else to push me off. But, with time and practice, I’ve gotten quite comfortable being uncomfortable. The best way to solicit feedback is to make a verbal contract with everyone you work with. Say, “I’d like to solicit ongoing feedback. Are you able to do this?” And then as you work together on projects, check in frequently, and I’m talking a couple times a week, and say, “Hey. What do you think is going well and what could I be doing better?”

Christin Price: Am I advocating for myself? As a society and especially as women, I feel like we’re pre-conditioned to believe that hard work in and of itself pays off. And I haven’t found this to be particularly true. Now that I’m comfortable being uncomfortable, I practice stepping outside my lane. I ask to be in the room.

Christin Price: Last month, there was a strategy meeting about how we hit our revenue number for the remainder of the year. It was 8 pm on a Tuesday night and I was asked to put together a model for the meeting the next day. I did so and I got my boss up to speed on it, and then I thought, “I have a valuable contribution here and I’m an expert on the subject.” I asked to be in the room. Not only did I join the meeting, I ended up leading it and one of our co-founders chased me out of the room with follow-up questions. It ended up being one of my most productive meetings in my two years at Mode.

Christin Price: Asking for public recognition. This past spring, I did a reboot on our commissions policy for our customer success function. And it took a lot of hard work, and the head of that team thanked me, privately, for the work I’d done. I asked him if he’d stand up at our Thursday all hands meeting and give me that recognition publicly. Not only did he agree to this, he thanked me for asking him. These small asks will increase your exposure to others within the organization, and also increase your level of influence.

Christin Price: Building multi-threaded relationships. This is actually a sales strategy. Imagine you’re working a deal, and your single point of contact leaves the company. It makes that inherently risky. Similarly, by building multi-threaded relationships with all different people at all different levels and in all different departments of your company, it ensures that there’s no single point of failure. Our CEO left on maternity leave earlier this year. If I relied exclusively on him to give me a voice within Mode, I would’ve been starting from scratch. Instead, I had many strong relationships to lean on during that time.

Christin Price: Don’t try to be everything to everyone. I had an epiphany about a year ago. I have always considered myself a direct person who establishes clear boundaries, but reflecting on my time, I’d realized I was trying to prove my worth by being a yes woman. Telling people I need more time, or that a project isn’t high priority, and then subsequently not doing all of the late work necessary to find that project a home is a really good practice. Others respect my ability to prioritize, and more importantly, I have the energy to bring the intellectual and emotional intelligence to the work that does fall within my purview.

Christin Price: Am I giving myself room and grace to make mistakes? I had a pretty serious miscommunication with a senior leader at Mode. Instead of accepting that I burned that bridge and beating myself up over it, I decided to apply a growth mindset. I apologized, I collected feedback, and I incorporated that feedback to rebuild our relationship. Today, I can gladly say we have a great working relationship. And furthermore, I don’t regret that mistake because of how much learning I got out of it.

Christin Price: So yes, this framework is a work in progress and yes, it takes serious energy to execute on it every day. And no, by no means have I mastered it. But I choose to apply a growth mindset and believe that with time and practice, I can continue to improve. It will become second nature. And I do truly believe there is something to be learned from every situation, especially the tough ones. And every day, I see the dividends of this practice.

Christin Price: Today, I am no longer on an island, as other people have joined the department. I was promoted to be a people manager, and I even have two open recs to continue growing the team. So, if you are a pace setter with a growth mindset who is hungry to learn and step out of your lane, Mode rewards that. And come find me after, because I want you on my team.

Christin Price: So today, I’m glad to say my relationship with Mode is mutually beneficial. It’s both give and take, and my career trajectory continues to crystallize. And with my growth mindset, I see limitless opportunity.

Heather Rivers: Next up, we have Senior Product Manager Nishi Patel.

Nishi Patel speaking

Senior PM Nishi Patel gives a talk on “Limitless Success: Influencing without Authority” at Mode Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Nishi Patel: All right, hi everyone. As Heather mentioned, my name is Nishi and I’m a PM here at Mode. I’m going to start off with a little story. So, it’s 2013, I had just landed my first PM gig after many interviews and I was so excited. I was bright eyed, bushy tailed, had done all of the reading I needed to do, and walked in on my first day. Within the first few weeks, I had been given the perfect project for our team. I’d been working with the design team, the engineering team, we’d done customer research, we’d built a bunch of prototypes, done testing. And we thought we had the ideal solution to bring our company’s first app to life.

Nishi Patel: So, in the following weeks we were going to have our first planning meeting. The CEO was going to be there, there was going to be a lot of stakeholders, some people that I hadn’t really even talked to yet. But I felt really confident in our solution and I was ready for it to be applauded and praised, and just feeling really good about it. What actually happened was that the CEO, amongst others, questioned every single point that I brought up. He pretty much shot down every single one of our ideas, and he couldn’t really connect the dots between how what we were doing and what we were proposing was going to get us to our revenue goals in three months, which is what was really on his mind.

Nishi Patel: I left, feeling pretty defeated. I went home that night, I remember, and was just circling all of the thoughts in my head and thinking what could I have done better, I thought I did everything I was supposed to do. But what I didn’t realize at that time was that our solution was actually pretty spot on to what we would end up building in a few months. They just didn’t resonate with the audience, and fell flat in that meeting that we had.

Nishi Patel: So what could I have done better? In one answer, instead of trying to explain a bunch of tactics around how we were going to build a solution, I could have used influence. So bringing us back to the point, why is influence important?

Nishi Patel: A lot of us here today are in tech or at startups, or maybe both. And we find ourselves working more and more cross functionally. On top of that, orgs are getting flatter, and so there’s a better chance that we may or may not have direct reports to help us ease into influence.

Nishi Patel: Daniel Pink, which apparently is popular amongst our group of speakers, I’m going to bring him up again. He said that we spend about half of our time at work trying to persuade others to part with resources. Resources in this context can mean time, someone’s ownership, someone’s decision making, or maybe even money. So, if it’s something that we all need to do, what are some ways to get there?

Nishi Patel: I’m going to talk through a few tactics that have worked for me, which is by no means exhaustive, but a few that I’ve had a great experience with. And also I’m going to talk a little bit about why sometimes we fail, and things that we can do to combat those failures.

Nishi Patel: So here’s one of the first influence tactics. Know your audience. I’m sure we’ve all heard this, but it’s something that’s really easy to glaze over when you’re really excited about something. What are the things that they care about? What are the things that get in the way of them doing their job? What are the things that keep them up at night? What are the things happening in their day to day that maybe affect them that you don’t even realize? I think most importantly out of all of this is really understanding how what they want, their incentives, and their motivations, can really align what you’re trying to bring to the table.

Nishi Patel: So going back to my story from earlier. I could have been much better at influencing and getting my message across if I was to understand better who was going to be in that room. I could have socialized the idea beforehand, and probably learned that the revenue goals were huge for our company and I could have better framed my story, to better connect the dots between why our solution was going to get us there and make our users happy.

Nishi Patel: Next, build trust and be vulnerable. This is easy to say, but pretty hard to do. I think the things that have worked best for me are just showing that I care and empathizing with the people that I’m talking to. And most importantly, being vulnerable. Definitely scary at first, but once you learn to put yourself out there, you can really show everyone that you’re talking to that you’re human. Consistently showing up is an amazing way to build trust and show that you care, because people can clearly see it.

Nishi Patel: So something I could have done in that situation is instead of just walking into that room with this really great presentation and this really great solution, or so I thought, I could’ve built a relationship with some of the people that were going to be in that room and really gotten their trust prior to entering and presenting.

Nishi Patel: And lastly, be clear about what you’re proposing. Be clear about how it impacts them, what you potentially need from them, or from my quote earlier, what resources they need to part with, and how it could positively benefit both their day to day and make their lives easier, and benefit the company. And also, stay true to you. If you’re not convinced about what you’re saying, they’re not going to either.

Nishi Patel: All right, so this is all good and great, and you might have even seen some of these, heard some of them, I know I have an inbox full of blog posts and newsletters that I could probably find even more tactics. But, sometimes we have every intention of doing all of these things and we prepare, and our message just falls flat. And we have to ask ourselves, why? So for me, the reality is we get in our own heads. I know in that situation, I was thinking, why would the CEO believe me? What if I fail? I’m new, why would that person even want to believe what I’m saying?

Nishi Patel: And a lot of this is fear of failure, and a lot of this is imposter syndrome. It’s a vicious loop. We don’t want to fail, so we don’t put ourselves out there, and we don’t put ourselves out there so we can’t even set ourselves up to succeed or even to fail. So at this point, we’re kind of just stagnant and we’re not doing anything at all. So if we get in our own way, how can we get out of it?

Nishi Patel: Here are a few things that I’ve come up with. Socializing your ideas. Pressure test your idea, and share it with others. This is a really simple way to start small, especially if you’re not this comfortable with everyone you’re going to be with in that room. And it’s a great way to get a signal of the things that are on people’s minds and how people feel about things. It’s also a great way to get advanced feedback, make sure no one is hearing it for the first time, and also to learn the opposing viewpoints that can help you in advance to shape your message when you walk into that room.

Nishi Patel: At Mode, we have a culture that’s pretty open and we have lunches. And so we all try to eat lunch together, and that’s a great way to have some of these casual conversations. Or, we also do a lot of coffee walks, and this has been a great way for me to kind of understand what’s going on around the company.

Nishi Patel: Secondly, observe and adapt to what works. So Sam talked earlier about not necessarily needing to reinvent the wheel if something works. So if there’s someone that you look up to, or someone in your company that you see that’s really good at influencing or maybe even in your life, build that into how you influence people. Analyze and pick up the things that work and put that into your message. Like Sam mentioned earlier… Sorry, not Sam.

Nishi Patel: Another story with Sam is earlier this year, I was actually doing a talk where I had to really incorporate the audience and really influence them with the case study that I was presenting. And there was a lot of things that I had observed with her when we practiced with each other that I was able to incorporate into my own talk.

Nishi Patel: And lastly, as a PM, I have to put in a shameless plug for learning and iterating. So in true product fashion, learn what works, learn what doesn’t, and iterate on this. And apply this thinking so that you can continuously improve.

Nishi Patel: So if there’s a couple big takeaways, it’s these. Find what works for you, and know that not all of these tactics are equal. There’s not one good formula and perfect formula to use, but the more you put yourself out there, the more you can try and figure out what works for you. And for those times where maybe the message doesn’t land, or you don’t influence the way you want, that’s totally okay. We’re all human, and the one thing that we have control over is that we can always and forever learn and iterate. Thanks.

Heather Rivers: All right, we have one final talk by our director of back-end engineering, Ushashi Chakraborty.

Ushashi Chakraborty speaking

Director of Backend Application Engineering Ushashi Chakraborty gives a talk on “Limitless Growth: Practicing Inclusion in Performance Reviews” at Mode Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Ushashi Chakraborty: Thank you. Hello everyone, Ushashi. I’m going to be talking about limitless growth, who doesn’t want that? Practicing inclusion in performance reviews.

Ushashi Chakraborty: So for those of you who are people managers, hopefully this talk is going to help you practice performing reviews in such a way that they are inclusive and they incentivize engineers with different kinds of stress. For those of you that are not people managers, hopefully this talk sparks an idea that helps you to ask for things from your manager when you’re sitting across them, and being deliberate in performance review.

Ushashi Chakraborty: This talk is going to have three takeaways. Let’s begin with the first one. That’s not a takeaway, that’s me. That’s the takeaway. Every engineer is different. Think about that for a second. Think about yourself, then think about your peers, various engineers that you have worked with. Seniors, juniors. Think about their strengths. Think about their ways of working. You’ll find that every engineer is different from each other even if they have largely to similar strength areas, for example, both of them are good at JavaScript. Even there, you will find nuanced differences.

Ushashi Chakraborty: Very recently, I was at the Grace Hopper conference, and there was a lot of chatter about bringing more underrepresented folks into computer science. It is great that we are at a place where we are encouraging everyone, everyone that is interested to come to this industry. Yet, don’t you think it’s absurd that we still think that people that are good at math and science, or people that are coming from traditional computer science backgrounds are the only ones that can make it well in this industry?

Ushashi Chakraborty: That is a flawed ideology. And if you take that flawed ideology, you are going to have biases. And if you start building a performance framework, you’re going to end up having a flawed performance framework.

Ushashi Chakraborty: Takeaway two. Don’t look at only one type of data. Data is great, but if you look at only one type of data, you will end up incentivizing engineers with one kind of strength. And if you incentivize engineers with one kind of strength, ultimately you will be left with an org where the engineers can solve only one kind of problem. And we don’t want that.

Ushashi Chakraborty: Most reviews that I have been part of have focused heavily on delivery. Things like code reviews, the number of code reviews that you have given. Number of comments, code quality are often given a lot of emphasis. I understand, because there’s a very easy metric to attach to these skills. And they are important skills to have. But sometimes, a different value that you add to an org, for example mentoring and interim. Or perhaps, sitting with your coworker and helping them debug a problem. Or perhaps writing a blog post for your eng blog.

Ushashi Chakraborty: We have to find ways to incentivize those skills, because all of these skills are important to excel as a software engineer. As an engineer myself, I have had reviews where those four skills are put together in one group, one bucket. And these skills are different from each other. And hence, those skills need to be talked about.

Ushashi Chakraborty: Takeaway number three. While a review conversation walks you through how your past performance has been, it is incomplete without a conversation about your future growth. How many of you here have gotten a performance review that scored you as does not meet, or meets, or exceeds? You’re familiar with that framework, right?

Ushashi Chakraborty: Now, something that has happened to me in the past is that I would get a great review that has been, a couple of times, in the past where I have gotten an exceeds. And I would be sitting there across from the manager waiting for the promotion to happen, very excited. Only there would be no promotion, there would be no talk about it at all. And I would be too uncomfortable at that point to ask for it, or ask why I didn’t get it.

Ushashi Chakraborty: When I look back at my career today, I can understand why I did not get it. Even though I was doing very well for my role at that time, I still had gaps for the next level. And hence, while the meets, not meets, exceeds framework is great, and its giving you context about how you are doing, that context is not complete unless you know how far you are from the next step. And hence, managers need to have that conversation when they’re giving you your performance reviews.

Ushashi Chakraborty: So now that we have learned about those three takeaways, let’s talk about how we do engineering performance reviews at Mode. We have adapted heavily from a framework built by Medium called Snowflake. It’s open source, you can check it out. And we rely a lot on robust conversations from managers to employees about their performance, as well as future growth. And we also take into account the inclusivity, such that engineers with different kinds of scripts are able to thrive.

Ushashi Chakraborty: The framework has four main tracks: build, execute, support, and strengthen. We will look at our favorite engineer’s performance review last quarter. Yeah, we are not embarrassed to say we have a favorite engineer. That’s our favorite engineer, Marshawn.

Ushashi Chakraborty: So let’s look at Marshawn’s performance review. So right now, Marshawn has not yet gotten a review, I’m going to review Marshawn very soon. First, let me explain the framework. So, on the right hand side you see a flake. We will start coloring that flake up as Marshawn gets some points. On the bottom, don’t worry if you can’t see, or if you can’t read what they say. The colors depict the different tracks I talked about. The building track, the executing track, the strengthening track, and the supporting track. We’re not going to get into the details of those tracks, but each track has about three to four skills.

Ushashi Chakraborty: Building is all about your code. Executing is everything that you do to get that code to production, for example in project management, communication. Supporting is the skills that you need to be supportive of your team, for example, their well-being. And strengthening is about building community inside and outside, for example, evangelism, recruit, those kind of things.

Ushashi Chakraborty: So each of these skills go from zero to five, and your manager evaluates you on those. At present, Marshawn is at zero and is an Engineer I, and total points zero. We’ll be walking you through two different scenarios of two different personas of Marshawn, and see how Marshawn plays out in these.

Ushashi Chakraborty: In the first persona, Marshawn is now having some depth of skills, or some really good skills around building and executing. You see those colors pop up, those are like getting two and three numbers in those skills. You see now, Marshawn’s title has changed to Engineer II, and Marshawn has 18 total points. So here, Marshawn is getting incentivized because of their deeper skills in building and executing, and they have shown depth in a portion of the flake.

Ushashi Chakraborty: Let’s talk about a different persona. Marshawn as a different engineer. This flake looks different. In this flake, Marshawn has a different kind of skill set. Once again, Marshawn is now in Engineer II with 18 points, but is a more holistic skillset that encompasses larger breadth of the flake. So perhaps lesser on the executing and building side, but still there, decent amount of skills. But they’re also having skills on the supporting and strengthening side of things.

Ushashi Chakraborty: Now let’s go back to those takeaways that I talked about. First, every engineer is different. So we see those personas. Those are real life engineers that we perhaps work with, having those skills. And now we are learning how to incentivize all kinds of skills while also having a way of our framework where we can provide feedback for the other kind of skills that they need to grow or hone.

Ushashi Chakraborty: The next thing, don’t look at only one type of data. Had we only focused on [inaudible] focusing on the blue and green that is the building and executing skills, and then Marshawn in persona two wouldn’t have been as successful.

Ushashi Chakraborty: Takeaway three. The framework should force the conversation about future growth. So in this little block here, the points to the next level which is 18, we see that Marshawn has 18 more points to get to the next level. So while your manager will be having a conversation with you as to how many points you are at today and how did that add up, they’ll also be having a conversation with you about how far you are from the next level and what you need to do to get there. And build this strategy with you to help you progressively get to there.

Ushashi Chakraborty: In conclusion, [inaudible] whichever side you’re sitting on during the performance review conversation, it is a challenging space to be in. I get it. And handling it with inclusivity is going to help you build an org that has all kinds of engineers that can thrive there and have professional growth that is wide, that is limitless. Thank you so much.

Heather Rivers: That was our last amazing lightning talk for the evening, but the party’s not over. Feel free to hang out here until 9:00. If you’re interested in talking to anybody about Mode, we have these green shirts, or if you’re interested in learning more about our product we have a little demo booth over there, very cool. And finally, we’re hiring in all departments, so feel free to ask any of us about our open roles. And yeah, let’s just hear one last huge round of applause for all the amazing speakers.

Mode girl geeks attending

A warm round of applause for all of the speakers at Mode Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X


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Podcast Highlights: 9 Key Takeaways on Intersectionality

Intersectional feminism

In continuing our Podcast Highlights mini series, this week, we’re sharing 9 quick takeaways from the Girl Geek X podcast that employees and managers everywhere can benefit from!

If you haven’t already subscribed to the Girl Geek X podcast, head on over to iTunesSpotifyStitcher, or Google Play and get ready to start binge listening! 

This week, Girl Geek X COO Gretchen DeKnikker is breaking out quotes and insights from her favorite release on the Girl Geek X Podcast — Episode 12: Intersectionality. (Apologies for the sound quality on this one, we’re still learning!)

Why this topic matters, and why it’s her favorite episode:

Gretchen DeKnikker, COO at Girl Geek X
Gretchen DeKnikker, COO at Girl Geek X

“This was an important episode because we’d been hearing intersectionality as a buzzword, often erroneously used as a synonym for inclusion, and wanted to offer clarification. Understanding how various parts of our identities intersect in both oppressive and privileged ways is absolutely critical in building workplaces where everyone can thrive. Solving the issues of the most marginalized among us raises up everyone. It’s absolutely essential that we have acute awareness around this as we do the work.

9 Key Takeaways

9. “We need to move away from ‘diversity,’ which has a limited meaning and actually is not aligned with the goals that we’re trying to build. We need to build balance in our organizations. We also need to move away from ‘inclusion’. Inclusion assumes that I can fit like an add-on into a power structure that was built for straight white men, and I have no interest in doing that. I’m not any of those things and I don’t know how to show up that way. I wanna actually build belonging, I wanna show up in a space where I was considered and where I was thought of.

Aubrey Blanche, Global Head of Diversity and Belonging at Atlassian
Aubrey Blanche, Global Head of Diversity and Belonging at Atlassian

It can be the littlest things that show consideration. You’ll see here, research shows that women feel like they belong when there’s more plants in an office. You’ll see that our bathrooms, even the ones that because of building codes have to have gendered words on them, do not actually contain pictures of what a man or a woman looks like. That might not matter to a lot of you. But to folks who are gender-nonconforming or non-binary or transgender, that has huge meaning. That little subtle clue actually tells their brain that they belong in that space, and that’s what we’re trying to build at Atlassian. I think we can all resonate with wanting to feel like we belong.” —Aubrey Blanche, Global Head of Diveristy and Belonging at Atlassian 

8. “Silly pop culture example that I always think of, there’s an episode of Scrubs where Elliot, who’s a white female doctor, and Turk, who’s a black man, are having this debate about who has it harder, black doctors or female doctors, and then thankfully a black woman doctor walks by and they’re both like ‘Ooh. Wow. This argument is dumb for the two of us to be having.’” —Rachel Jones, Podcaster at Girl Geek X

7.  “When you’re talking about privilege and talking about intersectionality and diversity and inclusion, I think sometimes they all get swirled together and you can lose sight of what those things are individually and what they mean individually, and that they are very unique distinctive things. —Gretchen DeKnikker, COO at Girl Geek X

Sukrutha Bhadouria, CTO & Co-Founder of Girl Geek X
Sukrutha Bhadouria, CTO & Co-Founder of Girl Geek X

6. “I think it’s important when you’re trying to create an equal environment that there’s no one definition of equal, right? That’s the whole problem when you assume there’s one definition of what it means to feel marginalized or to feel like a minority, so you have to identify where you stand and what the differences in experiences are for other people.

Learn more about other people’s experiences, especially when they’re different from yours so you can be more informed when you’re trying to create a more equal environment. But you have to have a good understanding of what it means and not have a blanket, oversimplified definition of what intersectionality is in the first place.” —Sukrutha Bhadouria, Co-Founder & CTO at Girl Geek X and Sr. Manager, Engineering at Salesforce

5.  “If I — as a queer Latina woman — can succeed in the organization, any changes that are made are definitely gonna benefit straight white women, too. But when we start with ‘diversity = women’, we only build programs, processes, and structures that help straight, white, economically-privileged women succeed.” —Aubrey Blanche, Global Head of Diveristy and Belonging at Atlassian

4. “I think intersectionality reminds us how much further we have to go and be open to continuing to learn about each other, this evolving conversation and just keep trying to be curious about other people.” —Angie Chang, Co-Founder & CEO at Girl Geek X

3.  “Psychological safety more than anything else is critical to making a team work. And so what is psychological safety? It’s the shared belief held by members of the team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.

Psychological safety may sound like it’s all about the emotions or about the mental aspect of the game, but really it’s the way that you encourage and promote behaviors that reinforce trust and respect and mutual empathy and authenticity, and discourage behaviors that tear those down.” —Heidi Williams, CEO & Co-Founder of tEQuitable

2. “I think white people in this country, myself included, need to get very comfortable with the fact that we are all racist on some level, and that everyone has racist behaviors… and that while the word is really powerful, we need to actually think about the definition of it and what that means, and how to correct those behaviors. Because even a racist will tell you they’re not racist, they’re just separatists. They just want you live over there. ‘I don’t not like you, I just don’t wanna live with you!’ kind of a thing. So just understanding there are racist behaviors is important. We all have them every single day, and we need to be open to hearing that feedback.” —Gretchen DeKnikker, COO at Girl Geek X

Rachel Jones, Podcaster at Girl Geek X
Rachel Jones, Podcaster at Girl Geek X

1. “You’re setting yourself up to fail if you’re using definitions of these things that are empty or you’re using solutions that only work for the group that’s struggling the least out of everyone. We’re at a point where people can very easily see through these things when they are bullshit. People aren’t just gonna say ‘we have a culture committee’ and take that to mean the work is done. People actually want to see tangible results. Hold people accountable to do the actual work and not just fly a diversity flag and say the work is done.” —Rachel Jones, Podcaster at Girl Geek X

Check out the full episode or podcast transcript for more great insights on intersectionality and questioning your own bias, or subscribe to our YouTube channel for even more insightful content on topics that matter to women and allies.


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.

Intuit Girl Geek Dinner: “Powering Prosperity for Small Businesses” (Video + Transcript)

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Transcript from Intuit Girl Geek Dinner – Lightning Talks:

Angie Chang: Thank you to everyone for coming out tonight to another Girl Geek dinner at Intuit. I know we were here five years ago and had a terrific time and this time it’s going to be even better. In case you missed it, there are amazing demo stations with engineers and product managers speaking and giving talks about what they’re working on – and donuts. So, they’re out there and thank you so much to the folks at Intuit for hosting us again. This is an amazing welcome. The campus is even more beautiful than I remembered and thank you so much for bringing these amazing women together.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Hi, I’m Gretchen. In addition to doing these almost every week, which if this is your first event, raise your hand. Okay, so now you know that we do these almost every week, so you’ll be on our mailing list, come check out more of them. We also have a podcast, we’ve done like 20 episodes now and we would love some feedback because we’re thinking about what we want to do for the next season.

Gretchen DeKnikker: So, mentorship and career transitions and switching job function and the definition of intersectionality, like all sorts of stuff. So definitely go check that out and rate it and please give us your honest feedback because that’s the only way we’re going to get better. Then we also have … We’re going to do our virtual conference, our all day online conference. I don’t know how many of you guys have come the last two years but it’ll be just before International Women’s Day on March 6th.

Gretchen DeKnikker: So keep an eye out if you think you might want to have your company participate or if you might want to be a speaker, then start thinking about those topic ideas and then we’ll let you know when we’re sort of ready for all of that. If this looks like a good time, you could do it at your company too. So, just email us or grab us. Our information’s everywhere on the web and we’d love to talk to you about it. So, thank you.

Tracy Stone: Thank you. So welcome to Intuit. We are so thrilled to have all of you here tonight and thank you to Angie and the Girl Geek team for partnering with us on this wonderful event. For those of you who we haven’t had a chance to meet, my name is Tracy Stone and I lead the Tech Women Intuit initiative here at Intuit, and that initiative is sponsored out of our CTO’s organization as an initiative to attract and recruit, retain and advance women in technical roles.

Tracy Stone: So an event like this is so wonderful for us to partner with Girl Geek and to be able to bring the community together as we build connections and empower our women in technology. For those of you that aren’t familiar with Intuit, I hope you got a chance, as Angie said, we had some amazing demos from our technologists of some of the technology that we’re developing as we are in our mission.

Tracy Stone: Our mission at Intuit is to power prosperity around the world. We are a global financial platform company, makers of QuickBooks, TurboTax, Mint, and so I hope tonight you’ll get a chance to learn more about Intuit, about our products and the technologies. In addition, we featured some of our small business customers today, so I hope you got a chance to interact with them, get some of the swag to take home, some cool stuff.

Tracy Stone: So I hope you got a bag and got to take home some of those, some swag and the treats from our small business customers. So tonight we have amazing program in store for you. We’re going to start with a fireside chat with our CTO, and then we have some of our technologists and leaders across the company going to share some of their lightning talks with all of you. In the middle of all that, we’ll offer raffle prizes throughout the evening.

Tracy Stone: So, we’ll go ahead and get started. I want to introduce our first talk, which is a fireside chat with our CTO, Marianna Tessel. Olga Braylovskiy will be leading the chat with Mariana. Olga leads HR for our technology teams and partners closely with Mariana and all of her organizations on talent related items. Mariana is our CTO and as our CTO she oversees technology strategy and leads our product engineering, data science, information technology and information security teams worldwide.

Tracy Stone: She joined Intuit in 2017 to lead product development in our small business and self-employed group. Before Intuit, she was an executive vice president of strategic development at Docker and she’s held engineering leadership roles at VMware, Ariba, And General Magic. We’re so thrilled to have both Olga and Marianna with us tonight.

Olga Braylovskiy: All right, welcome everyone. What a turn out, incredible. Lots of power in this room. So, let’s start, Mariana, with you sharing a little bit of your career journey and how did you get you this amazing role of being CTO at Intuit?

 

Marianna Tessel speaking

Intuit girl geeks: CTO Marianna Tessel shares her career journey with VP Olga Braylovskiy at Intuit Girl Geek Dinner in Mountain View, California.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

 

Marianna Tessel: Wow, well, thank you. First of all, thank you everybody for coming in today. So wonderful to see so many geek women, I love it. So, a little bit about my journey. I’m an engineer in my background, so I studied engineering and then I worked as an engineer for quite a long time. I actually started, I’m from Israel. Anybody from Israel here? Whoo, hi, shalom.

Marianna Tessel: So, I started in the Israeli military as an engineer. So I worked there for some time and then I came here to the US after that and I worked in a company that was trying to do devices like iPhones and we weren’t successful, but there was a documentary on the company, it’s called General Magic. You should look it up. It basically says that almost any device today, you can trace back to the roots of that company because the people that worked on iPhone and on Android both came from General Magic.

Marianna Tessel: So that was actually a real pleasure to work with an amazing set of people and doing something so like envelope pushy. Is that a thing? Yeah, pushing the envelope and then just thought I’ll use it in a different way, why not? Then actually I worked in other companies. I worked at Ariba, et cetera, but actually at General Magic I became a manager. I didn’t expect that, they had a need for a manager and they came to me and I said, what me? And then I said, actually, I really like it and I started my leadership career then, and from there on I was a leader in multiple companies.

Marianna Tessel: Then, just before actually coming to Intuit, I spent a long time in infrastructure. So that means that VMware and Docker. VMware by the way, I learned way too much, more than I ever wanted to know about storage, network compute and whatnot, really down in the guts of systems. Then when I came to Docker, that was amazing because that was like a start-up and we were changing the world and that was a really great experience.

Marianna Tessel: But I decided to join Intuit and to your question, Olga, I’m trying to answer your question. To your question, how I became a CTO, I think that I spent a long time as actually an engineer and then I became a leader and kind of grew with different roles, and because I had really different roles, actually I think I had like different perspectives and sometimes it’s luck, sometimes I grabbed the luck when I had it and here I am and I’m really happy about that.

Olga Braylovskiy: Luck is largely about preparation and clearly you had a good one. You should also mention how passionate you are about people and technical talent, which leads us to another question. Intuit is a really special company, a little plug-in for Intuit and we have amazing culture and we have very unique engineering culture that I know you’re super passionate about. So what’s unique about our engineering culture?

Marianna Tessel: Yeah, I think Intuit is really known for its culture and I knew it before coming to Intuit, but I think what’s really unique about Intuit and for engineers here is that you actually get to work on things that are really meaningful for lives of people, and that is a great feeling. You heard our mission is to power prosperity around the world and you saw some of our customers here, and when you work on something that you feel fundamentally touches the lives and people and really help them, that is really, really powerful.

Marianna Tessel: At Intuit, we are very good about looking at it this way and not just building awesome technology, which I’m really passionate about, but also thinking about how it helps our customers. So I think that intersection of really working on great technology and being able to, across the stack, really exercise your craft as an engineer, then working on a mission that is meaningful and then as a company having this culture where it’s really welcoming and nice, and just kind of not that very cut throat, et cetera.

Marianna Tessel: So, it’s kind of unique in its culture of how it’s a very welcoming of people and I think that’s why we actually have also actually high percentage of women relatively because we’re a very welcoming culture where you can feel like you can come in and be yourself, a lot more than I’ve seen in other companies.

Olga Braylovskiy: Awesome, so we use the word awesome a lot and that applies to our culture.

Marianna Tessel: That’s awesome.

Olga Braylovskiy: You touched on amazing, kind of use of amazing technology and being part of our culture. What are some cool and interesting uses of technology, especially more modern tech really as we try to fulfill on our mission of powering prosperity around the world?

Marianna Tessel: Right, and as all you guys you know, we declared our strategy to fulfill that mission to be an AI driven expert platform and what that means … And by the way, this is one of the things about Intuit that I’ve learned. You are very clear about our mission, our strategy, our values. In the beginning, I was like, wow, that’s really heavy, but I actually learned to really, really appreciate it and the clarity that it brings.

Marianna Tessel: So, I really appreciate it now. But our strategy is to be an AI driven expert platform, and what that means is actually it’s a combination of technology and being a platform, both in terms of how we build product, as well as interacting with other entities and actually people because what we have also coming to our platform are real people experts and bless ya, accountants, et cetera. So we are allowing, not just we’re building a great platform but we’re allowing people to be very, very productive on our products.

Marianna Tessel: The AI part is the one that I’m recently very excited about because this is where we really use innovation and a lot of kind of industry buzzwords and applying them to customers to again, like in a real life changing way. We actually we’re … One of the things and nice things we’ve done, we actually defined AI for ourselves, and we said, when we talk about AI, what we mean is machine learning, knowledge engineering and natural language processing.

Marianna Tessel: Now, you’ve probably heard about machine learning and natural language processing, but just to give you a bit of a taste of knowledge engineering, it’s actually about taking rules and relationships and turning them into code. Where it becomes very interesting for us is as you know, we have a leading tax product and other products that have to do with compliance, and what it enabled us to do is really encode compliance in a super efficient way. So that’s kind of one of the things we’re super excited about.

Marianna Tessel: So here is like, on the surface, a problem that could be like sounding to an engineer, slightly boring like compliance and you go ahead and you end up with a technology that’s actually really amazing and completely revolutionizing that field. So, that’s some examples that I’m excited on.

Olga Braylovskiy: Awesome, so if you reflect back to earlier in your career, what is something that maybe a true that you held at the time that you no longer hold true? Like you kind of reevaluated, your perspective shifted.

Marianna Tessel: How early? Like yesterday or?

Olga Braylovskiy: When we’re saying earlier, think back maybe 10, 15 years and I know that our perspective shifts all the time. Something that would be useful especially to this group of geeks who aspire to be the CTO.

Marianna Tessel: Right, I actually … There’s a lot of things that I change my perspective about, but let me kind of touch on a few that came to mind when you asked. The first one is how much do I want to plan my career or not? So, early on I was like this, I would say, like a leaf in the wind that I was like, oh, whatever that takes me. I’m like that sounds interesting, that sounds interesting and I didn’t really plan my career.

Marianna Tessel: I was like, oh, whatever is the next thing, if it sounds good, I’ll just go with it. What I realized at some point is that I need to have a little bit more direction to my career and not necessarily that I have to decide that I want to be like a CTO or whatever, but just kind of think about how the combination of my experiences is actually adding up and where am I going is not just like, oh the cool people. It’s also like, hey, what does it mean? How is it all adding up as a path?

Marianna Tessel: So that will be like one thing that at some point I was like, I’ve started to think … So I’m not a huge planner of my career, but I will be thoughtful about, you know what, I don’t think I’m learning anything here or I don’t think this is like … Doesn’t sound like the traditional step, but I think I’m going to learn a lot, so I want to go and do that. Like an example would be at VMware and it would be at Docker.

Marianna Tessel: I did end up doing a lot of business development while still having an engineering role and I’ve learned a ton from it. That’s something that early on I would be like, no, I’m an engineer, don’t talk to me about anything else. Another thing that I changed my mind about is around leadership. Early in the leadership … And maybe again because that’s kind of a little of what was expected from me, at least I felt, is like I was really focused on the people leadership side.

Marianna Tessel: This is an area that I’m gravitating to anyways. So I would really think myself as a leader of people and I just focused on that as in my leadership, and what I’ve noticed is that I actually really need to continue to develop my craft and I also need to be a technical leader, not just kind of a people leader. So that’s another thing that I changed my mind about how I lead and now I really focus on making sure that I follow technology, I understand technology, I understand the craft to a really big depth, not just focusing on leading people and that’s just like its more fun, but it’s also like, I feel like I add a lot more value to companies when I do it this way. So, I can also talk about other things about learning to be more assertive and things like that, but at a high level, those are a couple of examples.

Olga Braylovskiy: Awesome, last question. I think we have time for one more question. This is super powerful event. We’re all here to learn, share ideas, network. What’s your perspective on leveraging this type of event to the fullest? And just advice on how to make it most effective as a contributing factor to developing relationships and career.

Marianna Tessel: One of the things that actually I’ve learned in, again in my path that your network is one of the most important things that are going to help you in your career. Sometimes you find it in an unexpected places, so just to give you a few ideas around it. When you think about network is like the people you know then later on they will go places, or you need something, or they need something and then you have that connection to really make a dent for them, for the companies, for you, for your career, for your company or sometimes even just getting advice when you need it or sometimes it’s finding that next job when you need it, whatever that is.

Marianna Tessel: So developing a network, if you take one thing away today to at least kind of from what I’m have to offer, developing a network is something super important and I will really focus on that. Then the … What I will say that it’s really important to develop a network, it cannot be like this give and take. You can’t say like, oh I have a bunch of people that when I need them I’m just going to call them, is you need to think about it.

Marianna Tessel: You want to give your network more than what you are taking and you want to really develop great relationship and really, really think about it. Not just like something that you, a tool but something that you’re really caring about. So again, I always focus on am I giving more to my network than I’m taking, because that’s what I think is like a best set up. Of course you don’t want to have people that just always take, take, take from you and will never … There when you need them.

Marianna Tessel: That’s not good part of your network, and then how you develop your network is through events like that. You meet people, you exchange maybe information, then you can follow up. Maybe you have like, you decide to have a coffee or et cetera, but invest time in that. When you think about your day and when you think about your week or your month or whatever, make sure you allocate time to develop your network and to again, make sure you meet with people, you continue getting advice, you continue offering advice, and remember the golden rule, you give more than you take. So anyway, that will be my advice.

Olga Braylovskiy: Awesome, thank you so much for all the insights, Marianna. One and only Marianna Tessel.

Marianna Tessel: Thank you, Olga.

Olga Braylovskiy: You’re welcome. We like hearts in Intuit. That’s true though.

Tracy Stone: You can put those there. Thank you, Marianna and Olga, we appreciate you being here and your wonderful words of advice. Okay, so as promised we’ll do our first raffle and our raffles tonight are some goodies from our small business customers. So, our first raffle is from the Basik Candle company up in South San Francisco, and so I need to draw a ticket. Everybody have their tickets ready? You didn’t get a ticket?

Audience Member: I didn’t get to.

Tracy Stone: Okay, so ready? It’s 691156. Right here? No worries, there you go. From Basik Candle-

Audience: Is this right, 69?

Tracy Stone: Yeah, you are winner, congratulations. Thank you. Okay, so next up we’re going to hear from Rajashree. So Rajashree leads our engineering team for Intuit’s external developer platform and third party app experiences, enabling an ecosystem of thousands of applications that connect to Intuit’s QuickBooks platform. She’s passionate about building purpose-driven engineering teams with a customer first thinking and an inclusive culture. Before Intuit, Rajashree held various engineering roles at PayPal. Thank you, Rajashree.

 

Rajashree Pimpalkhare speaking

Director of Product Development Rajashree Pimpalkhare gives a talk on “Building Solutions with 3rd-Party Developers to Serve the Needs of Small Businesses” at Intuit Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

 

Rajashree Pimpalkhare: Thank you. First of all, let me say this is amazing to see all of you guys here and then secondly, how do I get to follow that? That’s really not fair, but I’ll do my best. So, I lead engineering for Intuit developer group and my focus and my team’s focus is empowering developers that want to work with our customers, deliver solutions to our customers that work with QuickBooks, which is our main product for small businesses.

Rajashree Pimpalkhare: I always like to start with customers. Actually, it’s the first thing I learned when I joined Intuit, that the customer is always in the house, and for us customers are three main type of customers, small businesses, self-employed and consumers. The key thing about all of these personas is they have their financial lives mingle between their business world and their personal world. So most small businesses will have bank accounts that they keep moving money from their personal account to their business account and so on.

Rajashree Pimpalkhare: So we always think of all of those customers in one breaststroke while we may provide different products for them. Then at the bottom you see our partners, so accountants, developers, financial institutions, mega platforms like the Amazons and Googles of the world, educational institutes and governments. These are all the partners that we work with. So, at Intuit we really believe that we want to power prosperity of our customers and we want to bring our partners along, and one big constituent in this part among the partners, are the third party developers.

Rajashree Pimpalkhare: So this is a little bit of geeking out. When you think of third party developers working with QuickBooks, they want to connect their applications to QuickBooks in one of three different ways. Before I go into the specific ways, let me put your mind to who are these developers, what are these apps and what is QuickBooks?

Rajashree Pimpalkhare: So, QuickBooks is our product that does accounting for small businesses. We offer them a payment solution. We offer them payroll solutions, we offer them capital, so we take it off of their financial lives. But these same customers think of like a food truck that you might have seen when you entered building 20. The food truck has things that they need to order. They need a POS system that they need to run credit cards through. They might have some discounts or coupons that they want to give out and those go through social networks and so on, so they use many different apps.

Rajashree Pimpalkhare: A typical small business uses anywhere from four to 15 apps to run their business and it is really critical that their data from these apps flow seamlessly into QuickBooks. Because at the end of the day, this is where they go to understand whether they’re making money, they’re losing money, or how are they going to pay for their dinner the end of the week, right. So there are three ways in which the platform enables us to or enable the third party developer to connect their app with QuickBooks.

Rajashree Pimpalkhare: The first one is data connections. So, this is what most of our developers use. So an eCommerce app, or a POS app, or any kind of other app that’s doing financial transactions for the developer can write that data into QuickBooks. So that can be reconciled into our books if it’s inventory for a product based business. Somebody is selling something on Shopify, the inventory can reconcile with QuickBooks.

Rajashree Pimpalkhare: If it’s a set of customers and a general contractor that’s doing 10 different jobs or a plumber that’s doing 10 different jobs for 10 different customers, those customer names can all come in here and they can understand where they spend money versus where they invoice their customers. So that data flowing in and out. So everything works together is the primary use case that our platform enables. The second use case is for certain types of experiences.

Rajashree Pimpalkhare: When small businesses are into QuickBooks and they’re trying to run their business, they don’t want to have to go and open up another app. So this might be something like you are in QuickBooks and you want to pay your bills. Now, we don’t offer bill pay as our own capability, but we do power it through a partner. If you are a small business in the UK and using QuickBooks, you can actually run payroll through a product that’s run, that’s developed by a different company but the experience is seamless and the platform underneath enables that. Then the third piece is we want to be where our customers are.

Rajashree Pimpalkhare: So, if you are in Google and if you are responding to some emails from your customers, you are able to invoice your customers right from there, from Gmail and that invoicing is powered by Intuit. So the three kind of ways of allowing integrations or ways for third parties to integrate with us, are data connections, so everything works together.

Rajashree Pimpalkhare: Powered by partners, so seamless experiences for our customers where they don’t know where our experience starts and ends and the partner experience starts. The third piece is powering through partners and this is really critical when we want to actually go and serve customers where they are. So what do we do with this? Why is this so important? So we are the small business platform of choice in the United States and increasingly in the global countries where we are.

Rajashree Pimpalkhare: The reason that’s true is because we have over four million customers that use QuickBooks today and for all of those customers, they have needs beyond what QuickBooks provides. So small businesses say, I need additional tools beyond QuickBooks to help me run my business and I would rather get it from Intuit because I trust Intuit and Intuit knows what really is needed for my business to run, and for my business to work, and for me to be profitable.

Rajashree Pimpalkhare: Then the developers need access to customers because if you are a small developer creating a niche app for a specific segment of small businesses, it is incredibly difficult to get them to know you and get them to pick you. There are so many different channels, but if they came in through, we have an App Store that the QuickBooks customers can view. If these developers put their apps in the App Store, they have access to all of their customers and they can put forth a value proposition and reach them.

Rajashree Pimpalkhare: So the developers come to us because they need access to customers to build a business that can grow and be profitable and we sit in the middle of it being able to really power that network effect. So it’s actually really, really gratifying because we work for developers and we work for customers and it’s great to be able to connect the two. A lot of build-outs. So I love this slide because it tells you a little bit about what kind of … So it tells you multiple things. First it tells you look at how big our ecosystem is.

Rajashree Pimpalkhare: All of these apps that show up here are connected to QuickBooks in one of the three different ways that we looked at. The second thing it tells you is look at how difficult it is for small businesses to really know what they want and what they need and the QuickBooks at the center is where we really take our role really seriously. We want to recommend the right apps to our customers. We want to make sure they’re successful with those. We want to make sure they know exactly how they interact with our products and so on. So this is just to tell you where we are today.

Rajashree Pimpalkhare: So I joined Intuit five years ago. I think Tracy said I came from PayPal and I came from a world where it was all about money, and all about revenue, and all about the money that came into the pocket of the company. I love PayPal as well, by the way, but at Intuit it’s just a little bit different, right? The purpose is just a little bit higher and the passion you can bring to the table is just that much bigger. In the last five years we have gone from about 700,000 QuickBooks customers to over four million.

Rajashree Pimpalkhare: I think the number is 4.2 million today. 40 apps that were on the App Store to more than 700 and one in five customers of QuickBooks today use at least one app, and we are continuing to work on it and continuing to grow it. So just super proud to be associated with the Intuit developer group to be working here and we are the global trusted platform of choice. So, with that…

Tracy Stone: Thank you.

Rajashree Pimpalkhare: I assume you’re not taking questions now, but I love to talk to you about it after.

Tracy Stone: We would love for you to engage with our speakers after. We’ll have some time at the end of the session. So thank you, Rajashree. Now we’d like to invite Nhung up to our virtual stage up here, I guess. Nhung, you want to advance the slide. Nhung is the director of data science for our QuickBooks ecosystem and customer success data science teams. She leads the strategy and execution of applied machine learning programs that span the range of marketing product, forecasting, and other strategic capabilities.

Tracy Stone: Her applied machine learning teams build new to the world products and services backed by artificial intelligence to serve Intuit’s customers across the whole customer life cycle. So I’m excited to hear from Nhung. So let’s give Nhung a warm welcome.

 

Nhung Ho speaking

Director of Data Science Nhung Ho gives a talk on “Using Machine Learning to Solve Small Businesses’ Problems” at Intuit Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

 

Nhung Ho: All righty, can you hear me? All right, so couple things as ground rules. I speak really quickly and I tend to pace. If I walk into these chairs, feel free to laugh at me. All right, so just a quick introduction about myself. I’m actually a former astrophysicist turned data scientist and one of the things I’m super passionate about is actually using math and code to solve real world problems. That’s why I escaped from looking at the stars, actually looking at people and turning my gaze down.

Nhung Ho: The other thing is I also love food and so if you’re traveling to any city and want restaurant recommendations, I have a running list. I made a Google maps, I pin everything and I have a list of all the dishes that I liked. So I’m happy to share that with anyone. All right, so I’m here to talk to you about how my team uses machine learning to solve small business problems because the business of running your business is actually really hard and it all starts with starting your business, right?

Nhung Ho: You would think that like Michael Scott in The Office, when he says, I declare bankruptcy, right? You can say, I declare a business and then you have a business. But actually that’s not true and this is just the first six of 25 steps that you have to take to even start a business, right? There are a lot of questions that you have to answer before you even get your first customer through the door. Once you start doing that, then you say, okay, I expect that I’m going to open a clothing store.

Nhung Ho: I’m going to be able to dress women, make them happy, make them look good and everything is going to be awesome, dandy. I’m going to go home feeling great, but what you do is you actually go home to a mountain of paperwork, right? I know this really intimately because I have 10 siblings and five of them own small businesses and every day they go home, the stacks and stacks of papers, stacks and stacks of receipts.

Nhung Ho: It is incredibly hard to manage. So, while during the day you’re satisfying your customers, you’re doing what you love, you go home at night and you’re dealing with paperwork because you actually have to run your business and make sure that you have enough cash flow to continue serving your customers. Just a simplified view of some of the things you need to do as a small business, you need to track your expenses.

Nhung Ho: You’re going to go buy supplies, you’re going to go buy inventory, and you’re going to have a stack of receipts and invoices that you have to keep track of. If you drive for a living, you have to keep track of how much you use your car because that ends up being tax deductible, right? You want to be able to track your income so now you have bank statements to take care of. If you invoice people, you have to keep track of that as well. Then, finally at the end of the year, you need to make sure you’re tax compliant, right?

Nhung Ho: So if you’re a sole proprietor, you need to know about this thing called a schedule C and you then you need an EIN. So there’s a whole host of things that you need to be able to do and know and manage as a small business owner that I think a lot of us who don’t own small businesses don’t realize. So where do I come in, right? Why do you need an astrophysicist here at Intuit for solving these problems?

Nhung Ho: It’s because a lot of these things that are really rote, and boring, and tedious, you can actually make much easier using machine learning. So I’m going to go through two examples. The first one is on receipt tracking. So I mentioned that a lot of small businesses go out and buy a bunch of things. They need to be able to track their receipts. They need to be able to take those receipts and actually transcribe every single piece of information into an accounting system. In this case, in QuickBooks, right?

Nhung Ho: So if you as a human, you have to go through and scan this and say, where did I buy this from? What is the address? When did I buy it? What are all the things that I bought? What is the individual prices? And then decompose that one receipt into individual lines in there. Think about how much time that takes and how tedious it is.

Nhung Ho: So what that ends up doing is actually causing you to say, it’s not worth it, I’m just not going to do this and then you end up leaving money on the table because you could have deducted these. So if you can imagine, what my team did was we actually married computer vision and natural language processing. You can utilize an OCR system to go through and actually pick out every single character. You can figure out exactly where the bounding boxes are for each of these fields and then begin to lift that information out.

Nhung Ho: You can then use a deep learning system to say, okay, I know that when I see Aroma Cafe, that’s a vendor, and when I see that number format, it’s actually a date, right? We can use the latest deep learning technology, scan through the system that’s already been OCR, pull out that information and then make sense of it. Then finally put that into your accounting system and you’re done.

Nhung Ho: This system is 10 times faster than what a human can do and we can go and grind through thousands of receipts for you as long as you send us the image. That’s kind of the power of what machine learning can do to help a small business succeed. So the next example I want to talk about is mileage tracking. As I mentioned earlier, how many of you here know that if you use a personal vehicle for business purposes, every single mile that you drive is deductible at 54.5 cents per mile?

Nhung Ho: Actually, quite a bit. Actually, I definitely did not know that when I started this. But if you are a real estate agent and you’re driving between showings, that could be hundreds of miles per day. That’s a lot of money that you can deduct on your taxes. We actually have a product called QuickBooks Self-Employed, that makes this really easy for you. You turn on our automated mileage tracking service, we will say, okay, we know that Nhung traveled from point A to point B on this day and this is the distance that she drives, which is super awesome, except we don’t actually know exactly what the purpose was, right?

Nhung Ho: Because again, you need to be able to say, this trip is a business trip versus a personal trip. If I drive to the grocery store, I can’t deduct that on my taxes and if the IRS finds out, it’s not going to be good times for anybody. So you have to go in and say, is this a personal trip? Is this a business trip? And if it’s a business trip, why did you actually use your car for that purpose, right? So it’s multiple pieces of work.

Nhung Ho: So to give you a real example that I have scrubbed a lot of personal information from is, meet Claire. Claire works at City Hall during the day and she actually teaches piano on the side. These are all of the trips that Claire took. You can see that some of them are for business purposes and some of them are for personal, but there’s no real pattern that jumps out here. In an average month, she takes 200 trips and you can imagine that if Claire, like I am, there’s a huge procrastinator, at the end of the month, she’s got to answer basically 800 questions.

Nhung Ho: What was this trip? When did I take this trip? Where was I going and what was the purpose of this trip? Is it for because I’m driving to teach piano or is it because I’m driving to City Hall for my job? We don’t make that distinguish. We don’t distinguish that, you do it for us, but I can build a machine learning system that can do this in less than a second for Claire and that’s exactly what my team did. We utilized frequent pattern mining and we essentially automatically learn very personalized and highly individualized rules per user.

Nhung Ho: So we can group all of the trips on the left side that she took exactly to the same destination, show that to her and say, we think that this is a personal trip and if it ends up being a personal trip or a business trip, here is a deduction that you get. For our users, they take 50 million trips per year. Now you can imagine building a system like this that is scalable, extensible, and is ready to use for any new user who comes in.

Nhung Ho: So what I hope I showed you was how machine learning can actually make the business of doing business much easier, right? And it’s not … I can tell you it wasn’t obvious to me when I started here, why we need a data scientist to work on accounting. Isn’t it solved? It’s so old, it’s so boring. But I can tell you some of the most boring, mundane things are the areas that are the most exciting because those are the areas that have not seen innovation in a really long time and that’s where you can go in and make a difference. So thank you for letting me share those with you.

Tracy Stone: Thank you, Nhung. I don’t think you tripped over the chairs either, but that might be my job then, huh? Okay, one more raffle now. So get your tickets out and this time our raffle prize is from Origaudio in the set of very cool noise canceling headphones. You like this? Yeah, all right. Let’s see if I can pull your raffle card. Okay, it is 691056. Anybody? 691056. Here you go, I believe you. Okay, wonderful. All right, so next we have Kristina Fox, and Kristina Fox is our staff iOS engineer working on the QuickBooks Self-Employed iOS app.

Tracy Stone: She has spoken internationally at over 25 meet-ups and conferences, including Grace Hopper, iOS Dev UK. Were some people at Grace Hopper a few weeks ago? iOS Dev UK, WeAreDevelopers World Congress and many others on topics ranging from Apple watch development to diversity inclusion. So thank you Kristina for being here and let’s give her a warm welcome.

 

Kristina Fox speaking

Staff iOS Engineer Kristina Fox gives a talk on “Using Mobile Capabilities to Save Time and Money for the Self-Employed” at Intuit Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

 

Kristina Fox: Thank you everyone. Okay, so we’re going to be talking about using mobile capabilities to save time and money for the self employed, and this is really a topic that’s near and dear to my heart because, well I’m an iOS engineer and it’s basically one of the most versatile platforms out there. Okay, is there anyone here that doesn’t have a phone on them right now?

Kristina Fox: Exactly, so that’s why this is one of those platforms that’s literally always on you and it can make such a huge difference in your lives than it already has, considering the fact that none of us really travel without phones anymore. Okay, so let’s get started. Just to give you a bit of context, I work on QuickBooks Self-Employed, it was actually the app that Nhung talked about earlier, and for those of you who aren’t familiar with it, it is an app that helps freelancers and contractors help manage their business finances.

Kristina Fox: So she talked a little bit about the mileage tracking. We also do transaction and expense reporting and also invoicing. So there’s lots of really cool stuff that our app does to help all of those self-proprietors out there, the sole proprietors out there. If you think about it, the types of people that we help are people like this freelance photographer out there or maybe even the Lyft or Uber driver that took you here today.

Kristina Fox: So lots of really interesting industries that we can also help out there. Okay, so the next thing that I basically want to dive into is specifically a project that I worked on and developed called Receipt Capture. This is this is one of these most probably my favorite project that I’ve ever worked on here, so it’s really fun for me to share this with you. Okay, so let’s take a step back and say, oh, we decided to go shopping and this is just to set some context about why receipts are so important to our self employed people, right?

Kristina Fox: So we decided to go shopping and we found a really amazing dress. It looked awesome on you in the dressing room and you decided to buy it and bring it home. But once you got home, you really … It ended up changing colors on you. You didn’t really know what color that dress was. Was it white and gold? Was it blue and black? You’re not really sure anymore. So, well, okay, you decided the blue and black doesn’t really work for you and so you want to return it and what exactly do you need usually to return things to a store?

Kristina Fox: Receipts, exactly. So receipts are really important to us as proofs of purchase as consumers, but for our small businesses, they’re really important to help prove that the things that we’re buying are actually business purchases and so this is really important, especially if the IRS comes to audit at some point, you need to be able to prove that the things that you purchased at the end of the day are actually for your business.

Kristina Fox: So, let’s talk about the basic Receipt Capture experience and so I direct your attention all the way to the left side. Usually you’ll hook up QuickBooks Self-Employed to your bank account and you’ll see the list of transactions coming through from your credit card or your checking account. From there, if you have a receipt for Starbucks for example, you’ll want to tap on Starbucks and then that will pull up a detailed view of your transaction.

Kristina Fox: From there you can tap, attach receipt and then you’ll be able to either take a photo or choose from your camera roll if you decided to take that photo earlier. That’s fine, pretty simple experience. You’re really just attaching a photo to a transaction, but one thing that’s kind of interesting about this is that if you’ve ever gone into your checking account or your credit card account and you just bought something, you’ll notice that there might be a pending transaction, right? It means that it hadn’t exactly cleared yet because maybe the restaurant doesn’t have your final total or your credit card is still being authorized.

Kristina Fox: So it can take generally about one to two days for these pending transactions to clear and unfortunately until that time we can’t really attach any receipts to it because it’s not a real transaction at that point. One to two days might not sound like very much time, but really anything can happen in these receipts in that one or two days, anything at all.

Kristina Fox: So what do you do? What do you do when you lose that receipt? Well, hopefully with our new enhanced Receipt Capture experience you won’t have to find out. So I’m going to do a quick demo of the new enhanced Receipt Capture experience that I ended up building for QuickBooks Self-Employed and this is going to be fun to juggle. So hopping in, I’m going to go ahead and end the show and I bring up my phone screen here. So this is the QuickBooks Self-Employed app. I’m trying to make this bigger.

Kristina Fox: You can go into the transactions tab where you can actually snap a receipt. So if you remember before we had to go and tap into an individual transaction to take a picture, well now you don’t really have to do that anymore. So you go into here, we’ll tap snap receipt and then we bring up this new camera view that we have, and so what’s cool about this is it actually does the cropping for you. So I’m shaking a little bit too much right now.

Kristina Fox: Demos are always nerve wracking. Okay, so we’ll steady. Okay, so now we’re able to get a cropped version of our receipt photo here and if you ever wanted to mess around with it, say it didn’t quite crop correctly, you could even go in, it takes you back to that original photo. So then you can manipulate those crop points or you can even rotate that image. So, there’s lots of really cool image enhancements that you can do here, and then from here all you have to do is hit at the bottom, use this photo and it disappears off. It gets uploaded to our service in the background and that’s it.

Kristina Fox: That’s all you have to do now. So this is our new enhanced Receipt Capture experience. So what exactly is happening here? Well, in the background we start off with QuickBooks Self-Employed. From there it actually gets uploaded to our document service. So this is where it actually stores that receipt image for you and then from there it goes to our data extraction service.

Kristina Fox: So, it’s something that Nhung was alluding to earlier where we can actually go and run optical character recognition on that receipt itself and then pull out the data that we really care about. So that’s stuff like, again, the vendor at the top of the receipt, we’re looking for the date, the total, and the credit card number too. So we can pull out all of that receipt data for you, and then we do automatic matching.

Kristina Fox: So now we go back into your list of transactions. Instead of actually having to go in and find that Starbucks transaction again, this algorithm actually takes that receipt and automatically looks at the data that’s coming in from that transaction and it attaches it for you. So it’s literally you take a picture and then you just forget about it and it’s already in your account, all done. Yeah, it’s literally a life changing event.

Kristina Fox: So what are some of the mobile capabilities of this? Well, obviously we’re using the camera to take a photo. We have a lot of touch … We have the touch screen capability where we can actually manipulate the photo if we need to, and we’re also running a lot of image processing algorithms in the background in order to make sure that the photo is usable. So you saw that it was telling me to hold steady.

Kristina Fox: In some cases, if there’s not enough light, it will tell me, oh, you need to add some more light to the background’s too dark, things like that. So there’s a lot of really cool things that are running in the background, just doing image processing there. It’s also a very on the go capability, like as you can see, a lot of the people we’re supporting are Lyft drivers. They’re a freelance photographers, they’re always constantly on the go, they’re gig economists and so they need to be able to have this type of capability wherever they’re going.

Kristina Fox: Of course, on one last thing, if you’re using the iOS platform, you might be familiar with Siri shortcuts, and so if I hop out again and on my phone. Okay, so let’s tell Siri, snap this receipt. It hops directly into that camera. So now the user doesn’t even have to go in and launch QuickBooks Self-Employed. You can just add a Siri shortcut with your own custom phrase and then it will go into the exact view that you need.

Kristina Fox: So we’re really taking advantage of all those platform capabilities here too, and here’s a look at what that looks like. So you can add this custom phrase to Siri and then it will do whatever you tell it to. So this is the one of the cool Siri shortcuts capabilities that we have. That’s it for me. Thank you so much.

Tracy Stone: Thank you, Kristina, and a live demo was so awesome. All right, next up, we have Cassie Divine and Cassie’s the senior vice president of the Intuit QuickBooks online platform where she leads the business units responsible for small business, self-employed, accountant, and the Intuit developer group. She is especially passionate about driving diversity and inclusion in technology with an eye on fostering a favorable work environment for women.

Tracy Stone: Cassie’s been awarded the Silicon Valley Business Journal Women of Influence award and has twice received the Intuit CEO Leadership award. A passionate small business owner herself, she also has an Etsy shop where she sells her DIY kids’ Halloween costumes, might come in handy. So let’s welcome Cassie Divine.

 

Cassie Divine speaking

SVP of QuickBooks Online Platform Cassie Divine gives a talk on “Owning Your Career: Reinventing Yourself to Create Impact at Scale” at Intuit Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

 

Cassie Divine: Thank you, Tracy. That glorious introduction just made my impostor syndrome in this room even worse. I’m so grateful to be here and crowned a Girl Geek with this amazing lineup of my Intuit colleagues. My topic, my lightning talk isn’t a technical one. It’s how to hack your own career and for all of you who know you’ve been working, there is so much conventional wisdom about what you’re supposed to do to move up, and advance, and create an enriching career.

Cassie Divine: By all of those conventional rules, I have done nothing right, and yet I find myself with a big fancy job, and title, and opportunity to make a huge impact. So tonight I want to tell you five quick stories. The stories are unique to me and they’re my crazy stories, but I think the lessons I’ve learned that I’ll share are applicable to lots of you, I hope. So I hope you hear something you already knew and needed to hear or something you could learn.

Cassie Divine: So story one, I started at Intuit 12 years ago and I joined as a senior manager and I had a plan to get promoted in two years. I had talked to the boss I came to work for. He had seemed to think that that was a reasonable expectation and I was at a point in my career where I was convinced that I was better than a lot of people and I needed to go. It was a sure thing that was going to happen. Of course in this story, it doesn’t happen that way and I was devastated.

Cassie Divine: I was devastated because I didn’t get this title that I wanted and the wisdom from my boss was just to work hard, to work even harder and to sort of ride the time and that it would happen in one to two years. I found myself being frustrated with the idea that I was waiting to get a label from someone else and in a moment I decided to create a label for myself. I’d been thinking about starting an Etsy store, a side gig, for a long time and I decided that this would be my moment and screw not being the title I’d wanted, I would be the CEO of my own thing.

Cassie Divine: And I kept working, but the work changed because so much of my creativity, and hustle, and anxiety, instead of worrying about some label, it went into something that was for me, and it was really enriching for me, and I actually probably stopped staying as late and stopped doing some of the things you do when you’re searching for a title and just started focusing on impact at work.

Cassie Divine: Because I had this creative outlet and don’t you know I got promoted six months later, and the lesson for me though was you define you, nobody else gets to do that. Titles can just be labels and we don’t like them when they’re bad, and I worry we give them too much power when we think they’re good and a lot of it is about the impact and the journey. Story two, I was coming back from my maternity leave and I got a lot of wisdom from women and men, which was, the plan was just to come back and show that I was the same person.

Cassie Divine: I could just, nothing had changed and I could work the same way and I remember thinking like, I don’t think I can even do that, everything has changed. I don’t want to be here the same hours. My priorities have shifted and I had never cashed in any of my street credibility or what I had had. I had never asked for anything and I decided that this might be the moment that I would, and I did my research, I talked to a lot of people who had organized creative arrangements.

Cassie Divine: A lot of people gave me advice that it was absolutely the worst time in my career to take a step back and there are a lot of studies that say women are going to earn less. I just decided to go for it and I asked to take 80% of my salary and have every Friday to be with my little girl. But I made a deal with my boss, which was, I will deliver the same impact, it just is going to look different. I did that arrangement for two years. It was so awesome and I got promoted after I came back full time.

Cassie Divine: I learned in it to ask for what you want. The worst thing anybody can say is no, but in asking for what you want, to be clear about what you’re going to deliver so people know what they get when they say yes. Third story, I was 15 years into my career, seven years at Intuit, and I had just been promoted to vice president and conventional wisdom is like, this is your career, this is what you’re going to do, this is your path. You build on it.

Cassie Divine: I had been unhappy for a long time and just going through the motions, and I loved the company, I loved the company’s impact, but I wasn’t finding it was meaningful to me, and I started working on my network. I agree with what Marianna said and I had always given to my network and this was a point I asked, I worked my network on what would someone take a bet on me to do that would be different from my job and I got my big break and it came with a demotion.

Cassie Divine: It came with giving back a team, which I had been led to believe that it was all about creating this big kingdom and you grow in giving … You grow and getting this big team and I went to being an individual contributor and people inside and outside the company thought it was a little crazy because it just seemed like it was too late to make a change and that it on paper looked a little insane to a lot of people. But I was so excited about it to get to have an impact on moving into a product business when I actually moved into the QuickBooks Self-Employed business.

Cassie Divine: I would move into a role in BizOps and I was excited because the person I was going to work for saw something in me that I didn’t even know I was capable of doing, but both of us were willing to take that bet. 18 months later after getting that job, I got the biggest job I’d ever gotten. I almost went for something bigger than what I had stepped down from, and it came when I wasn’t focusing on trying to get promoted. I was just trying to focus on the biggest impact. But the lesson that I learned in this is bet on yourself, but that has two parts.

Cassie Divine: It has the courage that you make the bet and it’s also about finding somebody who will make that bet with you, and my advice to all of you would be seek someone, your boss or mentor who sees what you’re capable of doing and suspends disbelief and isn’t just obsessed with what you’ve been able to do on paper already.

Cassie Divine: Fourth story, I was now in my big job leading this product business and it was really fun and I knew the rap on me is I had taken over from someone who was really successful. It was sort of like my was seen as the person who was just helping keep it up and running, and there was a job similar to mine that had been vacant for three to four months and it was bigger, and it was a lot harder, and it had a different profile and I wasn’t a candidate for it.

Cassie Divine: In fact, I was on the interview committee to go and search for the person who would be the right person and based on every discussion of what we thought we were looking for, wisdom said I had no business to do this. As we talked to the team and as we kept interviewing people, I started thinking, I think I could do this job and I actually think I could start to show that it’s not just about keeping the easy thing running, but I could show that I could work on something hard and lead a turnaround.

Cassie Divine: But I didn’t necessarily have the courage at the time to raise my hand to just take it, and so I raised my hand to help with it. I had said, what if I help in a capacity as we continue to search for this person and I will make it better. This team is in need, I have a great leadership team in Self-employed. They’ll step up and do more and I’ll play this dual role and six months later we decided that I actually was the right person for the job and I stepped into the role.

Cassie Divine: But more importantly, I showed that I was willing to take on the hard things. I was willing to do a lot more and as a result, I got my big job today, which is far bigger. What I learned in that is it’s okay to be your own hype woman and raise your hand and sometimes you’re the best person qualified to say you might be able to go do a job and be considered for it.

Cassie Divine: What I’d offer for you is, if you’re worried about it or if they’re worried about it, one of the best ways to get that shot is in a volunteer or rotational capacity because there’s nothing that is a downside to that except you do a lot more work in the meantime, but it shows you and it shows them that it’s a great opportunity. Last story isn’t a story, it’s something that has weaved through all of my stories, which is conventional wisdom is that career success is all about you and you answer this question, what do I need to do to get ahead and how can I show that I’m, I’m being successful?

Cassie Divine: What I found is career success is actually about making everybody else successful and investing in your teams, and your peers, and your boss, and your customers. One of my favorite books, I encourage all of you to read it is by Adam Grant. It’s called Give and Take and it is all about this idea that investing in other’s success is what creates the most success for us. Now, it feels counterintuitive when you think about what it feels like to give someone credit, God forbid it’s someone mansplaining something to you. It’s hard sometimes because it feels random.

Cassie Divine: Maybe you don’t know them or you haven’t … It’s not sort of about this give and take, but do it anyway. Real leadership is about creating impact and it is more easy to do. It is more fun to do with others, and as you do that, I promise it comes back to you. You become the person that everybody wants to work with and it has its ups and downs and I agree with Marianna, you have to worry about the people who are just taking and not giving back to that, but I encourage you to do it.

Cassie Divine: So the lesson I’ve learned there is what I’d call, what Adam Grant says is givers take all, and invest in others and raise others up and make that a part of your leadership brand. It will unlock things that are just amazing for you. To wrap up, start … I like starting with a plan. I like starting with a path. I like the point Marianna made about the things that are important. I would encourage you to be open to the idea that it can change dramatically and I would think a lot more about moving forward than moving up. Hack your own career.

Cassie Divine: You define you. Ask for what you want with accountability, bet on yourself and find the person who’s going to bet on you, raise your hand to take on work people didn’t know, but you did, that you’re capable of all while investing in others’ success. I’m so excited to find out what all of you will go and do and the impact that you create in your own careers. Thank you.

Tracy Stone: Okay, so with that, that ends our formal program tonight. I want to thank you all for coming. I want to thank all of our speakers. So these are some amazing women that work at Intuit doing some really cool work and leading teams around the work we’re doing to power prosperity for our 50 million customers and growing. You can just spend some time and interact with them as long as they’re able to stay.

Tracy Stone: Ask them questions; those questions that you had that you didn’t get a chance to ask. There are drinks out there. You can go out on the patio and network for a little while longer. I hope you all had a chance to connect with everybody and walked away with some few, those nuggets of wisdom that you’ll take as you go on to do amazing things, as Cassie said. So thank you all.

 

Cindy Osmon speaking

Distinguished Engineer Cindy Osmon demos “Smart Mirror” at Intuit Girl Geek Dinner. Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

 

Nirmala Ranganathan speaking

Principal Product Manager Nirmala Ranganathan demos “Shield” at Intuit Girl Geek Dinner. Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

 

Yi Ng speaking

Principal Product Manager Yi Ng and Senior Software Engineer Regina Garcia demo “QuickBooks for New Users” at Intuit Girl Geek Dinner. Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

 

Intuit Tech Women at Intuit Girl Geek Dinner group of women in tech

Thanks to all the Tech Women @ Intuit for hosting us warmly at Intuit’s Mountain View headquarters for our Intuit Girl Geek Dinner! Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X


Our mission-aligned Girl Geek X partners are hiring!

Best of 2019 – Girl Geek Dinner Videos

By Angie Chang (Girl Geek X Founder)

We’ve hosted 27 Girl Geek Dinners, of which 60% were located in San Francisco and 40% were located in the Silicon Valley. These dinners were attended by over 4,000 women this year and we are thrilled to continue to host Girl Geek Dinners for the 12th year.

Missed a few dinners? Don’t worry, we share videos of talks on the Girl Geek X YouTube channel. Subscribe to watch the latest videos!

GIRL GEEK DINNER TALKS IN 2019 – MOST-WATCHED ON YOUTUBE

Maybe you’re wondering where to start watching.

Here are the most popular Girl Geek Dinner videos in 2019, ranked by most YouTube views:

#1 – “Scale Your Career With Open Source” Confluent Girl Geek Dinner (video)Neha Narkhede (Confluent Chief Product Officer & Co-Founder) with transcript

#2 – “Thank U, Next: How “Diversity” Gets In The Way Of Gender Equity” Atlassian Girl Geek Dinner (video) Aubrey Blanche (Atlassian Global Head of Diversity & Belonging) with transcript

#3 – “Security First” Palo Alto Networks Girl Geek Dinner (video) Citlalli Solano (Palo Alto Networks Director of Engineering) with transcript

#4 – “Data + Scale + Community = Impact” Strava Girl Geek Dinner (video) Cathy Tanimura (Strava Senior Director, Analytiics & Data Science) with transcript

#5 – “Offline Performance Marketing: Using Art & Science To Drive Response & Revenue” HomeLight Girl Geek Dinner (video) Molly Laufer (HomeLight Director of Offline Marketing) with transcript

#6 – “Dossiers Of Awesome: One Way To Help Folks Get The Recognition They Deserve” Stitch Fix Girl Geek Dinner (video) Erin Dees (Stitch Fix Principal Software Engineer) with transcript

#7 – “Finding Your Niche By Identifying Your Strengths” Blend Girl Geek Dinner (video) Ashley McIntyre (Blend Sales Engineering Manager) with transcript

#8 – “Accelerating Computation For Real-Time Machine Learning” Xilinx Girl Geek Dinner (video) Jennifer Wong (Xilinx Vice President of FPGA Product Development) with transcript

#9 – “Machine Learning In Support: Infusing A Flagship Product With Innovative New Features” Zendesk Girl Geek Dinner (video) Eleanor Stribling (Zendesk Group Product Manager) with transcript

#10 – “People-Powered Innovation” Poshmark Girl Geek Dinner (video) Tracy Sun (Poshmark Senior Vice President of New Markets & Co-Founder) with transcript

GIRL GEEK DINNERS IN 2019 – HIGHEST ATTENDEE-RATED SESSIONS

Prefer the metric of quality over quantity? Maybe the Girl Geek Dinner happened later in the year, so there was less time to amass YouTube views.

Here are audience favorites from Girl Geek Dinners, ranked by attendee ratings on content and speakers in 2019:

#1 – Mode Girl Geek Dinner (video)

#2 – Blend Girl Geek Dinner (video)

#3 – Strava Girl Geek Dinner (video) 

#4 – OpenAI Girl Geek Dinner (video)

#5 – Microsoft Girl Geek Dinner (video)

#6 – Confluent Girl Geek Dinner (video)

#7 – Poshmark Girl Geek Dinner (video)

#8 – Okta Girl Geek Dinner (video)

#9 – Xilinx Girl Geek Dinner (video)

#10 – Atlassian Girl Geek Dinner (video)

GIRL GEEK DINNERS IN 2020

We would love to have more Girl Geek Dinners at med/health companies, biotech companies, consumer-facing companies… We are interested in partner more with the scientific and ethical-minded companies out there in addition to our slate of tech companies hosting Girl Geek Dinners.

Here’s how to partner with Girl Geek X in 2020. We are currently working with sponsors for 2020 dinner dates, and excited to continue partnering with companies to host Girl Geek Dinners!

“X” IS FOR PODCASTS AND MORE

Girl Geek Dinners, Girl Geek Elevate, Girl Geek Podcasts, and much more!

Here are the best 10 Elevate videos from 2019, and the most-downloaded 10 Girl Geek Podcasts from 2019.

We’ll be releasing the best of 2019 lists for more content soon, stay tuned!

#1 – “Scale Your Career With Open Source” Confluent Girl Geek Dinner (video)Neha Narkhede
#2 – “Thank U, Next: How “Diversity” Gets In The Way Of Gender Equity” Atlassian Girl Geek Dinner (video) Aubrey Blanche
#3 – “Security First” Palo Alto Networks Girl Geek Dinner (video) Citlalli Solano
#4 – “Data + Scale + Community = Impact” Strava Girl Geek Dinner (video) Cathy Tanimura
#5 – “Offline Performance Marketing: Using Art & Science To Drive Response & Revenue” HomeLight Girl Geek Dinner (video) Molly Laufer
#6 – “Dossiers Of Awesome: One Way To Help Folks Get The Recognition They Deserve” Stitch Fix Girl Geek Dinner (video) Erin Dees
#7 – “Finding Your Niche By Identifying Your Strengths” Blend Girl Geek Dinner (video) Ashley McIntyre
#8 – “Accelerating Computation For Real-Time Machine Leearning” Xilinx Girl Geek Dinner (video) Jennifer Wong
#9 – “Machine Learning In Support: Infusing A Flagship Product With Innovative New Features” Zendesk Girl Geek Dinner (video) Eleanor Stribling
#10 – “People-Powered Innovation” Poshmark Girl Geek Dinner (video) Tracy Sun