Sophie Novati, the founder of Formation, discusses the importance of understanding system design in engineering interviews. She explains that system design interviews test high-level problem-solving skills and real-world engineering experience, and emphasizes the importance of asking questions to understand the limitations and scope of the problem, as well as identifying technical challenges.

Transcipt:

Sophie Novati: Thank you so much, Amanda, for that wonderful intro. Thanks for everyone else for also being here in today’s session with me. I’m super excited to be here with all of you today.

And before I start, just wanted to say that please do drop questions as you have them throughout this talk. I know we don’t have a ton of time, but I’ll try to leave at least a couple of minutes at the end. And if not, I will definitely try to follow up with written or Looms or something, follow up to answer any questions that people have. Please ask them.

I think we mostly went through the intro already, so I’ll say hi again. I’m Sophie. I am the founder of Formation. We help people land top-tier engineering roles. This is just a really important topic for me because I remember starting my career as a software engineer at Facebook as a new grad just thinking that engineering was about just solving weird algorithms all day and coding, essentially.

And I distinctly remember throughout my career from Facebook to Nextdoor progressing to a staff level engineer transitioning into the mindset from being just a coder to being an engineer, which is really about building products that are actually changing the world and solving real user problems. And I think that this shift was the single most important change in my mindset that helped me become a way better software engineer, but it also made me just enjoy my work so much more. And I think that system design, understanding how your entire system works and the information, how it’s all flowing through the system to go from user input all the way to user response is very much part of that picture of progressing in your career as a software engineer. So anyway, to add a little bit to my background as well, I was one of those people that was very, very involved in our interviewing processes.

I was one of those people that did hundreds of interviews and I was very involved in thinking about diversity and onboarding and all things just bringing in new, great engineers related. And prior to starting Formation, I mentored at a bunch of different training programs trying to figure out why there was such consistently a skill gap I was seeing as an interviewer on my teams. And so I really started Formation because I just love the space and really want to spend my life hoping to create an impact in there. So I’m super excited to get to do this talk today. So today’s agenda, wanted to just really introduce you to the system design interview format. And this is roughly going to be the agenda. Obviously, it’s only 20 minutes, so you’re not going to become an expert at this at all by the end of it, but hopefully it gives you a little bit of sense of direction where to go.

So I want to start with talking about why system design as an interview format even exists, and from the perspective of your interviewer, what are they looking for, what are they thinking about? And then we’ll go through and we have this thing called the engineering method at Formation. And I’ll roughly just break down some of the stages of a system design interview. Note that these aren’t just orderly, like you do this, then this, then it goes back and forth between steps, but you slowly transition your way through these steps. And I’ll walk through an example as well. And then finally, I’ll leave off with a little bit of how do you actually prepare for this, knowing why it’s being done and what it looks like. Okay, so let’s get started. So the first thing is why systems design? So I think most people are usually familiar with coding interviews, so I’ll make a couple analogies.

But coding interviews, it’s really about testing fairly practical day-to-day coding skills. Now, I know the problems are oversimplified, so they’re not actually real problems that you’re solving, but it is fairly practical in that it is testing a skill that you will be executing every day, which is coding or most days. And system design is very much not that. It’s almost the opposite. It is really testing for high level problem solving and it is less practical because you’re not going to be building anything during a system design interview. You’re just going to be talking about a system in theory. And so it’s very high level problem solving. It’s testing for a lot of real world engineering experience, which is very different from coding, and so it relies on a little bit more theoretical stuff. And sometimes the system design is also meant to test for specific tech stack experience.

And this is sometimes, not always. Usually for specialized senior roles, system design will be very, very important because they might be looking for an experienced engineer who has worked with finance software specifically or security or some amount of obscene level of scale. And so for this in general, this is why I think it’s actually quite important, especially as you progress into your career, to really look at the job descriptions of the roles that you’re applying for, especially at these big companies where there are many job descriptions for the same level and each one might have a different thing because the different team needs a different skill.

And even if the interview format, like schedule is the same, like coding, then system design, then hiring manager interview, whatever the schedule is, the system design might heavily be influenced in terms of what the person is looking for based on the role that they’re trying to fill. And so really, system design also is the big seniority differentiator. So with a coding interview, it’s actually quite hard to disambiguate between a senior versus a junior engineer, but system design is where it’s at. And really, I like to say that it is trying to get a sense of how battle-scarred you are and the scale of problems that you’re really used to worrying about.

Okay, so how are we doing? So that’s the why behind system design. So let’s progress into the actual interview format itself. So the first step of the system design interview is somewhat, I find the scariest, to be honest, because it is often the time when you have the least amount of information. So classic system design interview, it’s like, hey, design Coder Pad and it is just incredibly open-ended and that’s it, that’s the prompt. And then you’re let go. And there’s a moment of just uncertainty because you don’t even know what problem you’re solving yet, yet you’re solving it. And so this step is really about discovering the limitations of the prompt on your own. And as part of this, you have to discover what is in and out of scope to be solved in this interview. And this is much more important in a system design than even in a coding interview.

This is an important step there, too. But you really want to be asking all kinds of questions and make sure you’re thinking about the system both at the macro level. So how many users are you supporting overall, right? What’s the scale of the system as well as the micro level? So what does the end to end end-to-end user flow look like? And the challenging thing here is that you don’t have infinite time, and so you also want to make sure you’re strategically asking the right questions in a binary search format so that you can quickly hone in on what it is that you need to focus the rest of your time on in this interview. And so quickly, to give an example, let’s go use our Coder Pad example. So what are some questions that you might ask for this? You might first ask, well, what coding languages does it support?

So briefly, what do you think about this question? I think that this question could be better, especially if this is your first question. And the reason is that by asking this first, it is implying that I think this is one of the core challenges of this problem, right? It’s like setting a code pattern. What coding languages does it support? And it’s like, oh, is that the most important thing? And I would say that this at the highest level actually feels like more of an implementation detail even though it’s a huge project to support many languages. But when we’re first starting off and slowly starting to expand breadth or depth first search of the problem space, it just feels like an oddly specific thing to ask about.

So a better question might be, Hey, do we need to support real-time collaboration? This is a fantastic question because it is immediately getting to the heart of why this prompt might be extremely challenging. If the answer is yes, we know we’re going to be spending a lot of time thinking about the idea of supporting real-time collaboration. And a few other good questions here are do we need to support code compilation or is it just display only? Do we need to be able to run structured test cases? Some things, like I’ve seen some products where you can input test cases and then it runs and tells you if it’s correct or not.

And then last one is, do we need to protect against anyone writing some kind of malicious code? Quick note on this, I oftentimes see junior candidates shy away from this phase because I feel like they’re nervous or panicking that they won’t be able to solve the problem they’re asking about, so they almost want to ask about things they are more comfortable with. And I would really urge you not to do that. Even if you have no idea how to do something, identifying the problems themselves can sometimes be just as important as identifying the solutions. And in fact, sometimes it is not an expectation at all for you to know the solution, but simply to identify the problem. I’m doing short on time, so I’m going to skip a little bit of the explanation as to why. But really here, focus on identifying where your major technical challenges are going to be through your questions.

And from there, we do have to come up with some form of solutions, right? And an important thing to keep in mind here is that there is no right solution for any problem and especially, especially in the system design interview. So try to reduce your stress. This is a conversation, not just a test of getting the right answers all the time. It is not about that. In a great system design interview, in fact, you should be offering up solutions and immediately almost critiquing your solutions to break down where the problems are. And I think I see people not doing this because it’s almost like, oh, well, if I attack my own solution, then I am not defending it and making it seem like the right answer. And that is very counterintuitive, but the right way to think about it. For example, let’s say we’re thinking about how to do session replay on Coder Pad.

And so the first thing that you’re doing is you need to be able to show edit history. And so it means that instead of storing the whole text document, you also have to store every single change that the user has been making in order to play it back in session replay. And so the second you think of this solution, you’re like, well, what’s wrong with this solution? What would cause this to be a problem or create a scaling bottleneck? And just a really simple one to me is now we’re storing a ton more stuff. We have to store maybe in a database every single character change.

And then there’s a lot of follow-up questions immediately. It’s like, okay, well, how long do we need to store this for? How much time afterwards do we support session replay? Do we have to be as live as character by character? Things like that. And then the answers to those questions can then inform the solutions that you choose. So from there, you have identified some problems, created some solutions, critiqued those solutions, and this is also a very hard step. I see people not doing this, which is making recommendations. Again, I feel like people think that we need to produce correct answers, and I almost see people asking the interviewer, do we do this? Is that the right answer? And actually here, in coding interviews, I would say it’s somewhat just about the execution sometimes because you’re producing correct code, but in system design interviews, you are literally being tested for your judgment. You’re being tested on which choice that you make.

And so the more decisive you are able to be and the more you’re able to create rationale for why this is a good solution, you don’t even have to have the best solution. It’s possible that you have other ones, the better it is. And by the way, a lot of times you’re going to make recommendations and your interviewer might challenge those recommendations. They might say like, well, what about this? And that does not at all mean that you’re doing a bad job. If you’re able to respond to it, then all you’re doing is participating in a very healthy engineering conversation, which anytime you’re working on products as an engineer on a team, that’s what you’re doing. You’re constantly being like, what about this? Well, that has this problem. What about this then? Well, that has this problem. Well, how about let’s approach it a totally different way?

And that’s how you battle test the solution that you want to implement. Okay, I’m not doing good on time. Making recommendations. Final thing is verifying your solutions. This is also I find a skipped step. So you just get to the end of the interview and you are starting to just say like, oh, we’ve done all the parts. From here, I would recommend for you to take a user job to be done and really show it how each user request will flow end to end through your system. I forgot to mention, actually, earlier step one, when you’re asking questions, by the end of it, you should have as output a list of requirements, product requirements, system requirements for the system that you’re building. And when you have that requirement, that should be written up so you can see it in the interviewer can see it the whole time.

And if you’ve done that, then here in your verified solution step, you should have a fairly easy job and you basically just want to go through each of the requirements and verify that your system supports the thing that you decided was a requirement. Okay, I have two minutes. Okay, so how do we prepare? So I want to talk about things that I’m seeing people not do. So I already see a lot of people reading and consuming a lot of material that is very theoretical. And by the way, all of that is super needed. There’s a lot of great fantastic resources on system design out there that I highly recommend to people. So what I want to share to add on to what people are already doing is I have a very strong sense that the most important thing to develop here is real engineering experience.

And you don’t necessarily have to be the person experiencing it, so you don’t have to be on the teams doing it, but you can really accelerate your growth by reading, learning, hearing about other engineers solving problems and hearing about their battle scars. So things I’ve recommended, reading engineering blogs from other top companies, talk to other engineers, build a diverse network of engineers that you can speak to and ask them, what are you working on? What are some of the challenges of that? Are you guys using AWS technology as well? Why or why not? And this is I guess the long-term solution that I would like everyone to do more of. In the near term solution, I think that system design, you can only bridge small gaps in a short period of time. And so for that, my top recommendation is don’t just consume in theory. System design is an entire interview of talking.

And so practice talking about real solutions. Super specific recommendation is find a friend, an engineering friend, come up with a prompt that is something you are familiar with, like a problem you have solved yourself so that you know it pretty familiarly. And then have your friend do the same thing and then trade stories. Okay, so I see that Amanda is back here, which means that my time must be just about up. So I am putting up my LinkedIn. Please feel free to connect with me and I would love to answer any additional questions. I’m taking note of all of the questions that are here and I’ll be more than happy to send follow-ups on any questions that you guys have. I’m so sorry I didn’t plan my time better, but it was wonderful being here with everyone. Thank you so much for your time. And Amanda, I think that is…

Amanda Beaty: These questions may disappear for you when we end this, but we will collect them and send them to you if they do.

Sophie Novati: Yeah, okay. That would be fantastic. Let me try to take a quick screenshot. Here’s a couple of good ones, but yeah, if you could send them to me, that would be fantastic.

Amanda Beaty: All right. All right. Thanks, everybody. We are out time and we will see you in the next session.

Sophie Novati: Thanks, everyone.

In this session, Agatha Agbanobi discusses the racial implications of psychological safety for people of color. She shares how psychological safety takes into account systemic oppression and how community building can foster psychological safety. The session focuses on three objectives: discussing a popular teaching of psychological safety that excludes people of color, exploring an equity principle for differentiated solution design, and examining a skill for cultivating psychological safety through an anti-oppressive lens.

Transcript:

Agatha Agbanobi: Hi everyone. Welcome to this session about the racial implications of psychological safety for people of color. My name is Agatha Agbanobi and I am a DEI consultant, coach and founder of the DEI firm Relevé. And I’m excited to be engaging with you all today on this topic. So I’m going to provide a brief intro about me, my background, and my approach before we dive into the session itself. I’ll quickly just say that I’m a former educator who was heavily focused on education equity work both internationally and also stateside. Specifically in Texas for many years before transitioning to focusing on team and leadership development for diversity, equity, and inclusion in the corporate workspace.

The three guideposts that generally lead my work or guide my work, I should say, are anti-oppressive or liberatory frameworks, systems change and community building. And I want to say that these are the guideposts specifically for how I frame my work on psychological safety. So some of the questions that I like to frame around this question is, how does psychological safety take into account the interpersonal and systemic oppression that people of color are those who face identity-based oppression? How does that take into account that oppression due to historical and present day context of systemic isms?

And then how do we leverage community building, coalition building to build psychological safety within ourselves, individually, self to self, but then also within community, with others across differences? So today we’ll be focused on three objectives. First, we’ll discuss briefly one popular teaching of psychological safety that excludes the experience of racialized individual or people of color. We’ll talk briefly about a crucial equity principle for supporting differentiated solution design for psychological safety, and then we’ll explore one of the skills for cultivating psychological safety through an anti-oppressive lens.

So the first question I want to pose you all is this. How do you define psychological safety in a teamwork environment? Go ahead and drop your responses in the chat and then also take a moment to see what your peers have said. See if anything resonates. So here’s just some of the common and well-known characteristics of psychological safety at work. So team-orientedness is one of them, being willing to take interpersonal risk or feeling that you have the freedom to do that, having mutual respect or experiencing mutual respect within your team from other team members, having the freedom to challenge the status quo.

Having the freedom to share your knowledge, ideas, ask questions without fear of retaliation or any sort of reputational risk, feeling like you matter to the team and the organization, more broadly. Inclusion, belonging, that sense of feeling included, feeling like you belong and mattering to your team. Feeling a high sense of value, having the permission to make mistakes and to fail again without risk, a reputational risk or just fear of folks viewing you differently. And then also the permission or freedom to learn without limit. So a lot of these definitions come from well-known researchers and practitioners like Amy Edmondson, Christine Comaford, Timothy Clark, and even mental health experts and therapists such as Nedra Glover Tawwab.

One of the popular frameworks of psychological safety I want to kind of zone in on is Timothy Clark’s four stages of psychological safety in the workplace. It begins with inclusion safety, which is the feeling of being included, and then it moves on to learner safety, which is safety to learn. Then contributor safety, which is safety to contribute. And lastly, challenger safety, which is safety to challenge the status quo. All without fear of being embarrassed, further marginalized or punished in some way. And so this definition, of course, sort of assumes that everyone is starting off at the same level of psychological safety in a way when they come into the workplace.

And while these definitions lay a foundation for psychological safety within a work environment and/or within a team, it’s really important to understand that our racial and intersectional identities are playing a role in what it takes for us to really feel psychologically safe when we arrive at the workplace compared to our white peers in any given work environment, and especially in industries like the tech industry that are historically racially homogenous. And so I want to pose this next question for you all then, since I’ve brought up the racial implications of psychological safety.

How do you think that your racial identity has affected your sense of psychological safety at work in the past in a way that maybe it’s not affecting your white peers? Go ahead and drop your response in the chat. And so as you all are dropping your responses in the chat, I want to just remind you all about racial identity, the different layers of racial identity. I think a lot of times when people think about race, they think of it in sort of like this one track lane or this single lane where it’s just race or your racial identifier. So Black, Latina, Asian, Asian American, so forth. But it’s way more than that.

There’s so many other layers to one’s racial identity that impacts how accepted, included, valued, and overall psychologically safe that they feel at work. So there’s the racial and ethnic group that one belongs to, that sometimes it’s incredibly visible and sometimes it’s not. Sometimes we can make assumptions, but we’re not always clear. We always have to verify with the individual. The other part is, the other layer is skin tone, how light or dark one skin tone is. The other is facial features, how closely aligned one’s facial features are to typical western features. The next is hair texture, how closely aligned one’s hair texture is to thin, fine hair textures.

That is usually what you’ll find in western parts of the world, even in Southeast Asian cultures. And then sometimes one’s nationality is another layer if that primary nationality is a global north nationality or a global south nationality. So all of these layers of one’s racial identity, sometimes it’s incredibly visible. I can say that if someone was to see me in person, they would probably be able to pinpoint that I am a West African woman. They can see that I’m dark skinned and darker skinned than most. My facial features, of course, are leaning more towards West African features and so on.

They can deduce that I belong to a Black racial group and so forth. The key here is that there is a racial hierarchy. That the closer one is to some of these aforementioned characteristics like lighter skin tone, being in some of the racial groups that are higher ranked, right? So white folks felt like people being at the top, and then Asian folks, then fine hair in terms of hair texture and so on. And so the closer one is to the top of that racial hierarchy scale, the less systemic and interpersonal racial oppression or biases and discriminations they’re going to face at or outside of work. So I want to emphasize that there are layers to racial identity, and there is a racial hierarchy that exists.

Another example is lighter skinned Asians and Asian Americans are often thought to be at the top of the racial hierarchies, second only to white folks in the west and white Europeans, white Americans. Because of the model minority myth, which of course stems from the racial tensions of the 1960s when civil rights movements were underway and the battles being fought in Asia during Vietnam War was on the minds of everyone. And there was a prevailing narrative that Asians were able to succeed in spite of all the hardships, but Black folks weren’t able to do that, quote unquote, and only complain and protested about their inequalities that existed.

And then another example is that you also have darker skinned Black people. So not just thinking about race, we’re also thinking about colorism, right? So you are going to have darker skinned Black people who are thought to be at the very bottom of this racial hierarchy. And it just continues in terms of facial features, leaning more towards where typical Western features or more towards Afro or African features. And all of that impacts how folks are experiencing the world that we live in.

So I’m going to break down what exactly systemic and interpersonal racial oppression is, how that sort of manifest. There are three ways, or some of the ways, I’ll name three. One of them is unnecessary suffering. So we’re constantly going through unnecessary suffering because of how we’re perceived racially. The other is inordinate use and depletion of energy. And I’ll dive a little bit more into that in a minute. And the last is social and systemic undervaluing. We get all these messages from the media, from people, even in our social groups, that somehow our value is less than folks who are at the top of that racial hierarchy.

And of course, it impacts the opportunity gap, career wise, education wise, it just impacts every aspect of our lives. And so the phenomenon I want to focus on today specifically is the inordinate use and depletion of energy and what that means. So you’ll see here on the screen that I have, the first person here on the screen has identity safety, and I’ll explain that in a minute. And the second person has a couple of things that probably is taking up some energy, that they’re navigating in the workplace aside from their regular job. And then the last person is maybe more closer to the bottom of the racial hierarchy or the racial scale.

And so they’re experiencing even more. They’re having to expend more energy just to exist at work in a way before they can even begin to feel like or think about their sense of inclusion, their sense of belonging. They’re navigating these other things as well as their job. I do want to also note that these different scenarios and examples that I’ve pulled are still kind of general because different racial groups experience different types of microaggressions and microinvalidations in the workplace. There are some that are very common for us and then across racial groups or non-white racial groups.

But then there are some that are unique to, for example, Black and African-Americans in the workplace. There are some that are very unique to Black immigrants in the workplace. There’s some that are unique to Latin or Latina individuals in the workplace and so on. So you get the picture. So looking at the first person here, identity safety. Identity safety essentially is the idea that one feels incredibly safe in who they are and how they show up without any effort, right? That they aren’t having to navigate different belief systems, scenarios, and situations that are constantly making them have to prove their value and their worth and their right to exist in a particular space and in this situation, the workplace.

And so when we look at this right here, the second person, the different aspects of their workday, these are just examples that they’re navigating that is taking away energy from their energy at work. One of them, an example is you show up to the workplace, your office, and you show up there all the time. Maybe there’s a new security guard. For some reason he doesn’t believe that you actually work there, even though you’re showing him your ID badge, he’s assuming that something is off or maybe you forgot your ID badge and you are trying to navigate, calling your manager and all of that. And so they’re giving you maybe more of a hard time than they might give someone who is lighter skinned or someone who is white.

There are a lot of real life stories like that where folks question folks of color who are at the workplace, they question whether they’re actually really working there or they mistake them for the janitor or whatnot. The next I want to talk about is different microaggressions that, specifically I would say maybe more so women of color experience microaggressions about our appearance, right? Example for black women, it’s often about our hair. It’s often about our makeup or what we’re wearing. And then another one that’s pretty prevalent and definitely you’ll see this on the racial scale.

This is something you will see specifically when you think about colorism and racism. The only feedback that one might be receiving after a presentation or a project is probably more aligned to their personality or how they conveyed their ideas during the presentation or how they worked with the team. It’s not actually about the content itself. Some of the meaty things that actually matter. We often find ourselves having to ask for that feedback, having to advocate for more critical and constructive feedback about the core goals of projects or the core goals of a presentation.

And then you’ll see in the third row, we have some other examples in there. And I also have there too, advocating for more actionable feedback. Other feedback that women of color get specifically darker skinned women of color or Black women is not actionable. And there’s a statistic on that in an article I did for HBR. Don’t quote me on it, but I think it’s… I’m going to say it wrong so you got to go back and look at my article. But compared to white men, we’re getting way less actionable feedback at work. And so all of these things are affecting our energy in the workplace and how we show up for the work itself.

There’s a term that we use now called weathering, which describes the high effort coping mechanisms that we are using to manage the constant stress of racial biases and discrimination that may lead to, of course, premature biological aging, poor, physical and mental health outcomes. And also just our ability to show up fully a hundred percent at work. And so while this term originated from a study to describe the unique stress from racism, that Black, especially dark-skinned Black people face, other racial groups at the bottom of the racial hierarchy arguably are facing some level of weathering as well.

So we’re constantly weathering these daily or unique incidents of racial biases and discrimination inside and outside of work. So quickly just let us know in the chat how are you able to relate to this. Have you ever noticed a difference in your mental or intellectual or even emotional energy when you are in an environment where you feel safe in your identity? So not when you don’t feel safe, but when you actually do feel safe. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to work in an environment. What I’m talking about doesn’t mean that you have to work in an environment where everyone looks like you.

But rather it’s that everyone possesses a high skill in navigating and this is all about cultivating equity, leveling the playing field, cultivating that sense of belonging, community and inclusion where everyone possesses, not just leaders, but also team members. A high skill in navigating relationship care, trust, safety, and safety with individuals of different identities. So what does this all mean, right? It means that there are elements to our sense of psychological safety as people of color that we have to confront before we can feel inclusion safety, learner safety, contributor safety and challenger safety, for example.

We first need to get over that hump of identity safety. And I think it’s also important to note here that we have to determine for ourselves how much responsibility we hold within ourselves to give ourselves that level of psychological safety. And then how much responsibility do we need to hold the organization and our team accountable to in securing that identity safety for us. So we’re not constantly having to navigate and spend energy defending our right to be in a space because of who we are. So now I want to briefly focus on what is within our power to get to identity safety for ourselves.

We have to definitely recognize that there is a role that workplace leaders, middle managers, and peers play, like I said before and there’s also a role that we individually play in getting to psychological safety for ourself. In looking at this specific category or phenomenon of systemic and interpersonal oppression that is identity-based. This category of inordinate use and depletion of energy. We can be reflective and strategic about how we use our energy or how much effort we decide to use to cope with different incidents and issues. And so what I’m talking about is sort of taking some of our power back.

And what I really mean by this is that we need to get in the habit of taking stock of what depletes us in navigating and in coping, and how it depletes us, what type of energy or effort it takes to get over the different humps or the different things that roadblocks that come into play at work. And then plan accordingly so we can be our best in the workplace. So what routes or peers do we need to avoid? When I say routes, I mean when we’re walking to our office, for example, what routes do we need to avoid? Who do we need to avoid? So think about peers.

And then when do we need to be sure to avoid them, right? For example, if there’s a big project coming up and you really want to make sure that you are conserving your energy as much as possible to complete it. You’ll definitely need to be mindful of how much energy you use to navigate different identity-based issues or conversations, whether they’re project related, team culture related or not. And this is one of the reasons why people of color, statistically, people who experience the most microaggressions at work in the workplace prefer working at home.

They’re not having to navigate these different barriers, specifically interpersonal barriers at work in order to do their job. So your emotional energy and positivity for your sense of self impacts your intellectual energy to fully show up, like I’ve mentioned before. All the studies show that you have a higher chance of reaching your full professional potential and become really good at a specific skillset if you are able to set the right boundaries for yourself. If you are able to really be careful about how you’re using your energy and if you’re very intentional about exercising your self agency.

Another example for me is just a personal one. When I’m working on a big presentation, I tend to limit my interactions with people in person, but specifically folks who I know who have been racially microaggressive in the past, even if it’s just subtle things that maybe they’re not aware of, that’s subconscious that I just sort of let slide because not everything warrants a crucial conversation. Those people, I’ll tend to just avoid that. Sometimes when I say communication interaction, this also includes email and phone communication and sending a nice message. Letting folks know that I’m working on something right now and I’ll get back to them at a later date usually works just fine.

So there’s definitely… This is very high level. There’s a little bit more to this, including how you communicate your boundaries to different types of stakeholders at work, because it’s not one quick broad brush stroke, but how you’re setting and communicating those boundaries without having to even use the word boundary is something that I’ve dove deeper with clients. And then also thinking about how you are communicating it in a way that sticks and is sustainable for folks no matter what type of work environment you’re in. So we don’t have much time to go into all of the details of that today.

But I hope this provides a good snapshot for you of a crucial skill when we think about cultivating psychological safety, which has the key, I want to say, core factor identity safety for ourselves in the workplace. So to quickly recap some of the key points or the main key points of this session today. The first one is feeling safe as we are in our identity is the primary stage of psychological safety for people of color and/or those who face identity-based, systemic and interpersonal oppression.

The other key idea is that one of the key pillars for cultivating psychological safety for ourselves is taking back some of our agency and being strategic about how we use our energy, knowing we have a limited daily supply compared to others because we’re not just dealing with what’s at work, but also outside of work in terms of social and systemic identity-based privileges. Or you could go the other way in terms of biases and discriminations that were confronting it or fielding every single day. So as we wrap up, I want to ask you all, what are some of your key takeaways?

Research says that if we’re able to clearly share new knowledge with a peer or even practice what we’ve learned after a session, the more likely we are to remember, internalize and even practice it. And so I’m going to ask you all or challenge you to find a friend or a peer who might be interested in this topic. Tell them about this session and tell them what is still circling around in your head that’s not quite clear, or that you have questions about. What do you understand now that you didn’t understand before?

And then what is one takeaway that you think you can start applying immediately as you navigate the workplace? And then lastly, if you’d more presentations like this, of course, feel free to get in touch with me. Here’s some of my information. And that’s it for today. Thank you all so much for engaging with me in this session. I hope that you all were able to take away some key nuggets, and this really sparks the conversation further about the racial implications of psychological safety at work. Thank you so much. Bye.

Elevate conference keynote speaker Lakecia Gunter shares her personal journey in tech and the importance of building supportive networks. She highlights the impact of leaders who believed in her and invested in her career. Gunter emphasizes the need to say yes to opportunities and cancel self-doubt, and encourages attendees to reflect on their vision, seize opportunities, take action, and build relationships.

Transcript:

Angie Chang: Welcome to the Winter Elevate Conference. My name is Angie Chang. I’m the founder of Girl Geek X, formerly known as Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners where we hosted over a decade of Girl Geek dinners in the San Francisco Bay Area and over five years of virtual Elevate conferences where we’ve created opportunities to give even more women the mic on stage. So thank you for joining us. Every quarter, we’ve been gathering over a thousand women online for career and tech talks, networking first annually on International Women’s Day and now quarterly at Elevate virtual conferences. And this time we have added two mentorship hours in the mentorship lounge, which people are just coming in from. We just started that in this fall and we found it to be a great success for having dozens and dozens of women experts in tech, AI, LLMs, data science, non-coding roles in tech, volunteering to share their expertise with women in tech online around the world.

So thank you so much for all of the volunteers who’ve just joined us from that mentorship lounge and that mentorship lounge is a place where we hope you make connections at people on LinkedIn and stay in touch. There is a second mentorship hour that will be happening at 1:00 PM Pacific Time and you can visit the mentorship lounge to meet even more mentors. It’s a different set of mentors, so I encourage you to go look at the list of mentors will be joining us in the afternoon and the Girl Geek X team will be in a booth in Elevate on this platform. So if you want to meet us and talk about potentially sponsoring one of our virtual events or hosting a Girl Geek dinner at your company, head over to our booth to meet the Girl Geek X team and ask any questions you have about potential partnership or sponsorship.

And we have a participation leaderboard going today. So you’ll be rewarded for what is it, putting little emojis in people’s sessions, cheering them on, messaging each other, asking questions. So please show our speakers some love during their session. You can also schedule meetings with fellow attendees in this air meet software by using the attendees search bar to browse profiles or click on someone’s name in the chat or at a table in the mentorship lounge. And at the end of the event, the top three folks on our leadership board will get a Girl Geek X swag bag of cool stuff. So if you’re one of our top participants today, you get really cool stuff, so encourage you to participate. One of the things that we did in the pandemic when education was disruptive is we began volunteering with the East Oakland School in partnership with a nonprofit called the Oakland Public Education Fund.

And if you happen to be in the area, you can join us in Oakland or you can sign up to volunteer through Tech Link, which is a virtual or hybrid mentorship program with the East Oakland Public School. It happens Fridays in February through April, and as I said, it’s virtual but with the option to go in if you would like to, and you can sign up for that and find out more about that at our website @girlgeek.io or in our weekly newsletter. And this is the third year that we’re partnering with this nonprofit to bring our professional network of women and allies to the local schools to provide a helping hand for educators and introduce students to role models. As you know, probably in our lives we didn’t have that great role model working in tech to meet us when we were in high school or junior high school. So it’s really a great opportunity to help be that role model that you always wanted in your life. And if given our current economic climate, if you know someone who’s looking for a job, we do have some job listings at our website @girlGeek.io/jobs. There’s a diverse set of remote and hybrid roles from some of our partners this year. I’m going to hand it over to Amanda.

Amanda Beaty: Hi, my name is Amanda Beaty and obviously I’m used to being in the background here at Girl Geek X. I do things like social media and working on YouTube videos. Our co-founder Sukrutha is usually here in this spot, but she’s unable to join us today, so I’m filling in. Today we will be hearing from a diverse set of women working in tech from executives to individual contributors. We love hearing from women about their unique expertise and inspiring stories, all the cold job titles and incredible passions and values. Hopefully our speakers will inspire you to do that hard thing that you wanted to do or help you think differently about something. We’ll be learning so much today and we encourage you to help us amplify and elevate the incredible takeaways our speakers will be sharing with us today. If you want to share on social media, please tag Girl Geek X and use the hashtag #ElevateWomen.

All of our talks are recorded and put on our YouTube channel later. You can also immediately hit replay in this air Meet platform after the session ends, so you can re-watch this later today or later this week. So if you’re interested in speaking, 95% of our speakers today submitted speaker submissions on the Girl Geek X website to speak here today. You can go to our website, girlgeek.io and go to the speak at the top of the menu and just click apply to speak at an upcoming Elevate conference. Our next one is in March on International Women’s Day, and then we’re doing this quarterly for the rest of the year.

So we’re also looking for sponsors who are hiring women in tech to partner with us to showcase their top leaders and talent to put more technical women leaders on stage and create more role models. If your company is invested in hiring diverse female talent, come visit us in the booth later today that Angie mentioned earlier. And now Angie’s going to introduce our keynote speaker for the day.

Angie Chang: Yes, so our keynote speaker today is Lakecia Gunter. She is the chief technology officer for the Global Partner Solutions Organization at Microsoft. GPS is the largest partner ecosystem in the industry, empowering partners to drive digital tech transformation. And prior to joining Microsoft, she held several leadership roles at Intel Corporation, including technical assistant and chief of staff to the CEO, as well as vice president in the Programmable Solutions group. You may remember her from Intel Girl Geek dinner in 20 27, 20 17, and today we are excited to welcome our keynote speaker. Welcome.

Lakecia Gunter: Thank you Angie and team. “You may write me down in history with your bitter twisted lies. You may trod me in the very dirt, but still like dust, I’ll rise. Does my sassiness upset you? Why are you be set with gloom? Because I walk like I got oil wells pumping in my living room? Just like moons and like suns with a certainty of tithes, just like hope springing high still I’ll rise. Did you want to see me broken, bowed head and lowered eyes, shoulders falling down like teardrops weaken by my soulful cries. Does my hotness offend you? Don’t you take it awful hard because I laugh like I’ve got goldmines digging in my own backyard. You may shoot me with your words, you may cut me with your eyes, you may kill me with your hatefulness, but still like air, I’ll rise.”

I love this poem by Maya Angelou. It is one of my absolute favorites, and if you’re like me, when you hear this poem, you imagine, no you remember the obstacles that stand in the way of women rising. It can be so difficult at times. In fact, I often reflect on my own journey and think you should not be here because the odds of becoming a vice president at Intel, a CTO at Microsoft and a corporate board of directors member at IDEX Corporation seemed insurmountable. But as Maya says, “still, I rise. Still, you rise. Still, we rise.” My intention today is to inspire you to think about the ways you can be a force for blazing a trail for sisters around you and those coming behind you so that as we are leading, as we’re moving forward, as we are rising together, we can lift others to rise with us to lift as we climb.

Good morning. I’m Lakecia Gunter, as Angie said, and I am so elated to be here with you this morning. I don’t take this opportunity lightly to connect with amazing women in this room, in this virtual environment on this call. It’s an absolute pleasure and as Angie said, I’m no stranger to the girl Geek community. I love the Girl Geek community. It’s so empowering and supportive of women. So Angie, thank you. Thank you to you and your team for your passion, for your focus on increasing the number of women leading at the highest levels in tech. My hope is that one day very soon, the rooms in the tech industry will be overflowing with women and I believe with each of us working together, we’re going to make that happen. There’s no doubt about it in my mind. I cannot believe it, but we’re less than 30 days away from 2024?

Can you believe this ladies? 2023 has flown by, I don’t know about you, but I’m determined to make 2024 my most transformational year yet. How many of you guys agree our most transformational year yet? No matter what you faced in 2023, we know at times, it can be so challenging, but remember, you are resilient. You are an overcomer. I want you to know that there’s no obstacle, no setback, no mountain that can prevent you from dreaming those big dreams and achieving what others may think is impossible. And when we support one another, we are an unstoppable force. I know this firsthand because I’ve experienced this in my life. If I’ve done anything right along this journey, it’s been connecting with the right people at the right time, building strong supportive networks, supportive relationships has really been the key to my success. It’s what I call my secret sauce.

I’m excited today to really just kind of walk you through my story and my journey into tech and my journey absolutely began in a small town in Florida. Yes, a small town in Florida called Hane City. It’s right outside of Orlando. Our claim to fame was being one of the top producers of the most delicious oranges in the state and being right next door to all those theme parks that we love to visit in Orlando, like Walt Disney, universal and the likes. I was raised by a strong and equally amazing single mom of three who had a heart of gold age, supportive grandparents and a phenomenal family and a community that really looked after its own. I was surrounded by faith, love, strength, and unity. My mom instilled in me the value of hard work. She set an example of how to stay vigilant in the face of adversity, never allowing challenges, which they came in life or in the environment to dictate how her life story would be defined, and she made certain that it wouldn’t take mine early in life.

I discovered my love for computers and I have to tell you, my mom certainly encouraged me. One year, she worked extremely hard to make certain that I could get a computer. She worked extra shifts to make sure I could buy my very first computer for Christmas or she could buy my very first computer for Christmas, let me just say that it was her buddy, but it was a Commodore 64. I know I’m taking some of you guys way, way back. How many of you guys remember the Commodore of Vic 20, the Commodore of 64? Am I by myself in this Ataris? You remember ladies, but that was one of the best Christmases I’ve ever had. My mom was my biggest cheerleader and she never missed an opportunity to show me. She always invested in me in my future, equipping me with the resources, the tools to achieve my wildest dreams.

That was my mom. I love this quote by Marilyn Monroe. It says, “Give a girl. Give a girl the shoes….” Excuse me. “Give the girl right shoes, and she will conquer the world.” And in my case, it was more like give the girl the right computer and she will conquer and travel the world, and I did. For me, age 12 was just the beginning. I never could have predicted what was coming next. It has been a whirlwind. I had been so extremely blessed with a phenomenal career and the opportunity to work for so many different companies. That deep love for computers would take me from that small town in Florida to some of the top universities in the country, University of South Florida, in Tampa to Georgia Tech and provide me with the opportunity to work with some of the best companies on the planet, top Fortune 100 companies I’ve been able to work for in my career.

As Andrew said earlier, currently I’m at Microsoft. Like some of you though, my very first job was at KFC. How many of you guys remember that fast food experience? Was it just me? I don’t think so. That’s where I got my start. Mr. And Mrs. Tinsley, entrepreneurs in my hometown, African-American entrepreneurs at that they owned the franchises and one of them was a KFC. They spotted my promise as a young team, and hired me as a lobby hostess at age 14. I had my first job making my own money. By the time I was a senior in high school, I was assistant manager, working with my peers, working with my classmates, I was making my own money and contributing to my family’s success. There was no greater feeling than that. This opportunity was so meaningful to me. It really made a huge difference in my life and the life of my family, and this was my very first experience of being lifted up.

As I reflect on my career journey, there’ve been several people that made a huge difference in my career. And on the screen, you see a couple of them, these leaders really invested in me and I know that my career journey and any success that I’ve achieved has really been because of these men and women who believed in me. They invested in me, they empowered me to pursue my dreams and goals. More importantly, they put themselves in my shoes and remembered what it was like when they first got started in their life and in career. And as I said earlier, being in tech can really be hard without the support of community, including managers and senior leaders. I know for me, one can feel very alone in Fortune 50 companies with over a hundred thousand employees with very few women and people of color. I want to highlight three leaders who changed my life and career trajectory.

The first Bob Swan, former CFO and CEO of Intel. Bob was always a huge support for me in my career. As Angie said, I had an opportunity to be chief of staff and technical assistant to Brian Krzanish, the former CEO of Intel. And Bob was CFO at the time and I would never forget, he always made me feel like a leader on the team, like a part of the management committee. One time I put together a leadership offsite and it was a two-day offsite and it was just a lot of great work around strategy, team building and the likes, and we were done. It was the end of the day, we’re actually in the jet center about to head back to Santa Clara and he came up and he put his arm around me and he said, Lakecia, you make us better. Wow, that touched me so deeply in my heart I felt like, wow, he sees me.

I’m adding value to the team. I will never forget that moment in my career ever. And Bob continued to be a major supporter for me in my career. So much so that when I was interviewing for him for a board opportunity with Idexx, he was one of my references and he was so excited to be a reference for me. He said, Lakecia, I just talked to Igon Zender and let me just tell you, you’ve got this, so proud of you. It’s a done deal. And of course I did get the board seat, and so he’s continued to be a shining light, a bright light, a mentor, a sponsor, even until today. He saw me, he recognized my value, he recognized my impact, and he has continued to enable my growth and my success. I’m so grateful for that. The second picture is Rodney Clark. Rodney recruited me from Intel to join Microsoft.

And what I loved about that opportunity is that he said, “Lakecia, not only am I hiring you for a job, I’m really sponsoring you into a career at Microsoft.” That meant the world to me. It wasn’t that, hey, I’m just looking for someone to fill a spot. No, I’m looking for someone that can grow their career at Microsoft and someone who I believe has a long trajectory at Microsoft. So grateful for Rodney. Every year he made certain that I was growing. He made certain that I had new opportunities with bigger scope. He believed in me and my potential to achieve at the highest levels. Such an amazing leader, so empowering, one of the best. And last but certainly not least, the beautiful face on the slide is Pamela Lusardi, affectionately, we called her Pete. Pete hired me into Intel in 2008. She was a 27-year Intel veteran and a phenomenal leader.

She believed in me from day one ladies, she told me, so Lakecia, you and I we’re going to change the world of of silicon validation of intel. No doubt about it. We’re going to be the dynamic duo. The first few days on the job, she said to me, Lakecia, you have to make this a hundred thousand person monstrosity at Intel seem like a family. You’re going to have to. You need to make sure you create that very small, tight-knit community or more importantly, she said, you won’t make it because that’s been her experience. She said, “I want to help you build your Intel family.” So let me tell you what she did. The first few days on the job, she said, “You’re going to kill this job. I’m not worried about that.” But she gave me her Fab five or her fave five, whichever you want to call it.

She gave me five women in her network to go and meet. She truly embodied the #Liftherup. She is me. I am her. That’s what Pete did the first week on the job. She absolutely had a vision for my career. There was no doubt about it. We met every week, strategize for the week ahead, put our game plan together. We were just in lockstep making changes in validation, changes that were really well received. And one of my weekly one-on-one conversations after I had been on the job for about six months at this time, it was March 31st, 2009, I’ll never forget, she began to share a vision for my career at Intel. She said, “You can become a technical assistant and chief of staff for one of Intel’s c-suite leaders.” My first thought was, wow, this is awesome. And my second thought is, but what is that?

I had no clue at the time, I’d only been in the company for six months. I had no idea. She said, also, you can become one of Intel’s rock stars and I’m going to help you do both. Ladies, let me tell you, I was in tears in the room. I never actually cried in front of my manager, but I was in tears because I’m like, wow. I never had a leader see me that way and I never had a leader tell me, here’s where your future is and here’s where I’m going to get you to together. We’re going to do it. Not only was Pete a smart, beautiful country girl, she loved family, she loved farming and she loved animals. Dob Lewis was one of her charities that she absolutely enjoyed serving and spending time and donating her dollars to. And guess what? She was a licensed pilot.

She owned her own plane. She loved flying and many times she would actually fly her plane to work. Yes, my boss flew her plane to work. She would park it in the Hillsborough airport hangar right down the street from Intel and she would ride her bike to the office. She was so cool. I called her a pint-sized powerhouse. We adored Pete. On April 1st, 2009, the next day after our one-on-one again the night before, she shared with me her plan for my career and what we were going to do together.. The next day, what was April fools day, I’ll never forget, we actually got news that we were not prepared for. Pete’s plane had crashed on the way to work.

I remember looking for her that morning. She was supposed to be in the cafeteria with her manager and it had been raining that day, very rainy. And so we thought, well, she doesn’t fly her plane in the rain, so she’s probably driving. She was a little bit late, but unfortunately her manager confirmed that on the way to work, her plane had crashed. I lost my career best manager at that time. And so Pete’s impact on my life has been phenomenal, is tremendous. There isn’t a day that doesn’t go by that I don’t think about her and what I learned from her in those short six months. And so I dedicate this talk to her. I really do. She absolutely was amazing. And as I said, one of the most important things that she told me to do when I first started at Intel is to make sure that I build my network.

And so Pete’s wisdom continues to resonate with me. I know she attributed her success at Intel to not just hard work but the power of her network. And I’m forever grateful to her for extending her network to me. She was giving me access to women who could help me, who would provide guidance and insight to help me navigate my career. Women who shared their experience, their resources and their relationships to help me accelerate my success. Her fab Five supported me and encouraged me during one of the most difficult times in my life. They helped me to actually achieve the dreams and visions she set out for me to become a chief of staff and technical assistant to a c-suite leader at Intel. I was so proud to be able to realize the things that she had planned, not just for me but the entire team.

She wanted us to be an award-winning software development team at Intel. And of course we achieved that in three years. Again, Pete encouraged me to develop those trusting relationships that help support and encourage you on your career path through every step of your journey. That’s what we want to make sure that we’re doing. Something as personal as dreaming truly starts with the relationships that you make. And as you heard me say, in my case it did. I didn’t have a dream to be a chief of staff and technical assistant, but she had that for me and that enabled me to realize that dream. And so I continued to expand on everything that she taught me about building my network and making sure that my team was growing. And as you can see on the screen… Yes, as you can see on the screen, I continued to expand my network and I continued to expand my network to make sure it absolutely even included male allies.

That was just as important. I continued to grow that network. People that are a part of my network made certain that whatever I needed they could provide and whatever they needed, I could provide as well. All of these people have shown up for me in so many ways. And the same can happen for you. This is what I call my Team Lakecia, my squad, my personal board of directors, my personal board of advisors. It is truly an interconnected network of mutually supportive relationships that Elevate not just my capability but the capability of the entire network. You too can build your team. And we’re going to talk about exactly how to do that.

In a recent survey, 88% of women surveyed said they absolutely wanted to advance to the next level. 70% have a desire to be a senior leader. But many times when we’re presented with opportunities, women, we say women typically say no. We let fear stop us from pursuing our desires. I have fallen victim to this a couple of times. You see the beautiful picture on the slide, that’s Mary Wilner, she’s the vice president at Intel. And Mary and I connected a number of years back. I heard her speak and she was amazing and immediately said, I need to know her. I want to learn more about her story. I want to learn how she achieved at the highest levels. And Mary willingly spent time with me in one-on-ones. And over the course of some time, I shared with her that I was looking for my next opportunity.

And so she would always send me different roles across Intel that may have come her way. And on this one particular occasion, she actually had a couple roles that were available in her organization and she was so excited to share those with me. She sent them to me an email and said, hey, let’s get some time together. Lakecia, I want to talk to you about these opportunities. I think one of them may absolutely be right up your alley. And so I had a one-on-one with Mary. We talked about the role. Well, even before I met her, I thought mmh, this looks quite interesting. Although I’m not sure I have everything on the list, but I’m still going to have the conversation with Mary. So I went in, I had the conversation, we had a good time chatting, and so she began to outline what she was looking for in the role and then she also even went as far as to say, here’s where I think you’ve got tremendous strength in the role and your skillset.

And so we continued the dialogue and I said, well, thank you so much for thinking of me, but as I look at this, I only have 7 of the 10 items that you’re looking for. And so she said, Lakecia, don’t you ever do that again? Surely you have strengths for this role, but there may be some gaps, but that’s okay. You can go learn those things along the way. And she said, you know what? I sit with men all the time and I’ve never had a man tell me he wasn’t qualified for their job. Even if he thought he had one of those items, he would say, I’m in. I got this. And so my point I,s many times we say no because we’re afraid to fail or we are afraid to succeed in some cases. I have learned to say yes, actually I can.

And I learned that from the conversation I had with Mary. Because you know what, we’ve got a certain set of qualifications and skills that really enable us to do any job and wherever we may have gaps, my idea was you know what, call your team Lakecia, and just say, you know what? I told Mary I can do this job. I have no idea how I’m going to do it. I even got the job. I don’t know how I’m going to do it. And they’ll help you get prepared. So I’m being facetious a little bit, but the point I’m making is say yes to opportunity. We’ll figure out the next steps to close any gaps or perceived gaps that you may think that you have. So what am I saying, ladies? I’m saying today it’s a new day. It really is a new day. It’s time to transform our thinking altogether.

It’s time to really realize that you know what, our dreams are on the other side of fear. So in 2024, we’re going to render fear powerless. We’re going to make sure that fear no longer has a control over us. I always say, look, fear directly in the eyes and say, hello, I see you, but we’re going to move past it. We’re going to feel it. We’re going to use it. We’re going to operate through it. Fear really isn’t an obstacle, but it’s an opportunity. An opportunity for us, for you, to uncover the next best thing or even the path to achieve your dreams and goals. If you want to live your best life now, allow yourself to experience more fear. When you do this, you open yourself up to the unknown and it can be mind-blowing everything you want. Everything you desire is on the other side of fear, so it’s time to face everything and rise.

Let’s begin to access our courage and live boldly into the greatness that we all are capable of. In 2024, we’re transforming. We are absolutely going to cancel self-doubt. That’s exactly what we’re going to do, ladies. It no longer has any place in our future. We’re going to not entertain it at all for me, and I know we’ve all had those moments of self-doubt. I can recount numerous times where I’ve doubted my ability and my capability. Like maybe when I was overlooked for a promotion several times. At that point, I decided to open up my aperture to new opportunities across the company and even externally. I said, you know what? It may be time to go where you’re valued. Or when I was standing at doors of new opportunity, that doubt started to creep in and I really kind of felt like an imposter. But I called my team Lakecia and they said, “Girl, you are a super bad sister, you’re up for this challenge. We got you.” I’m like, you’re right. I could do this. Self-doubt can creep in when people speak over you and interrupt you in meetings.

I’m sure I’m not the only one. I’m reminded of Vice President Kamala Harris when she said, “I am speaking and I say, I am speaking.” Or when those voices say that you’re not enough, maybe at the end of the day where you’re thinking about tomorrow, and sometimes those little voices, those old tapes start to play and say, you know what? You’re not enough. But I remind myself, you know what girl, you have graduated from Georgia Tech. You worked in some of the top Fortune 500 companies. You are all that in a bag of chips. Whatever that self-talk is for you, we have to make sure that we’re playing those positive tapes in our mind. It is truly time for each of us to be the hero of our own story, our own lives, and cancel self-doubt in 2024, we’re going to do this together.

No doubt about it. And when you do that, you’re getting yourself ready to roar in 2024. That’s what I’m talking about. Roaring in 2024 so that you can soar in 2024. I started a podcast a few years ago, not necessarily willingly, but one of my coaches said, “Lakecia, I think it’s a great thing for you to do. You should start a podcast.” I’m like, well, okay. And it absolutely was the best thing I could have ever done. I have the opportunity to talk to Fortune 50 business and tech executives and women leaders about the hidden power that’s inside of us as women. It’s a fire that’s in all of us, and we talk about how often that fire is suppressed by fear. Well, I’m here today to tell you ladies that this power is your birthright. It’s your roar and it’s waiting to be unleashed.

As you can see, ROAR stands for reflection. In 2024, it’s time to clarify your vision, believe in your potential, begin to reflect on your own wins. You are a winner, and whatever you do next, you’re going to win at that too. Opportunity, sit in your power and say yes to opportunity. Don’t say no. Say yes, actually I can. And then begin to phone a friend and say, let’s put our strategy together so that I can really knock it out of the park when I start my new job. Action, it’s about tapping into your network, articulating what the right next steps are and running towards the thing that you might be afraid of because that one thing could unlock so many new opportunities. Relationships, we’ve talked about pulling together your board of directors, your board of advisors. Begin to assemble that team and make sure that you become a part of someone else’s.

Ladies, it is time to release your ROAR. Get ready. I love this quote by MLK. He says, “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, what are you doing for others?” Well, we can answer that question. Let’s answer this question by elevating and empowering women in industry and becoming a part of their personal board of directors, because you and I both know that behind every successful woman is a tribe of other successful women and male allies who have their back, and let’s make sure that we’re also paying it forward. On this slide, you should see four beautiful women on this slide. They’re absolutely amazing women. They’re rock stars and they’re dear friends of mine. I love this tribe that you see on the slide. We support each other, we mentor, we sponsor. We’re sounding boards. I wear their T-shirts and rooms that I’m in and they wear mine.

It’s been an honor to play a small role in their career success. As I said, these are super bad women. They’re total rock stars. Kelly on the left hand side is a new VP at Isotope. We work together at Intel. Diane is a VP at Lululemon. We worked together at Microsoft and she was an amazing partner to me and really enabled my success in so many ways. Phenomenal sounding board. Panya is a senior director at Meta. We’ve been friends for over 25 years. Phenomenal leader, Paan Diane are a part of Black Woman on board Rising program and just kicking butt, taking names. Karenga, the last picture you see as a senior director at Intel, I was part of her recruiting process into Intel. I hired her into my org and I promoted her. It was a well-deserved promotion and she earned it even before I hired my organization, we’re making this happen.

I also sponsored her into a leadership program for IWF. She had an opportunity to meet phenomenal women across the world, go to Harvard. Again, it is important that we are lifting as we climb, that we’re supporting other women through their career journey. So my question to you today is who will you lift up? Who will you put in those circles? What four women will you put in those circles on the screen? Who will you open doors for? It’s so fun to be able to do that. And the next thing I want to ask you is who will you add to your team? Who is going to be part of your personal board of directors, your personal board of advisors? Who are you going to make sure you can support them and they can support you? Build your team, build your squad, build your personal board of directors. It’s so important as Pete said to me from day one. It’s to build that community of supporters. It starts today, and I’m here to help you in any way that I can.

Now ladies, I want us to really imagine the lift that we will see as a group. If all 1000 plus attendees at this conference take the actions I just outlined in the next few days. Imagine the beautiful mosaic we can create in corporate America when we’re intentional about lifting each other up. If everyone lifts up one more woman, the tables and the rooms and the C-suites will look so different. Imagine the difference we can make by lifting others up and calling on our squads to lift us.

Imagine the strength we will create collectively as women lifting women. Just like moon and suns with the certainty of tides. Just like hope springing high, still, we rise. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you for the opportunity to spend time with you guys today. It’s been my absolute pleasure to be a part of this conversation. Thank you Angie and team for including me in this amazing conference. Let’s start the movement. Lift her up, lift as you climb. We’re going to fear less and roar more. We’re going to roar with Lakecia Gunter. Thank you so much for this opportunity. It’s been an absolute pleasure to be with you today. Angie, thank you.

Angie Chang: Thank you so much for that inspiring talk. I learned so much from your slides about your team, your stories of inspiration, of receiving sponsorship, and also the encouragement for women to sponsor others. So that’s a really great call out. We have a lot of people chatting away. I don’t know if you want to take a question?

Lakecia Gunter: Yeah, happy to take some questions. My pleasure, thank you.

Angie Chang: Two minutes left in this session.

Julia: Hello? I’m here waiting for something, I don’t know what I was waiting for. I do have a question. First off, thank you so much for such a strong… I’ve just been sitting here just watching with just awe.

Thank you so much. Oh, actually, let me show my face if I can. There we go, hello.

Lakecia Gunter: Hi, Julia.

Julia: Hi. So yeah, I’ve just been sitting here like this the whole time. Yes, thank you so much. This was a phenomenal talk. And I guess my question is, I am currently trying to build my squad. We’re trying to roll. And so how do you know somebody is for the squad? Because not everybody’s for the squad. And so I’m trying to build quality squad here. And do you have any tips on building that squad, finding the people to get into that squad and stuff like that? Thanks.

Lakecia Gunter: That’s a great question, Julia.

Angie Chang: One minute. Sorry. Just a reminder, we’re going to end in one minute. So yeah.

Lakecia Gunter: One minute, okay, I’ll be very quick. Thank you. We’re right at 9:39. So what I would say is, for instance, Mary Wilder became a part of my squad, the picture that I’ve shown in terms of the job opportunities, because she was speaking and I was so inspired by her talk. I simply said, I walked up to her and I said, hey, I love to get to know you. A few years in my career at Intel, you are super successful. I’d love to learn from you. And so we had a one-on-one. I always just ask people for 15 minutes and that 15 minute coffee chat, we began to connect on so many things.

She was from Florida, I was from Florida. She was Cuban American, I’m African American, we both were engineers. And so we just began to find those common trait dialogue. And once we did that, she became part of team Lakecia. So it’s about finding connection. So as you begin to meet people, you’ll know, and they all know that, you know what, we want to be connected. We’re forever friends. Mary has retired from Intel. We’re still friends. I had her on my podcast. So it’ll come to you as you begin to connect with people, you’ll find those natural connections, and that will be a person who’s willing to be a part of your team Julia. Thank you for the question.

Julia: One quick follow up. What’s your podcast? I think other people ask that too.

Lakecia Gunter: Sure, it’s Roar with Lakecia Gunter. I’m so sorry. So yeah, you can find me on Apple, Spotify, Roar with Lakecia Gunter. I’m putting it in the chat. If you search on that on Google, my podcast will come up. And I’m working on season two as we speak. It’s been a phenomenal experience for me. I’ve learned so much by doing the podcast. Thank you so much.

Julia: Thank you.

Lakecia Gunter: All right, thanks ladies.

Julia: Thank you.

Lakecia Gunter: Bye.

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Sukrutha Bhadouria: Next up, we have Jessica, who is a Latina developer, educator and advocate in tech. Welcome, Jessica.

Jessica Dene Earley-Cha: Thanks. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Hello folks. I am super excited to be here, and let’s just jump right in. Let me get my slides up. Lovely. Oh, it’s always nice when technology works. Cool. We only have 20 minutes.

Jessica Dene Earley-Cha: I have a lot of content and because I sometimes can be an overachiever, I like to share all of my stuff that I do. There’s a Bit.ly link if you would like access to the slides. Highly recommend it if you are planning on using any of the content today. Let’s jump right in. I am Jessica Dene Earley-Cha.

Jessica Dene Earley-Cha: I am a developer, educator, advocate in tech. Oh gosh, let’s see, I’ve been in tech for about eight years. The last five years was with Google as a development relations engineer for Google Assistant.

Jessica Dene Earley-Cha: I’ve been involved with lots of different organizations, have done tons of dinners with Girl Geek Dinners back in the day as well. I’m really excited to be here. Angie was working at a place, when I met her, where I actually learned how to code and so this is really fun to actually be speaking at one of these events. Because I remember attending them and being like, “How cool are these folks?”

Jessica Dene Earley-Cha: Before I joined tech, I actually worked in the nonprofit space for 10 years working with at-risk female youth and folks with mental health challenges. I don’t have a very clear or straightforward career, I definitely have jumped around, and love to connect with people and chat. Because of my nonprofit background, love to support others and honestly, the reason why I have been as successful as I have been is because of community and other people helping me. If you need anything or have any questions, just let me know.

Jessica Dene Earley-Cha: This is a reduced or a smaller version of a talk that I gave a few months ago. If you want to see the full talk, I have the YouTube video, it’s about an hour long, but I did want to walk through the big portions of when it comes to interviewing, some frameworks that I’ve used that really helped me.

Jessica Dene Earley-Cha: Today we’re going to talk about some resources I have gathered up from, again, community. I asked folks in my community going, “If somebody’s trying to learn how to prep for whiteboarding, what are the great resources out there?”

Jessica Dene Earley-Cha: Then I have my scaffolding of the seven steps I think of and I go through when I actually do my technical interviews, and then tips and resources at the end. It’s going to be a little bit rushed, which is not ideal, but hopefully you’ll be able to get a lot of great information, and if you want to chat more than happy to chat as well. I could do it. I could change slides. There we go. Again, this is not just from me, this is from tons of amazing people.

Jessica Dene Earley-Cha: Here’s a list of resources of solving different problems and potentially different types of questions that could help with your interviewing prep, because there’s no point of practicing the whiteboarding portion if you haven’t done some prep work beforehand. This is really a list of great resources. All the links are again, in the slides as well.

Jessica Dene Earley-Cha: Let’s dive into when it comes to the actual interview, you’re onsite or you’re remote, this is the things I do that help me process through, think things through, and then also when my anxiety kicks in, I can go back to this and have some scaffolding, which is really nice.

Jessica Dene Earley-Cha: These are the seven steps that I have, which has to do with when they ask you the question, I restate the question, I make my test cases, I draw it out. Pseudo code. Test, code and refactor. Let’s walk through this because it’s one thing to say it’s another thing to do it. Let’s pretend there’s an interview.

Jessica Dene Earley-Cha: I’m going to be both the interviewer and the interviewee and we’re going to walk through this relatively quickly. But I want to show you how I recently have done this as I’ve been going through my own. I was looking for work, now I’m working again, which is lovely.

Jessica Dene Earley-Cha: Let’s say they give you an interview question. This one is just write a method that determines if two words are X. Part of the process I would do, I’d be like, “Okay, cool. So this problem… Or at least I would ask clarifying questions. I’d be like, “Ooh, an anagram is when there are two strings that have the same number of letters, or is it this other one?” I would make sure that I knew what those words meant because I don’t want to make assumptions, because then I would be solving the wrong problem.

Jessica Dene Earley-Cha: I always restate the question, making sure I understand what’s happening. Then I also do out test cases, which is part of my question asking a little bit. So I’m like, “Okay, cool. So do I care about capital letters? Do I care about if there’s maybe no characters? Am I working with good data?” And then writing out some of the test cases of so they said act, capitalize and eat, lowercase should be true.

Jessica Dene Earley-Cha: And then I just walk through, write a couple of them, making sure I get true, false and edge cases as well. That’s how I make my test cases as I’m clarifying what’s the problem. Then I draw this out, and this can be different for different folks. When it was traditional whiteboarding with an actual whiteboard, I would literally draw out what I would be doing. But because a lot of things have moved remotely, this is what I did this last time I had a question was, okay, cool, so I’m thinking about getting the first word putting it into a dictionary, and then for every time the letter appears, I’m going to bump up the value by one. And then the second word, I’m actually going to put that into the dictionary, a different one. Or maybe the same, not sure, I’m not committed. And I’m going to decrement, go the opposite way.

Jessica Dene Earley-Cha: And then with those two, if I compare the two, and if all the values are zero, then it should be good that it should all equal out. So that means it’s true. So that’s how I would draw it remotely versus with the actual whiteboard itself. Then after that, after I explain that, I’m like, okay, cool, this drawing makes sense. I’ve explained it to my interviewer.

Jessica Dene Earley-Cha: Then, I’ll pseudo code. I’ll go, “Okay, cool. I’m going to walk through this really quickly. I’m going to create my variable. I’m going to loop over the first word, adding the letter as a key and the value as one, then looping over the second word.” And if the letter is not in the counter, that means they don’t match, then I’m out. And then of course if the letter is in there, I’m going to subtract by one.

Jessica Dene Earley-Cha: At the end, I’m going to loop over that counter dictionary, checking the values. If they’re not all zero, then false if they are true. So that’s my pseudo code. Then after that I would test my pseudo code. I like to have this little diagram. I usually draw this out. It’s a little harder when you’re dealing with virtual, but this is what I normally do, is I put my variables on one side, the values on the other, I’m like, okay, word one is at. Word two is eight. Then I have my new variable of counter, I loop over and I actually walk through the whole process working through it as though my pseudo code is real code. This happens to me all the time where I’m in the middle of writing code or pseudo code. I’m like, “Oh, I have this other great idea.”

Jessica Dene Earley-Cha: Instead of stopping and working on that idea, I always recommend write down a little note, tell your interviewer, “Hey, thought of something, going to get back to that after. Let me finish this.” Finish your process of testing out your pseudo code. Then at the end you can go, “Oh, you know what I thought about before even doing all this work, just checking the two lengths of the strings. If they’re not the same, I could potentially come out.” Granted, there might be some white space and all that, but in theory that would work. That’s usually how I handle cases where I think of something in the middle of it, but instead of just trying to solve that thing, I might get confused. I try to finish what I’m doing, then go back to my little note for myself. And I usually tell people up front of my interviewers, found something, hold on. Cool, let’s go back.

Jessica Dene Earley-Cha: Then I add that pseudo code. After testing, you would also want to test to make sure the cases in which you have negative cases, things that should be false, actually trigger and they become false. I would test that out. We’re not going to walk through that today, but you’d walk through the whole process of testing it, then you would code. And then I put sometimes because I’ve had it where people are like, “No, this is cool, this is good.”

Jessica Dene Earley-Cha: You don’t always necessarily have to code if your logic and your pseudo coding is solid. Because after that, it’s just potentially syntax errors, which you could Google and you could look up. That’s what we do our normal day to day. But something I do do is when I go, “Oh, you want me to code this out?” And they’re like, “No, it’s okay.” If I know the time and space complexity, I upfront tell. Them that was something I know I spent a lot of time trying to learn, time and space complexity.

Jessica Dene Earley-Cha: It is a thing that most computer science people have learned about. I did it as a person who doesn’t have a CS degree, so I learned it as well as I could. And if I feel pretty confident, I will upfront tell them this is what the time complexity or space complexity is. If you don’t know, that’s okay, but whatever you do know you want to upfront versus waiting for them to ask you for it. That’s usually what I do.

Jessica Dene Earley-Cha: The times where they do ask me to code, I’m like, “Cool, I’ll code.” And the nice thing is because I already have pseudo code, it’s easier for me to write my code as well. And then of course you always want to test out the new code that you just wrote out. And then after that, refactor. And generally by then, you’re talking about refactoring, you’re not actually refactoring your code because of time as well.

Jessica Dene Earley-Cha: That’s how I would walk through it really quickly. Granted, I would have more time and show more examples. But that is the seven steps I do when I’m interviewing. What’s really nice about this is if I get lost in my pseudo code, I can go back to my visual of my actual image that I have, that I drew up. If I get lost in my coding, I can go back to my pseudo code.

Jessica Dene Earley-Cha: This is a really nice way that you could really support yourself and solve the problem abstractly and then get more granular in there. Then you could worry about the syntax and code and the scary stuff. It looks like we have six minutes left. Yes. Some tips and resources that I have.

Jessica Dene Earley-Cha: When you get stuck, and it’ll happen because we’re human beings. And this is why if you are doing this type of work, this is hard work. If it was easy then it wouldn’t be as lucrative potentially? I don’t know. That was a weird statement. You’ll get stuck and that’s okay. I usually like to, instead of going or let my anxiety kick in and, “Oh my gosh,” and freak out or go silent, that’s usually what I do.

Jessica Dene Earley-Cha: Something I learned and I tend to do now is instead of going or silent, I go, “Oh, this is interesting.” And that one phrase is my backup of like, oh, Jessica, if you don’t know what’s happening or if you’re stuck, at least say this part. And so I go, “Ooh, this is interesting. There’s something here.” I try to explain where I’m stuck. I usually phrase it as, “That’s interesting.”

Jessica Dene Earley-Cha: The reason why I do that is because society tends to not be as kind when it comes to assumptions, when it comes to women and people of color. I try to frame it as I’m excited, I’m not intimidated. I might not feel that way, but I’m presenting that way. That’s usually, ooh, this is interesting. Then it also puts me in a nice playful framework, versus “I don’t know this.” Again, that’s something I do. I really enjoy that. That’s a tip I got from a friend so I love to share that.

Jessica Dene Earley-Cha: When you get stuck, explain what you’re stuck. You can say this is interesting to help boost yourself and frame it as, no, no, no, this is collaborative, this is interesting. Let’s talk about this. Then I would recommend draw your picture again, go back to your picture, draw it out, try to unstick yourself, and then honestly too, it’s not a bad thing if you have to go, “You know what? I’ve got myself all twisted. I need to start from scratch.” Of course, depending on the actual time you have, sometimes that’s possible, sometimes that’s not.

Jessica Dene Earley-Cha: But it’s not a horrible thing to acknowledge, you know what? I think I solved this not in the best, or I was going down potentially the wrong path. Let me start again. And you can start from drawing the picture, pseudo coding, then coding as well.

Jessica Dene Earley-Cha: Some handy tips I usually let people know about is use built-in methods. It’s okay. If you have to, I don’t know, process some data and part of it is sorting it out first then you process it, use the dot sort methods. It is A-OK. The big thing is if the problem itself is about sorting, you don’t want to just do dot sort, you would want to work that through. But you could definitely use different methods.

Jessica Dene Earley-Cha: You don’t have to do everything from scratch or by hand. Another thing I like to do is I create my own helper methods of clean data and I’ll just reference it as, oh, I’ll clean the data here, and that’s a function I’ve wrote somewhere else. I’ll build it after.

Jessica Dene Earley-Cha: Sometimes, usually they don’t ask you to actually write that part of the code, which is really interesting. You could definitely use that as well where you just use that clean data. That could take out all the spaces of data or correct any errors or what have you. That way you could solve the core problem.

Jessica Dene Earley-Cha: Another thing is to share what you know. There’s many times where I’m going to go back to that sort example. If I am using that, I’ll say, “Ooh, I know in Python there’s sort and sorted. One changes it in memory and the other one returns a new array. And so I’ll drop little things like that as I’m writing my code. Or potentially especially one off errors, I usually know, ooh, there might be a one off error here. Because we’re human. Nine times out of time there’s not but at least I have flagged potentially there could be something here that once we run that code, we’ll find it as well.

Jessica Dene Earley-Cha: Upfronting what you do know is really helpful for people to understand what you know versus waiting for them to ask you. And I know that might feel strange, and so practicing that is really helpful for yourself to get used to that part because this is a whole skillset that we need to learn in regards to doing these interviews. Definitely highly recommend that.

Jessica Dene Earley-Cha: Important things: talk through your thought process, have some clear pseudo coding, ask questions, get something on the board, helper methods. Those are things that are important. Less important things. Solving it as quickly as possible, and then also the most efficient solution. Oh, I hear… Oh no. Okay. And then that’s it. Thank you so much. I think we made it right on time. I know we started a little bit late. But feel free to connect with me and then also provide feedback too. This was a reduced talk from something that’s a little longer, so feel free to check out that Bit.ly link so you can see all the resources I have for you.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you, Jessica. Thank you everyone for joining. We’ll see you at the next session. Bye.

Jessica Dene Earley-Cha: Thanks everyone. Bye.

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

• Check out open jobs at our trusted partner companies.
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• Does your company want to sponsor a Girl Geek Dinner or Career Fair? Talk to us!

Geetha Anne: Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for your time today. My name is Geetha. I am a solutions architect at Elastic. Today, the topic of discussion for the session is how do you start at building a career in sales engineering if you’re already a software engineer? And how can you go about scaling your career in the sales engineer (SE) world? First, I’d like to extend my thanks to the Girl Geek X community for this incredible opportunity. I’ve been a long time follower and I’m so excited to speak on this platform today.

Geetha Anne: Before we get into the topic, a bit about myself. As you can see, I am South Indian. I currently live in the SF Bay Area in California with my family, two daughters, nine and six, they are. My husband who’s also in the tech. I’m in California, so I’ve inherently got in the habit of hiking and I love hiking. I recently finished this Half Dome Summit, which is for me, it’s a great accomplishment because I’ve suffered from an extreme case of acrophobia and I was able to overcome that fear by submitting Half Dome recently.

Geetha Anne: On the right, you see my picture from my graduation day, I did software engineering from San Jose State University back in 2015. That’s my daughter when she was one year old, when I graduated. Before I moved to the US I used to work as a software engineer at Tata, and then I moved here, did my Master’s, and I started off as an intern at ServiceNow in software engineering. Got a full-time as a software engineer, and then after a few months at ServiceNow, I accidentally discovered something called pre-sales exists.

Geetha Anne: Back then in 2015, it was still a niche area for infrastructure backed companies to have a pre-sales function. I was really apprehensive, but I started loving that role ever since. So I worked at Cloudera, Confluent and Elastic recently. As a software engineer, my mind used to work like this. It’s an exact representation of how my mind would function and think like when I was an engineer. Maybe some of you can relate to this because I had technical knowledge, I had creativity, curiosity, but was wet behind the ears in terms of experience.

Geetha Anne: When I was chasing technical knowledge and creativity, I would lose out on curiosity and experience because curiosity will be killed when you follow a monotonous routine, which is usually the case in these SDLC life cycles. You follow the rules that were set in by others and then you lose the curiosity side.

Geetha Anne: I did have inherent curiosity and creativity, but then I did not have the right amount of technical knowledge in order to implement my curiosity and creativity into a real existing, real executable program or a project because I didn’t have experience. Putting all these diagrams together, I was looking for that magic to happen, which never happened when I was a software engineer because I was lacking one or the other.

Geetha Anne: In order to kickstart my journey, in order to really propel my career in software engineering, I read a lot of books. On all these books on the screen you see like Mythical Man-Month, the Pragmatic Programmer, and all of the great books you see on the screen, they give you a perspective to think of software engineering as an art form rather than a science.

Geetha Anne: As with painters, when you draw parallels between art and software engineering, as with painters, I’ve seen so many software developers who only replicate things and really never come up with something original. I was someone like that. I used to be a great painter, a great engineer who replicated things, who really created projects that were similar to others and did a great job at it. But what many other software developers in the organizations were like this genuine artist who are different. They came up with new things, they set new standards for the future. They changed the current environment to me and the status quo for the better, and all the great things they could achieve as these really passionate quarters and programmers, which I was not. I was not a passionate programmer.

Geetha Anne: I did know programming well enough to read code, make the changes, and really suggest optimization techniques and whatnot, but I was really not into it. And then reading all these books taught me to think pragmatically, to present a collection of tips to improve the development process, how to think in a pragmatic way then a theoretical way. I also became an early adopter of inquisitiveness and critical thinking and realism.

Geetha Anne: That set me on a path to define set rules for myself, a guardrails for myself. Like if I were to stay in the software engineering role, I will have to do these things, X, Y, Z things. And the first thing was grasping the fundamentals for the long-term benefit. That was one thing I told myself. This can be elementary as it can appear at first, but having a solid foundation in fundamentals will always need to be, it should come first.

Geetha Anne: The better you understand, the easier it becomes when you’re going onto these advanced concepts. I also set myself a rule that I will learn by doing. I always play with the code while learning. The sooner I started playing with the code, the better I got and faster at learning these given advanced topics. Fiddling around with this code made me realize that I’m capable of not only changing this code, but maybe create my own code when required.

Geetha Anne: I also learned quite a bit from bugs. Bugs, they are inherently going to appear in software programs when you write, right? They are part of fully acceptable process and a phenomenon, and it’s a commonly occurring situation that bugs occur. I’ve learned quite a bit from my own bugs as a software engineer, but it was not fulfilling enough. I really needed that new avenue.

Geetha Anne: I wanted to learn what’s happening on the other side of the fence, what’s happening in business. I always was inquisitive. I wanted to see what goes in that realm, but I didn’t know where to start. But there was this miraculously an opportunity showed up when I was at ServiceNow. They wanted someone to demo the project at a sales kickoff that I was part of.

Geetha Anne: I didn’t really know what sales kickoff meant at that time, but I signed up for that opportunity because no other engineer was willing to go to Florida. I signed up for that opportunity and fortunately that worked in my favor because it opened doors for so many things in my life that my career has completely transformed from then on.

Geetha Anne: I was there in Florida at the sales kickoff. As I was demoing the product and interacting with my sales peers at the time, I’ve learned incredible life lessons in professional way. I’ve learned that sales actually plays such a crucial and important role in every business. I was so late in the game to understand that. I really did not have a full picture of what’s going on in the organization.

Geetha Anne: I came about to understand that there’s no matter how good your operations are, how cutting edge your technology is, how good of a programming prowess or engineering prowess you have, and how tight your financial goals are, how progressive and forward-thinking your management and engineering techniques are, you still will need a great sales mechanism in place in order to make any business profitable.

Geetha Anne: After that particular day, some switch flicked in my brain and I started researching more and more about sales and I came across this quote, which is my favorite. “Nothing happens, nothing really happens until someone starts selling something.” That’s when every transaction starts, every enablement starts, and everyone starts to know what’s in the world out there.

Geetha Anne: Once that realization came to me, I started researching and I found that there are majorly two roles across every business in every industry. It is primarily sales and sales support that will make you profit, that will make any business profitable. Every other business function is redundant if sales team fails.

Geetha Anne: If sales fail to sell a product or a service, it will lead to cascading effect of generationally failing income cashflow and also other functions failing in a business. You should take it seriously that there is no other department or business function that can have a greater impact on the development of all cash flows, all important cash flow than the sales or for that matter marketing department.

Geetha Anne: When that realization came, I started research about pre-sales. What is pre-sales? In my opinion, pre-sales is this awesome function within any sales led or a product led company, which is about empowering and educating your buyers, prospects and customers.

Geetha Anne: Pre-sales means it is as simple as guiding your product buyers through their buying journey and proactively anticipating challenges that might occur. It is far more than technical sales. You will have to know about the solution in and out as a sales engineer, as a pre-sales engineer, it is knowing your buyer’s needs ahead of time and you being the expert in the room, you will help them successfully advance to the finishing line of the deal. This is a responsibility of the sales engineer.

Geetha Anne: And if you aren’t from the sales industry, the term pre-sales will apply to all activities before the sales event starts. That’s why the pre in pre-sales comes from. And then by definition, pre-sales will include all marketing and lead generation up to sales qualified lead.

Geetha Anne: Is there need for pre-sales engineers in the market right now? The answer is a big yes. This is the case decade ago. It has only become extremely crucial to hire more pre-sales in a product led or a sales led growth companies. The way it works is once a sales organization sets a sales qualified lead, this sales team will work in converting the lead internal opportunity. Then you work on that opportunity to closure, to win the deal, and all of that activity. In this process, the sales reps are focused on working on the opportunity.

Geetha Anne: There are so many areas where the technical resources are needed and the assistance is required in winning that opportunity. This is where the sales engineer or the SE comes into play to save the day. The activities performed by sales engineers include early demonstrations, technical discovery, comprehensive tech demonstrations, filling something or as request for RFIs, request for proposals, technical validations, which are typically the most resource intensive part of an SE journey, often referred to as proof of concepts and proof of value. These are the responsibilities as a sales engineer, you have to analyze and come up with a solution that fits the needs of a customer.

Geetha Anne: And as a profession, it’s developed in a technology sales environment where the product and service offerings are extremely complex. It’s not like you’re buying a car where there’s only one person needed to sell and the product is easy to understand and there’s only one decision maker. That’s not the case with selling a complex IT or a SaaS or infrastructure-based technical solution.

Geetha Anne: You often need multiple teams and parts of business are involved, stakeholders are involved in decision making when you close the sale. And in order for that to happen, the pre-sales has to cover a lot of activities that take place. First thing is qualification. You will have to identify and invest in the right opportunities and then you have to… And the SE has to perform.

Geetha Anne: The sales engineer has to perform the opportunity discovery, understanding the landscape of that customer, understanding the context and why they’re seeking the solution from us as a company. And then you map out the requirements of customer to the solutions that are offered by the company. You come up with a success criteria and define and cater, tailor or custom make a demonstration that will cater to the needs of the customer. And then finally deliver on all of these things that are promised after the pipeline is generated. You answer the RFPs, do the internal research, come up with a proof of concept and deliver. This is all in the hands of a pre-sales engineer.

Geetha Anne: But how do pre-sales engineers go about doing it? You don’t have to do it, there are so many frameworks that are in the market that will help you do that. The first one is K-I-S-S principle, which is very simple, which will help the customers to be told what they’re going to be told. Like the sales engineer is going to tell them what they’re going to tell and they’re going to tell what they’re going to do next and they’ll repeat what they’re told already and keep it very simple. And they’ll repeat the process of keeping them completely informed on where they’re going and how they’re evolving in the journey of customer success.

Geetha Anne: And the next one is LAER model, which is a successful framework used in managing objection handling, when it comes to pre-sales software sales. There’s so many objections that come up in business related contexts like price related objections. There’s quality of service risks that customers are worried about, and there’s relationship and trust-based credibility issues or legitimacy issues that customers are worried and raise an objection about.

Geetha Anne: You can use this LAER methodology in order to overcome that fears that they have. And there are many other techniques like MEDIC, which is a sales qualification framework used by a lot of salespeople to help qualify the sales using certain metrics like who are the economic buyers, who’s the decision criteria based off of, and what’s the decision process? What is exactly the pain point and who’s the champion?

Geetha Anne: After understanding all of this, you will come to terms, you’ll also understand the responsibilities and know what to expect in an SE role. You will have to equip yourself as an SE with certain competencies. The first thing being, so in order to be a successful SE, you need a lot of skills that are very much soft skill based. The first thing is communication skill, which is a presentation skill. In other words, you are the face of the customer, right? You are the face of this company in front of the customer, so you will have to have innately the ability to create high value presentations of the company you’re representing.

Geetha Anne: When you start as a junior SE sales engineer and you grow and work your way up to the level five as an SE or a staff or a principal SE, your responsibilities are growing. At first, you’re only expected to understand the audience, create a messaging that caters to them, and deliver those demonstrations.

Geetha Anne: As you grow up, as you work your way up, you will be expected to be extremely skillful and create a compelling case for why the customer has to buy your product. And your ability to deliver compelling messaging, your depth of knowledge, breadth of knowledge, and your ability to speak to a multitude of products, disparate concepts will matter and you will be sought out as a high value presenter. And you’re expected to be on your own when it comes to demonstration skills, when you’re going from level one to level five as an SE.

Geetha Anne: The technical acumen is a non-negotiable skill every sales engineer is expected to have. Because imagine this, right? You are standing in front of the customer representing a product and a company. Your familiarity, your depth of knowledge, and your complex understanding or in-depth understanding of a product in a range of technical topics on that product will only position yourself for success. And you are offering so much value right away and you’re bringing so much to bear already.

Geetha Anne: You are familiarizing yourself with the core products. You are positioning yourself as an expert in this particular technology. You will be having will be expected to have ability to troubleshoot the technical issues. You will also master all this one step at a time.

Geetha Anne: At one point you’ll become an SME of some category of the product and you’ll be capable of running your own meetings, creating your own demos, proactively applying all the emerging trends, and advancing your sales and differentiating from the competitors. Creating competitive materials and making it repeatable is another skill you will also hone.

Geetha Anne: Another skill that’s important is relationship management because you are dealing with salespeople here. You are on a daily basis sharing your knowledge, understanding the landscape. You are constantly evolving these processes. Whenever there’s money involved, it has to be dealt very, very carefully.

Geetha Anne: You have to have exceptional process and project management skills. You don’t have to have it right away, but you are expected to learn as you grow in front of these customers. You’re answering these complex RFPs, you’re presenting topics that are disparate. You will have to become a trusted advisor and their own champion in order to gain trust and credibility.

Geetha Anne: What are the great qualities of an SE? I’ve observed that a great SE is a business operator, meaning, which they view every opportunity as an incredible way of winning that particular account. Their win rates for opportunities of SEs are extremely high, and they’re also people developers, meaning which they contribute back to the SE world by creating tech enablement and all the on-boardings and trainings and creating other kinds of value creation avenues like videos, blog posts, and also articles.

Geetha Anne: And then, after all that, we’ve seen the competencies. There’s a career path for every SE. Most companies replicate this pattern that you’re seeing on screen. They start off as an SE, then there’s a promotion that happens to senior SE and there are two pathways you can take from there. One is become an individual contributor or you can go in a management pathway and manage other sales engineers. The max you can go is a principal SE, and from there you can pivot to management whichever way you want, which is very similar to software engineering, but slightly different in terms of your expectations and how you progress in each level will define where you will find yourself a suitable fit.

Geetha Anne: Above all, topping all this, you need a great mentor. I highly recommend finding a good mentor. First, outline your professional goals. Seek a mentor within the organization or externally who can align with your professional goals, and you can establish a connection with that person and then develop a mutually beneficial relationship. I’m open to mentor anybody who’s willing to move into sales engineering career.

Geetha Anne: These are some of the resources that helped me put together this. And also in my day-to-day job, I refer to these books and resources on a regular basis. Thank you so, so much for this opportunity and I hope to meet some of you on my LinkedIn and great, I hope you enjoy the rest of the conference. Bye.

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