“Morning Keynote: How to Build Your Personal Brand”: Corliss Collier with Amazon (Video + Transcript)

In this Elevate keynote, Corliss Collier (Amazon Head of Product, Research & Science – Amazon Seller Satisfaction & Insights), discusses the process of crafting a personal brand. She emphasizes the importance of self-discovery, reflecting on values and goals, identifying a target audience, seeking feedback, and the need for continuous development and networking to foster and refine one’s brand. 

Transcript:

Sukrutha Bhadouria:

So let’s dive into an intro. Hi, I’m Sukrutha. I’m the co-founder and CTO of Girl Geek X. It used to be called Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners and we dropped the Bay Area because we wanted to go global with our virtual conferences and podcasts and so on. So over the years we’ve actually crossed over a decade of Girl Geek Dinners in the San Francisco Bay Area, and over five years of virtual Elevate conferences. With this, we are creating even more opportunities to give more women the mic on stage. Oftentimes we find that our amazing, amazing speakers are actually giving a talk for the first time and giving a talk at a Girl Geek Dinner or at an Elevate conference has really boosted their confidence level, their comfort level in sharing who they are, what they work on, and it really then multiplies and encourages women to not only get into but stay in tech and that’s what we are here for.

Thank you for joining us for our conference celebrating International Women’s Day. This year’s theme is Inspire Inclusion and we hope that we can provide a safe space to do that with each Elevate conference that we do. We have a virtual mentorship lounge as well. It’s kicking off tomorrow with experts on everything on a variety of subjects. From engineering to product to product management, to design to career transitions and so much more. We really hope you’ll find a way to connect with others, whether it’s mentors in attendees or they’re speakers.

There are a variety of ways to network over the next two days and we hope you add folks on LinkedIn and stay in touch. A wise person once told me to put my business card behind my driver’s license so I always have it with me, but in the world of LinkedIn and in the digital age, it makes it so much easier to connect and build that network because you’ll always need to build it before you actually need to use it, right? So work on that network. There is a participation leaderboard as well and that encourages and rewards folks for visiting the virtual employee booths at noon to 1:00 Pacific time on Friday. So the top three participants will get a Girl Geek X swag bag of cool stuff. It is really cool, carefully curated by Angie so it’s really awesome. If you are one of our top participants across the next two days, you can win that amazing hamper bag. Over to you, Angie.

Angie Chang:

Hi, my name is Angie Chang and I’m the co-founder of Girl Geek X and I wanted to say thank you so much for coming today and celebrating with us International Women’s Day this week and we want us to say thank you to our sponsors and it is because of their support and event sponsors that keep us hosting Girl Geek X events like Girl Geek Dinners and the Elevate virtual conferences and career fairs, providing opportunities for us to, like Sukrutha said, pass the mic to girl geeks, but also for women to connect around the world and lift as you climb, and so thank you to the United States Digital Service or USDS, US Digital Service. There’s so many ways we could say it. Opendoor, Boomi, AppFolio, and 18C for all of your support and enthusiasm for women in tech. So for your partnership in recruiting and retaining and working and building up reputations of women in tech.

So we can’t wait for your recruiters and hiring managers to meet our attendees at the virtual career fair booth hour, which Sukrutha as said starts tomorrow at noon, Pacific time. For one hour, you get after employer intros and you hear a bit about the companies, where they’re hiring, the cities that they’re in. I heard Santa Barbara, San Diego, New York, Dallas, Pennsylvania, Hyderabad, lots of roles in engineering, staff and senior roles, San Francisco. So yeah, please come hear them talk about their roles, learn about the companies, and then meet recruiters in their employer booths because I know in this macro economic climate, you probably know someone who’s looking for their next role in tech, so it’s a good place to go, make connections and get a foot in the door. So I encourage you to look at those company’s jobs at girlgeek.io/jobs and please talk to them tomorrow. They will be here in person.

And today we’ll be hearing from an inclusive set of women working in tech from managers to individual contributors because we love hearing from women about their unique expertise and inspiring stories. We like to see their cool job titles and hear about their passions, geeky side projects, and that real-talk career advice. So hopefully today, our speakers will inspire you to do something that hard thing that you wanted to do this year or help you think differently about something that’s been challenging you. So we’ll be learning so much today and we encourage you to help us share all these takeaways from incredible women. We have a hashtag ElevateWomen if you want to share on social media, we can reshare or you tag us or usually Girl Geek X at any of the social platforms that exist today, and yes, all of our talks are recorded.

You can hit replay right after the session ends and watch it to your heart’s content today, tomorrow, this weekend, and then they’ll go into our Girl Geek X YouTube channel where all of the sessions from our previous events also live and you can watch all of that content when you would like to, and most of our speakers today actually did apply to speak via our website. So I encourage you to go to girlgeek.io and go to the speak link at the top and apply to speak at an upcoming Girl Geek X event because we host them quarterly and we host Girl Geek Dinners as well. We’re always looking for sponsors who are looking to hire women in tech to partner with us to showcase their top leaders and talent, recruit from girl geeks and put more technical women on stage creating more role models in the world.

And as introverts, we’re always looking to elevate introverts, crushing it in the workplace, so I would like to bring up our keynote speaker this year, Corliss Collier, who is the Amazon Head of Product Research and Science, Amazon Seller, Satisfaction and Insights. She’s won numerous awards and has been recognized throughout her career for outstanding achievements in insights and marketing measurement and scientific modeling, and was recognized by her undergraduate alma mater Spelman College as a distinguished alumni in business and tech. We are excited to welcome her. Thank you so much for being here.

Corliss Collier:

Thank you, Angie. Thank you, Sukrutha, for having me and especially a big thank you to the Girl Geek X community. Without all of us girl geeks out there, we wouldn’t have anything to talk about today so I’m so happy to be here. So today I’m going to talk to you guys about crafting your personal brand and this is a timely discussion because like I heard, Angie just told us about the networking tomorrow and there are going to be so many roles open, but you need to know what you’re bringing to those organizations and be able to say it very confidently and stand up, and if you don’t know, think about it tonight. You have a whole day and the rest of the night to think about it and build it and hopefully you can get some tips for me here on how to build your brand.

I’m going to try to go through my slides, not too fast. I want to make sure you guys kind of find out how I built my brand and about me, but I will leave some time at the end if you want to ask questions. So as you’re thinking about this, if you want to go ahead and start putting your questions in the chat or whatever, we will capture them there and we’ll be able to answer those at the end. So what is it about crafting your personal brand and why do you need a personal brand and a blueprint to success? And this is the blueprint that I’ve worked and kind of worked for me.

So if you think about your personal brand and what the importance is, it is good for your professional and your personal growth. So when you step back and think about that, I want you to kind of take a moment to yourself or if you’re in a group watching with your other girl geeks or allies out there, think about what are you known for and do you even know it? Do you know why when people send people your way or you’re called or asked certain things, do you know why you’re asked for those or why you’re called? And I am not talking about those adjectives or those descriptive words that you would describe a piece of furniture or your best bag or your favorite pair of shoes. You’re not reliable, you’re not sturdy, you’re not healthy, but what are you known for? What do you bring to the table every time that you get there?

And so kind of think about that as we go through this process and we work through this together and then while you think about what you’re known for, what about that makes you unique? So what is your UVP, your unique value proposition? And I don’t mean you have to be that necessarily that unicorn, you don’t have to sweat glitter, although all of us girl geeks do because we’re just that amazing, but what is it that sets you apart from the person standing next to you, the next person who’ll come behind you? And it can be something so simple as you’re able to deliver the things in scale faster or you’re able to connect, and then how do you craft that message and make sure that message is what’s whispered about you when you’re not in the room. That’s how you really know that your brand has been solidified.

When people come to you and say, “Hey, Angie told me to reach out to you about X, or Sukrutha told me to reach out to you about Y,” what is being said about you? And that is how you know what your unique value proposition is. So I’ll tell you a little bit about me. I’m going to take you through a story or story time as the young kids are saying. I have a teenager so I have to learn these things because she calls me oftentimes and says, “Let’s have a story time.” And that’s just code word for I’m going to tell you about my day or tell you some really long story. You’re going to catch some pieces, you’re not going to understand half the words, but I don’t use as much young slang. So hopefully you guys understand me. So who is Corliss, what is her brand?

How did she get there and what is her unique value proposition? So if you think about Corliss and you just kind of throw some words or word cloud out there, she’s a friend, she’s a mother and she’s a wife. She’s a tech leader for over 24 years. She’s a mentor, she’s a coach, she’s a speaker and she’s from I guess some people call it that forgotten generation. She’s a Gen X-er, but we weren’t forgotten. We’re actually out here doing very big things in this world, but what is she known for and what is her career path? So I’m going to take you through story time with my career journey and kind of like I said, you can kind of build up to kind of what I’m known for, and in order to know what I’m known for is I’ve crafted my brand, but I’ve also, I seek feedback from people.

And for that I’ll tell you, I’ve been told that I am a connector. That is what known for, is a connector, that is my personal brand and not only a connector as in bringing people together or a gossiper, but I’m able to connect data and turn the analytics and stories into strategy that really help businesses and brands and things grow. I’m able to connect stakeholders and customers and consumers with the right assets and those type of things. I’m able to connect people ultimately. I put the right people in the room at the right time to make sparks happen and so being known as a connector, whether it’s through my mentoring, my coaching or my speaking, that is my brand. So whenever people feel like they need something done where they need someone who can connect the dots quickly, move forward quickly with a strategy, that’s often the things that I’m called for, especially when they’re data-driven, analytic-driven.

So let’s go through my career journey. So you guys will stare at my picture for a while, plus look at me talking, but I’m going to take you through the story time. I started my career in an industry that was heavily male-dominated, however, it was an analytics role so it was always been in a tech role. I was in the tobacco industry, but when you’re working in analytics, that is considered tech roles in a tech, especially when it’s predictive analytics and I became quickly known for the person who was able to take that data and write that story and not only write that story, but write that strategy that delivered dollars back to organization. So moving on, that was the thing that I was identified for and helped me be able to grow and move and grow as I built in that community. Once I got comfortable in identifying that, I became a mentor. How do I help bring the other women along with me, the other girl geeks?

I love that term where they say lift as you climb. That is one of the best things that has always driven me and connected me with Girl Geek is lift as we climb is how do I bring the other women along? How do I go from when Corliss started in building her brand, being the only woman in the room to now when I look around I see more women in the room who are leading and delivering and really just kicking butt at these things, and then along the way, I had some key learnings about myself that always what you do with your brand is not what you think or what you say it is, it’s also what people say it is. How you show up, how those things start, how you deliver and the consistency in which you’re there.

So let’s talk about this a little bit. So how did I build that brand? So in working to build that brand, there are two key areas that I look for and building a brand, if you guys think about what I’m saying, it’s not just you doing your job. Your job is not your brand and oftentimes when I start working with people, whether it be in my mentoring or just working or developing my employees, they’ll say, “Oh, well my brand is X.” Your brand is not X, so-and-so the software engineer, so-and-so the product manager, so-and-so the analyst or the applied scientist. Your brand is something much bigger than that. That’s your job code, your job title. So you have to be intentional about your brand because if you are not intentional on the brand that you set out in the marketplace, people will give you a brand.

And I can guarantee you, you won’t always agree with that brand, but the brand that’s given to you are the opportunities that will follow. So when you think about, there are two main areas that I always dive deep into when building my brand. I call that identify and reflect, and so how do you identify? So you have to know what your strengths are and your strengths are not everything. You cannot be everything to everyone but exhausted, and so this is one of the things I learned in my story as I say, “Who is Corliss?” So let’s step back to that story. When I was working through my career, I’d say probably about five to seven years, I received my first role. I had done very well in my role. I had been promoted very quickly in advancing and I had now hit my, I think it was an associate director at that time role.

And I tried to be everything to everyone because I was not clear on what my brand was. I allowed my brand to be given to me and it was just always like she’s going to work hard, she’s going to get it done. Those adjectives are not a brand. Work hard and get it done are not badges of honor. They’re not your brands. So you need to identify your strengths, your skills, and most importantly, your passions. Your passions will fuel you as you move along and your passions may and often do lie in the things that you do daily, but it may not be all of it. So identify that one key thing in there and remember and tie that to your UVP, your unique value proposition. So I quickly identified that my passion was the ability to take data and not just report on data, report the news, be the weather girl.

I wanted to take data and predict actions and drive strategy from that aspect. So that’s what I started to really fuel what my brand was going to be, and then as you’re building your brand and doing that self-discovery phase, you also need to reflect on your values and goals. Your brand needs to align with the values and the goals that you hold personally and professionally and how you bring those to market and how you show up at work and you use those.

A story there, I will talk to you about that. So in working through my brand, there were things that I was doing in roles that I was taking in organizations and when I would look back, I would say I won’t return to that type of industry or I won’t work in that industry even if it is in a technology-driven role because it no longer aligns with my values. So your values are part of your brand. Your values could be something like, “Hey, I only like organizations that respect the environment.” And if that’s part of your brand, that’s how you connect those things into turning those into your brand. So when people is looking for someone who is say, their brand is they are really good at connecting data points or really good at engineering and learning how to engineer at scale, but they engineer at scale in a way that is more ecological, economical, you connect those points.

And then next part in building your brand is identifying your target audience, understand your audience and their needs. So when I say that, I mean understand who you want to buy that brand at that time. Are you trying to convince your manager or your leadership team that you’re ready for a promotion? So continue through the journey of who is Corliss. I remember after taking that first role of associate director, it was time to where I was ready to move on up and move into a director role. So I needed to understand, did my brand align with the goals and the brands and delivery of the organization? And I had to get a sponsor to understand my brand and to whisper my name in those rooms that I was not in yet because they were having senior executive meetings and I was just an associate director and make sure that when those projects came along, for example, when I was working with another analytic organization that they were looking for someone who could do the things that aligned with my skillset.

They were tailored to my brand and they knew that I could deliver on, that I was getting those opportunities to work on those and it’s not just a skill set, but it was like the people knew that this was part of the brand. So the fact that I had that strong brand with that room and instead of just saying, “Well, we need to find someone to this role.” They were able to say, “It’s Corliss.” Another example was understanding an audiences moving into the role that I’m currently in. I could say fast-forward almost 15 years later, I’m not going to count too many more years, then I’m going to start aging myself quickly, but fast forwarding 15 more years later from that role I was associate director maybe five, seven years into my career, then move into a director role for years. So fast-forward is the role that I’m currently in.

This opportunity was brought to me because people understood my brand as a connector and when I asked the executive team why I was called and asked to interview for this role, that is exactly what I was told. I’ve heard that you were the connector. So understand how you build that brand and how you make sure you keep people in a room. So how do you have that sponsor, that mentor and the whisperer, and that whisperer is most important because the sponsor and the whisperer in building a brand may not be the exact same person, and when you’re trying to get your name mentioned into those rooms, and the way I build my brand, that is your target audience is that whisperer. You want that person to understand you enough to respect the things that they’ve heard enough about you that they will raise your name in the room and you tailor your brand to resonate them.

And note I said tailor your brand, not change your brand. If you change your brand so often, then is it really your brand or is it just the gimmick that you’re using at the time to get where you want? That is not necessarily a bad thing. However, that’s not what we’re doing now. We want to build longevity and building longevity is in building that brand aspect. So I’ll move forward a little bit and continue the story, and so consistency. As you build your brand and people now they understand you as going back to Corliss, being the connector, the person, everything. You have to maintain a consistent presence whether it’s at work, in your social settings. So think your community or your social settings or online, and don’t forget that social media posts live forever and the reason why I say that is because having a dual presence is what I call it for social media is just okay, especially nowadays where people use a lot of social media.

Like Sukrutha mentioned, we no longer carry business cards. We ask you guys to connect with us on LinkedIn. So the things that I follow and I connect with and I comment on and the people who are in my network, they are part of my brand. So be intentional about that as you guys are connecting with other geeks today and girl geeks, excuse me, that you are intentional in who you’re connecting with and that you’re adding value to them and they’re bringing value to you and that the companies and organizations that you’re following very much like Girl Geek X, you’re very intentional that they align with your brand, and remember that the things that you post, whether you delete it, remove it or those, they live forever. So they need to align with your brand until you have an intentional pivot or change in your brand.

And as you’re building your brand, you have to develop. You never stop. Your brand is never there, whether you’re in your career or where you’re just done. I’ve made my brand, this is it. I’m going to mint it in plastic and wear it on my shirt. That doesn’t work that way. You need to seek development in areas that are aligned with your brand and from people or organizations that align with your brand and they also nurture your brand and they’re able to also mention you for things of that nature. So think about continuous learning and skill enhancements, when you’re taking those things on, learn from organizations or people or ideas that can enhance your brand at you are at that point in time, but also understand that as you’re through this developmental journey, my brand that it was when I was 25 is not my brand that it was when I was at 30, 35 and so forth and so on.

I’m not going to go any further. Again, we’re not going to keep counting, but just remember it’s okay in your development realm of you’re building your brand if they change. Secondly, you’re going to showcase your growth and your brand narrative. Your brand narrative is not necessarily the way you talk about yourself. Your brand narrative when you know you’ve got it right is the way other people talk about you and how you show up when you’re at work, whether you’re in professional settings, networking settings, events such as this, is what people are saying about you. That is a true reflection of what your brand is in the narrative. Seek feedback. I know this is an area that is hard for a lot of us and sometimes we don’t want to seek feedback, especially with something that’s very personal to us when we think, “Well, this is my brand, why should I need feedback on my brand?”

But you think about it this way, going through my journey of my career and building my brand and really coming comfortable with being called a connector, which I didn’t like at first and I still don’t call myself that as a brand. My actions show that is the feedback that I get from my stakeholders, my mentors, my coach, people I interact with, people I meet here is the feedback on how I show up to them, and when I ask them, oftentimes I’ll say, “Hey, give me a word. How would you describe me if you had to? How would you describe me if you had to introduce me or you had something about me?” This is the type of feedback that I asked to understand. Am I showing up the way that I intend to and am I intentional in building my brand? And then finally, you have to adapt and refine your brand over time.

Treat yourself just like you would treat a brand that you would go in the store and you would pick up or the brands that we buy or brands that are in the marketplace. You have to adapt and refine your brand over time and it’s okay. That’s called growth in a journey. So I go back to the final, going back on one more step in my career in the story, of course, the story time. So then fast-forward to getting promoted, getting a project given to me, getting promoted, making some career moves, getting promoted and reach. I finally reached a pinnacle about I’d say maybe about 20 years into my career where I thought I had refined my brand and I realized and I was told that I wasn’t showing up in the way that I thought. I was still considered a connector, but I was connecting too small.

And so I needed to go back and really figure out what that person meant because they just kind of said, “You’re connecting too small.” So really understanding my brand and what was meant and how did I grow more, it was they wanted me to kind of be intentional and how I mentored and coached and brought on and brought other people along and so that is another area where I refined my brand. So I am very, very, very intentional now in my coaching and mentoring where before anyone who would call, reach out, send a message, LinkedIn, “I need some time with you. I want to understand coaching or mentoring. I heard you know how to do this.” I would take them in because I thought that was my brand is connecting. I have to gather and connect, but now I’m very intentional in my connecting on that portion of my brand.

So that part of my brand is the mentor and the coaching is I focus on women and specifically I focus on girl geeks and because that is the area that is still very much untapped. Although we’re all together today, we’re only a small drop in the huge bucket of opportunity that is out there, and then again going back and refining this process, we’re back to that. This is a continuous process. I wish I could say once you get it, you’re done, but you’re not. You constantly have to come back, but it looks different at this time. So the self discovery that is now I’m back to reflecting again. I’m reflecting again like, “Okay, well this is what I said. This is what I’ve learned in this period of time.” And I say that I probably do intentional self-reflection. So my self-reflection looks at my personal goals, my career goals and my brand and am I showing up how I want to even as a mother, I do that probably about for professional career and my brand, I do that probably about every six months.

So every half year, I treat myself as an organization and I do that reflection. I look at that, I evaluate, I do intake, and intake comes from maybe organizations I work with or people, or my business in my role I work in my company, or if I’ve done some mentoring or speaking opportunity organization, I ask for feedback there as well, and I really think about that and I reflect on it. Is the feedback that I’m receiving and the input that I’m receiving, does it still reflect on my values that I want to project and the goals where I’m aligned at this point in my life? And again, I refine my strengths, skills and my passions because as they may change, I want to make sure that I’m still staying true to self and keeping my brand because if you’re doing this process that I’ve used, and I’ve been using this process now for about 15 to 16 years, it has helped me continue to grow.

And like I say, it’s constant re-evaluation and don’t think when I say you have to look at it every six months that you have to sit down, block out a day, get your calendar, but it’s just kind of something you think about as hey, as you’re thinking about it as you’re cleaning out your closet, because if you’re like me, I absolutely love to shop. So I have lots of shoes and clothes to go through probably every six months to clean out, donate so I can make room for more. I sit and I also think about my brand. How do I show up at work? How do I show up professionally? How do I show up personally and people know that, and then finally, as you’re doing the cycle, you have to network and you have to build genuine relationships in order to foster your brand.

People are only going to put their brand on the line for you when they feel like the relationship is genuine and that you can truly live up to the brand that you are putting into the marketplace. Attend events such as these. Network, network, network. Join different types of communities, reach out to people when you’re on LinkedIn, but don’t just reach out with, “I’d like to connect.” Develop your brand, add a personal note, tell them why you want to connect. Tell them what you bring to the table, tell them what you can do for them and allow them to know, “Hey, I can raise this name, I can raise this person. I know this person now. I built this relationship, I’ve built this genuine relationship, I have this community and I’m able to do that.” So in conclusion, because I would definitely want to leave time for questions if you guys have them out there.

So get ready if you haven’t already written them, I can’t see yet, start writing your questions. In conclusion, when you’re building your brand, it’s kind of like I say a virtuous cycle. There’s always going to be self-discovery in there. You’re going to have to know who your target audience is. My target audience, my brand here is I’m looking to kind of bring other girl geeks along, other allies along with us. My target audience when I’m building my brand as mom is to my 19-year old who corrects me every day and tells me that my brand is not quite as cool as I think it is. My target audience, my executive leadership team is to see me as a leader able to bring large tech projects through the pipeline for organization. Always know what your unique value proposition is. Know what you bring to the table that’s done so differently that people say, “If I don’t have this person do that, If I don’t have Corliss do this, I’m not sure if it will be done the way I need it or be done to the best of its ability.”

Be consistent in your delivery of your brand. Whenever you find that you can’t be consistent anymore in that brand, that is the time to go back to that self-discovery phase. So this flywheel is constantly working. Your online presence, that is something that is unique to represent as well, especially in this technology age and this world where we’re now reaching further and further out. We’re not only knowing the people who are in our community or the people who work in our office building. We know people all over the world, people who are in networks. So make sure that your presence in your group there represents your brand. How you’re creating that content that you share online, whether you’re reposting, you’re sharing those things, you’re interacting with those things, that’s part of your brand.

Networking, networking, networking. And I’m not saying just networking like shaking hands, meeting people, how are you doing? My name is Corliss, I work here, but is networking and bringing stuff to the table be very genuine, and again, I like the way Angie said that earlier, “As being an introvert. I know it’s hard.” So be intentional when you network. If you meet three very good connections through this process, be very intentional. Follow up and bring through notes. Make sure they know your brand without a doubt and then consistently develop.

Consistently develop your brand. Consistently develop yourself. Consistently develop your knowledge in your area. Reevaluate and make sure that you’re meeting the expectations of your brand. So I want to stop here because we have a few minutes. I know we have a hard stop and I want to answer any questions if anyone has any. I don’t know if we have any in a chat. I can stop sharing and look and see. Oh, there. Okay, we’re going to start this person, how do you select a whisperer? You can’t select a whisperer. What you can do is you can influence who that whisperer is and that’s how you interact across the business. So I would say your selection of a whisperer is very passive in that aspect. It’s how you show up to your executive leadership, your senior leadership or even your peers around you. It’s those people who have a seat at the table who have the ability to say your name when you’re not there and they know of the things that may be happening. So it’s really in the influence that you have in how you show up to your work. I don’t know if that was helpful or if you have anyone else or if it didn’t answer that question, well let me know. So identify whisperer.

When building your brand, is it how others view you and when a situation comes up or how likely they will remember you? It’s a little bit of both. So building your brand is how people view you, it’s how intentional you are and what you put out in the marketplace, and it’s what they will remember most about you. So it’s like a three-part triangle of that, but so if you’re putting out your brand in a way that is intentional and consistent, they will remember what you are you telling them. So that is the best way. So that’s how you’re building a brand because you don’t want to let someone give you a brand, because if you remember my story time, I allowed my brand to be given to me like my first five years of my career and it wasn’t necessarily something that I aligned with.

In this challenging market, how do you advise about being willing to step outside your brand and keep building your skills in other areas and stay in the industry? I’m probably a bad person to ask about that and the reason why I say that is because I’ve always been a risk-taker and I say take risks because to give you an analogy and it might be right to tell you that I use analogies a lot. No one’s going to bet on you more than you. So if the market is challenging, if you’re not willing to bet on yourself and step outside and develop your brand and to make sure that you’re really dealing it, you can’t expect anyone else around you or any other organization to bet on you. So only you can be your best advocates.

Angie Chang:

We have a question from Mina who says, I’ve been thinking about my brand, although her peers see her as young female director. So how do you tailor that because she has so much more to offer?

Corliss Collier:

Okay, being a young…your brand and your peers see you as young female director. The easiest way for me to answer that for you is you’re a director. You’ve earned that seat, you’ve earned that title. You can’t change how people see you from something that is, I’m going to use the B word, biased as age or your gender, but you can change how they see you as you show up. That’s some inner work that they have to do on themselves. You are a director, you earned that title, you’ve earned that seat, but that title of director is not your brand. So I would say ensure that you’re delivering and that you’re doing what you say that you can do and doing in that aspect. I hope that helps you there. Is there any more, Angie?

Angie Chang:

Any advice when it comes to making your brand known to potential employers? Especially when you’re breaking into a new field and don’t have any long-established record in that field?

Corliss Collier:

Not at all. Who’s your biggest cheerleader? Who can speak the best about you? That your brand should be splashed everywhere where you are known. Your LinkedIn profile, your resume, your Instagram, all those things. Your brand should be there. It should be no doubt what your brand is and so letting it be known is not a problem at all.

Angie Chang:

Okay, there’s a question about you mentioned working hard and doing the job aren’t brands, but what would be a brand if we want to be known for consistent, very good work?

Corliss Collier:

Delivery, just doing the work. Working hard and those things… those are adjectives that describe things and I laugh and chuckle a little bit about that, but working hard, that describes your favorite briefcase if you’re like me and you’re on a plane every other week, it’s been drug through airports all over the world. That briefcase works hard. Working hard, you don’t want to be described like that. You want to be described as something that’s memorable. You deliver on anytime that there are hard problems. You are able to deliver. Those are the type of things you want. Working hard, reliable. Those are things you say about your favorite pair of flat shoes that you put on after a hard day and your other favorite pair of heels. Those work hard. Those are reliable. That’s not what you want to be for.

Angie Chang:

You want to be impactful and you want to have be results driven and talk about things, not necessarily character traits, but the results of your character traits of hard working.

Corliss Collier:

Exactly.

Angie Chang:

Good question.

[Cross-talk]

Corliss Collier:

Do you recommend posting your brand on your LinkedIn profile? Yes. All day, every day. You may not call it brand, but when they read your headline, your story or things, they should be able to say, “Oh, this is the person I should call if I need expertise in Y or X or Z.” That should be their brand.

Angie Chang:

Absolutely. I think we have two more minutes, so if you want to take another question.

Corliss Collier:

Someone says when you revisit your values, goals, strengths, skills, passions every six months or so, what tools do you use in your journaling? I use journaling and I also use something I call my board of directors. I didn’t talk to you guys about that, but it’s a group of people who I’ve worked with through my career, all managers, people who’ve worked for me with me or people I’ve met throughout my journey and they change out. As your life evolves, your career evolves. I use them because no one’s going to tell you more and then oftentimes for that last piece of check, that cool check, I use my 19-year-old, because they’re going to tell you quickly if you’re not cool, you’re not showing up right, but I use those things. It’s really an introspective look for yourself. It’s done for you, but it’s how you show up.

Angie Chang:

Awesome. All right, well we are out of time, but thank you everyone for asking questions. We look forward to answering many more of your questions with our speakers for the next two days. Thank you, Corliss, for joining us from London and making this work. So thank you so much and we’ll see you in the next session.

Corliss Collier:

Thank you guys, please find me on LinkedIn.

Girl Geek X Rippling Panel Discussions (Video + Transcript)

Speakers:

Jennifer Hasche VP, Global Tech Recruiting, Rippling
Vanessa Wu General Counsel, Rippling
Tahlia Spiegel Senior Director, HR, Rippling
Kim Glatzer Director, Technical Account Management, Rippling
Munira Rahemtulla VP, Product Management, Rippling
Jennie Doberne UX Research Manager, Rippling
Diana Soare Senior Engineering Manager, Identity, Rippling
Kitty Kwan Director, Product Operations, Rippling
Maria Chavez Cantu Director, Engineering, Twitch
Nan Guo SVP, Engineering, Zendesk

Over 50 girl geeks attended the SOLD-OUT Rippling Girl Geek Dinner networking and discussions in downtown San Francisco, California on February 6, 2024.

Rippling women shared insights on “going to Western Union’ and career do’s, don’t, and a-ha’s. Rippling is hiring!

Transcript of Rippling Girl Geek Dinner – Discussions:

Angie Chang: This community has grown with us for the last 16 years. I’m glad that people are still coming and enjoying Girl Geek Dinners at really cool companies like Rippling.

Vanessa Wu: Show of hands, how many people know what Western Union is?

Munira Rahemtulla: That helped me take my thinking about my business to the next level.

Diana Soare: Figure out, “Why is the customer seeing this?” and just really help them understand how the product works.

Kim Glatzer: It feels good when you advocate for a customer. It feels even better when a customer says, “Wow, you just totally changed my quality of life.”

Jennie Doberne: Not just getting this out in record time for our customers but also bringing them something that kind of went beyond what they might’ve even sort of asked or anticipated.

Maria Chavez Cantu: If you can get a group of people that support each other, especially women, in an organization, it’s amazing.

Angie Chang: While you find your seats, I want to say hello and thank you so much for coming out tonight. My name’s Angie Chang. I’m the founder of Girl Geek X. I’m the person that emails you and says “Please come to these really great Girl Geek Dinners.”

I hope you make friends, and I hope you make some people that you’ll become friends with on LinkedIn, social networks, so that we can continue to inspire each other and lift each other up. Since this community has grown with us for the last 16 years, I’m glad that people are still coming and enjoying Girl Geek Dinners at really cool companies like Rippling. So I’m going to hand the mic over to Jen, who’s the VP of Global Tech Recruiting.

Jennifer Hasche: Thank you, Angie. We’re not quite sure why this is echoing, but I think if you turn it off and on, it’s going to take too long. We’ll figure it out. Hi. Hi. Thanks for coming. Angie, thanks for partnering with Rippling on this. I’m Jen Hasche. There’s a lot of people from Recruiting here, so if you have questions for Recruiting, just let me know, and I can connect you with a recruiter. Before we jump into the panel, I wanted our CTO, Albert, to say hello in the back.

Albert Strasheim: Hello. Thanks for coming.

Jennifer Hasche:

He’s amazing, he’s built a phenomenal Engineering team, and a great person to chat to about Rippling. Can everybody hear me?

Audience: Yeah.

Jennifer Hasche: Okay, cool, cool. So we have two panels tonight. The first panel is a cross-functional panel from Rippling, which I’m really excited about. And then we have our guests, Nan and Maria, who I’ll formally introduce later, who will be on our Careers Dos, Don’ts, and Aha panel. So really great. Hey, you guys are all adults. If you need to leave and take a break, go ahead and do that. We’re going to keep rolling probably most of the night to get into all this great content. Bathroom is around the corner. Wine is right here, water is there, and coffee is in the back, and tea.

Jennifer Hasche: Before we jump in the panel, I’m going to have Vanessa Wu, who’s our general counsel, tell us about this amazing Rippling leadership principle that’s called Go to Western Union. So you probably saw it on the event and like, “What is Western Union?” It is a great story, and Vanessa is going to tell us more about it. Enjoy, everybody.

Vanessa Wu: Show of hands – how many people know what Western Union is? Cool. And how many people have actually been to a Western Union? A couple, a couple. So the first time I actually went to Western Union, not known to be the most modern form of payment transmission, was on behalf of Rippling. And it was a really defining moment for myself and also a lot of the folks who were here at Rippling early on.

Vanessa Wu: It was about four years ago. It was in this building. I remember it because it was Labor Day, the Labor Day weekend, and we had just moved into the building. It was super hot, and our old office did not have any AC, so I remember being really appreciative of that moment. But what happened at Rippling, which is, among many things besides HR and IT and finance, a payroll company, is we woke up one Friday to a ton of alerts.

Vanessa Wu: People were writing in. They were saying they were not getting paid. As a payroll company, when your customers write in that they have not yet received their paychecks, that is a big problem. So folks all across the company immediately went into troubleshooting mode, and we encountered that our payroll, which was processing overnight, it didn’t go through.

Vanessa Wu:  Folks were anxiously trying to rerun the payroll in order to try to get everyone on Friday paid. And what happened is we had a customer that had an accent aigu over the E in their name. It was the first time that we had a customer that had any sort of special characters in the name of the company, and it broke the processing of our payroll. And so everyone after that customer, I won’t name them, but it’s burned in my mind, did not end up receiving their paychecks that day because it broke, and it missed the same-day of payroll processing deadline.

Vanessa Wu: Folks would be paid the day after, that Saturday. But we knew that people… Some people live paycheck to paycheck, and some people have auto payments set up. And it’s really critical. What we do here may not always sound the sexiest, but it’s really critical and it impacts people in their day-to-day lives.

Vanessa Wu: What we did at Rippling, everyone just sort of galvanized together. Despite the hot weather, we all huddled in the conference room in the front. Some folks were like, “Could it get any worse?” And I was like, “It could. We could have no air conditioning.” So I remember the day. And thought, like, “What do we do?”

Vanessa Wu: Folks started getting on the phones, calling our customers to see if their employees would need their paychecks that Friday. Most customers were like, “It’s fine. It can wait until Saturday. That’s cool.” But there were a couple companies that said, “No, this is a problem. Our people, our employees rely on these paychecks. They need to get this cash today.”

Vanessa Wu: We then put our thinking caps on and like, “How do we get… Can we courier your money out? Can we go to the banks?” And it wound up with a bunch of us at Western Union trying to figure out how to open accounts, get money out, and just try to get the couple people who needed to be paid paid.

Vanessa Wu: The ultimate end of the story, and now I’m thinking about this value thing, is that the Western Union didn’t actually work because they blocked our payments for fraud. But the moral was like, “Hey, going through extreme lengths to do what is right by your customer is something that we are going to be really proud of and something that…” It didn’t matter if you were in legal like me or if you were in engineering or if you were on the sales team. We knew how important this was to the company, and we were going to do what it took and what we knew we could contribute to the table in that moment to get stuff done.

Vanessa Wu: That is our Go to Western Union value. It is something that I am really proud to say I feel with everybody I work at this company. We have had sort of big events, I think the panel’s going to talk about some of those, that have happened since our Western Union Day. Just to know that there is a value and an ethos at this company, which is, “We’re going to do right by our customers, and we’re going to be creative, go to payment institutions that we know nothing about, unfortunately, and just try to do right by our customers.” So that is the Go to Western Union story. You have a mic.

Tahlia Spiegel: Yeah, I think that one is for the audience. Cool. Hi, everyone. I’m Tahlia. I’m from our HR team. And I’m going to be moderating this awesome group of Rippling leaders that you see here in front of you today.

Tahlia Spiegel: Today, we have Jennie from our Design team. We have Kitty from our Tax Ops team. We have Diana from Engineering, Munira from Product, and Kim from our Technical Account Management team. So highly, highly cross-functional team, but I think the common theme here is that we all go to Western Union together. I’ve been here for a year and a half, and I have to say…

Tahlia Spiegel: Rippling, compared to other tech companies I’ve been at… You normally see this tension between tech teams and business teams and whatnot. I can honestly say you do not see that here. We are just way too busy for that. There is so much going on, and we know the only way that we can really do this is together. And I think today, we have some really cool stories to share with you, a little bit behind the scenes of how we go to Western Union every day.

Tahlia Spiegel: I thought a good place to start would be customer problems. Kim, you’re on the front line there. Do you want to share with us a little bit about solving customer problems?

Kim Glatzer: Yeah. Can you guys hear me?

Tahlia Spiegel: Yeah.

Kim Glatzer: I lead Technical Account Management at Rippling, and we get to work with our largest customers and our most strategic accounts. And one of my favorite things is when we uncover needs that we don’t yet support. The reason I love that is because of this panel and so many other people at Rippling that I get to partner with because when I’m at Rippling, if I uncover a customer need and really get to the bottom of it and find that it’s something a lot of customers need, we get to build that out. And we do it pretty quickly.

Kim Glatzer: Typically, we see a customer need trickle in, we see maybe one or two customers have a problem, and then sometimes it explodes, where suddenly, it feels like every customer has the same problem right now. And that’s awesome because we’re growing and we’re seeing problems that come with that scale.

Kim Glatzer: One of these needs happened recently. We had a lot of customers who hire an employee, terminate the employee, hire them again. Maybe they’re seasonal. It’s part of their business model. And it was really painful for them in Rippling for a while. They had to track different profiles of different employees. And the reporting wasn’t seamless. It wasn’t as easy for them to manage administratively.

Kim Glatzer: I talked to Munira about it a lot, and we got it on the roadmap. And we got it for, like, in several quarters. And that was-

Munira Rahemtulla: Q3.

Kim Glatzer: Q3.

Munira Rahemtulla: Q3 this year.

Kim Glatzer: Well, from the time that I brought it up, and that was awesome. But then, suddenly, customers needed it now, and we started having customers who just actually… It wasn’t sustainable for them to use Rippling if we didn’t support this. So I went to Munira again and partnered with her and with Jennie over there, and we got this really complex solution built out pretty quickly for our customers.

Kim Glatzer: The best thing about it was… I’ll let them talk about the process, but it feels good when you advocate for a customer. It feels even better when a customer says, “Wow, you just totally changed my quality of life.”

Kim Glatzer: After we were able to roll this out, we presented it recently to our customers at a customer advocacy group, and everyone was like, “Whoa, this is exactly what you needed. You hit the nail on the head. Thank you.” And I couldn’t believe in the record time that we did it. Munira and Jennie can talk a little bit about the process and all of the work that went into actually discovering what that need was.

Munira Rahemtulla: Kim sort of gave away the ending, but back at the beginning, we had no… I had no idea that it would turn out well. Because she came to me and said, “These customers want to have a…” A profile is the page that shows all of the information about an employee, right, like your name, your compensation, when you were hired, when you left. We were creating a new one every time someone worked at the company.

Munira Rahemtulla: We had a company that had multiple employees with more than six profiles. And when they needed to find a piece of information about that person, they would have to basically dig through these six profiles to find out if that person had ever signed an employee handbook document or taken their training or course or whatever.

Munira Rahemtulla: This was actually a very… The reason we had originally put it as a Q3, several quarters out, kind of roadmap item was that what people said to us was that they needed a single profile for a person, “A person should have one profile.” So you can probably imagine that that would require a re-architecture of the way we stored our underlying employee data in a way that would also require a migration from the multiple profiles to a single model. And it would be very complicated and a very long project.

Munira Rahemtulla: This is where you start to invent and come up with ways to find creative solutions to problems. And so I had this idea that maybe there would be a way that we could consolidate things at the UI layer rather than all the way down at the data layer. So I wasn’t really sure if the solution would fly, and so I turned to Jennie, who leads our research group, to ask her if she could talk to some customers and get a better understanding of, what was it that they really needed? They were saying that they wanted a single profile, but what actually was important?

Jennie Doberne: Yeah. This is a really fun project because one of the, I think, unique things about our product research team is one, that we get to partner so closely across the organization, but two is we don’t just talk to our customers. So when we get to really thorny issues like this, we need to go outside the building or go to Western Union and find, say, an HRIS system admin guru type of another product, maybe like a larger enterprise HR, payroll system, who can go deep into the weeds with us and really get into, “How does rehiring work in other systems? What can we learn from that? Can we explore this idea of a unified, say, on the surface layer but the profiles being separate? But also, can we get beyond that?”

Jennie Doberne: I think one of the things we quickly saw is like, “Yes, the solution that we’re kind of heading towards is very similar to what our top competitors do as well,” but we also learned a whole lot about problems that people have in other systems, so kind of preempting ways we might have to go to Western Union in the future, so things like, how should you model the data? What’s downstream of a start date or a rehire date? Could it be problems like benefits eligibility or equity and compensation, right? So all of those things we got into the weeds of.

Jennie Doberne: We also saw ways we could really differentiate, like when you rehire… I think Munira saw some really easy just like, “Oh, here’s things we can really pull forward so that an admin can have all this rich context that is in Rippling.” So I think where we ended up is not just getting this out in record time for our customers but also bringing them something that kind of went beyond what they might’ve even sort of asked or anticipated.

Munira Rahemtulla: The solution that we ended up with was one where we basically let you page through all of the profiles, and we take you to the most recent profile. And then we sort of give you a Previous and Next button so you can just see. And you can pick any tab, so if you’re interested in documents, you can look at the Documents tab and just page through the six times… The six profiles.

Munira Rahemtulla: We know that there’s six profiles, right, but to a customer looking at it, it’s like, “Oh, there’s just six pages of this data,” right? Or you can go to their Learning Management page and see what courses they took, and again, just page through the six profiles that they have.

Munira Rahemtulla: I felt like we were cheating. This really felt like a huge cheat, and especially because we were able to get it out for Rippling in about four weeks, which is… So we dogfood all of our… All of our products, we get to play with ourselves. And it worked pretty quickly out of the box. And so, just three weeks later, we had a beta launched to customers.

Munira Rahemtulla: I was super nervous, actually, to show this to the same customers that were like, “We need a single profile.” I kind of wanted to hide under the desk and be like, “So I have a solution for you.” But customers… Well, I don’t know, maybe I’ll turn it over to Kim to talk about what customers thought.

Kim Glatzer: Every single customer has said it meets their needs entirely. And I think that’s one of my favorite parts about finding customer needs and then seeing it come to a solution is we do our best in Technical Account Management to understand the needs and translate it to product, but having Jennie do all of the deep-dive research she did, and then when you’re actually building out a solution that I wouldn’t have thought of that addressed actually the needs that they had, they were blown away.

Kim Glatzer: We still have customers right now clamoring to get on the beta and give feedback. And everyone at this event that I was talking about with our customer advocates raised their hands to try it out. And so it’s super gratifying when we’re able to ship something so quickly, it meets their needs, and we see it actually impacting customer quality of life really quickly.

Tahlia Spiegel: Something that’s really special about us is… or about Rippling, is no matter where your role is, you cannot not be customer-centric. It’s not just a sticker on the wall at Rippling, right? It is literally deeply embedded. I think Diana, even on the engineering side, you… I think it would be interesting to tell the team, to tell everyone up here about how Engineering gets involved in supporting our customers.

Diana Soare: Yeah. Hi, everyone. I just want to plus-one what Tahlia just said. It’s everyone’s job here to support our customers. And so, from an engineering perspective, we do get involved, and we get involved quite a lot. And to be honest, this is something I really appreciate about Rippling, where we have this value of putting customers first, but Engineering is not on the sidelines.

Diana Soare: The main touch points for us in working with customers are through partnering closely with our Support team. We work on customer support tickets as part of our on-call rotation but we also do more ad hoc customer calls where we might help a customer debug or fix an issue in real-time. And sometimes we also do scheduled, more intentional calls, where Engineering just shadows with the goal of understanding how customers use our product and build empathy, ultimately.

Tahlia Spiegel: Yeah. HR for HR software is also a customer, so engineers have to talk to me all day long, which I’m sure they don’t like. Do you have an example you want to talk about?

Diana Soare: Yeah, sure, I would be happy to share. and this actually directly impacted my team. To set a context, we had a customer, they were going through implementation. This is the process where you set up your company and your employee base in Rippling. And they were targeting to go live with Rippling for their company in a few days. As part of implementation, they were hitting a few issues. And so this admin that the implementation team was working with, they were becoming increasingly frustrated, and they were at risk of churning from Rippling.

Diana Soare: One of the main issues they had was directly related to a product feature that my team built. And so, naturally, when it got escalated, I got pulled in. The context there was we built this product feature and launched it, and we were expecting or assuming customers would use it in a specific way. And this customer ended up using it in a totally unexpected way and, frankly, a way we didn’t want to support. However, we didn’t block it, so it wasn’t really the customer’s fault. And we also couldn’t go back to the customer and tell them, “Hey, use it this other way,” because they were already escalated.

Diana Soare: A few things happened as part of this escalation, and this was, again, a few days before they were going live. Within my team, trying to figure out, “Okay, what do we need to do? How can we solve this customer problem and really unblock this use case that they wanted to use in a timely manner?”

Diana Soare: I worked closely with the on-call engineer and another engineer on the team, kind of, again, going back, putting our thinking hat on and figuring out a solution. I think separately, and this speaks hopefully to going to Western Union, since I was the one that engaged with the implementation manager and the customer themselves, a lot of the other issues kind of fell onto me.

Diana Soare: I also went ahead and tried to find all the owners for these issues to either get an explanation or figure out, “Why is the customer seeing this?” and just really help them understand how the product works. And I worked cross-functionally and across time zones for this.

Diana Soare: Overall, I think a day before they were going live, we ended up fixing a lot of the most critical issues, and they were able to go live. And honestly, a lot of their employees didn’t even see these issues. So, yeah, all in all, I would say it was a success story.

Tahlia Spiegel: Very cool. So you’re all probably thinking, “What goes on at Rippling? What is all this chaos, this customer escalations and engineers on the front line talking to customers?” I think something I’m curious about is, how do we build product? How do we do it differently to other engineering orgs and product organizations that might have a different approach to building?

Diana Soare: Yeah, I mean, the one key difference I see is we don’t only say, “We care about product, and we want to build a quality product.” We actually do it. And so, whenever we have to shift things around or make a trade-off, it’s never the product quality, or product quality is the ultimate thing that gets traded off. We usually figure out scope or, to Munira’s example, figuring out the customer need and see if there’s a way we can provide that with more limited scope or time. Kind of going back to appreciating this value is we’re being flexible, we put customer first, and sometimes that means we have to scramble or move things around, but ultimately, it serves the customer, and it helps us build the product that we want to.

Munira Rahemtulla: Another really interesting thing that’s different about the way Rippling builds products is that we are a multi-product company, which means that we have Spend, we have Payroll, we have HRIS, we have Learning Management, we have Applicant Tracking. I could go on. I don’t know, does anyone know how many applications we have at this point?

Tahlia Spiegel: Plus 25?

Munira Rahemtulla: 25?

Tahlia Spiegel: Yeah.

Munira Rahemtulla: Yeah, I don’t know. There’s a lot. 50-plus? So this has very big implications on the way that we develop products because in order to develop that many products successfully… And each of these products is trying to compete successfully with the best-in-class competitive product on the market. These are not low-end, entry-level MVP products that we’re talking about. We’re trying to compete at the highest level.

Munira Rahemtulla: I think one of the biggest… The most important approaches that we take that enable us to do that is to rely on a platform layer that every product benefits from. At the platform layer, we have Reporting, we have Permissions, we have Approvals, we have Workflow Automation, and all of the other building blocks that all of the products that we are building need.

Munira Rahemtulla: That enables us to have small and scrappy teams that are able to go understand customer needs, understand what the best-in-class product looks like, and crank these out very quickly by relying on all of the underlying infrastructure. I think that makes it a super fun place to work because we can very quickly turn things around for customers.

Tahlia Spiegel: Yeah, it is.

Munira Rahemtulla: We build new products for them.

Tahlia Spiegel: Yeah, all hands on deck, all the time. Kitty has been unusually quiet. She is one of our top Slack users at Rippling. She has a lot to say and I think something that would be really interesting for you all to hear about. You may have read about it in the news, I don’t know. It was a pretty big day for us last year in March, SVB. Kitty, you’re the perfect person to tell us a little bit more about what happened.

Kitty Kwan: It is true. I am the second-highest Slacker at the company all time.

Tahlia Spiegel: No pun intended.

Kitty Kwan: No pun intended. For context, Silicon Valley Bank is a regional bank based in California that disproportionately banks for startups and VC firms. Because all bad things in payroll happen on Friday, on March 10th, 2023, SVB was actually shut down by federal regulators. On that day, funds that were held at SVB were frozen, including money moving in and out on that day.

Kitty Kwan: The impact to customers is quite clear, right? As a startup, you need access to your working capital to pay bills, to fund payroll. The impact to Rippling was actually very unique and it was unique because we are a payroll provider and as a payroll provider, we move funds on behalf of our customers in order to pay out their employees and we use Silicon Valley Bank, SVB, to both debit our customers as well as pay them out. You can imagine SVB is almost like a bottleneck in our entire payroll funds flow.

Kitty Kwan: On March 10th, we had a serious crisis that was actually very similar to the story Vanessa told on actual Western Union. On that day, we had no access to the funds that we needed to make payments for that day’s check date as well as frankly the foreseeable future because we had no information on what would actually unfold over the next 72 hours.

Kitty Kwan:  That really led to the first instance of our company going to Western Union. Our CEO made a very quick and decisive decision to use corporate funds to fund $119 million in payroll to pay out employees that day so that they could be paid, because that is the golden rule in payroll is you always pay on time and in full.

Kitty Kwan: Now, that was no easy feat and a ton of people at this company had to then further go to Western Union to make that happen and heroics were performed across the board. For example, in engineering, they had to pay out $119 million, same day, using an entirely different banking system. To make that happen, they essentially compressed an entire quarter’s worth of work into 24 hours. Essentially moving our entire banking rails from SVB over to JPMorgan. In addition, yeah, serious collapse. By the way, Albert wired, I think over a million dollars to the IRS using code. I don’t know.

Kitty Kwan: In addition to the engineering team, we had probably upwards of a hundred people in support and customer success, phone calling, texting, emailing our customers so that they knew what to expect because everyone was scared. No one knew what was happening with their money or whether or not their employees would be paid. Legal also did some pretty incredible stuff around researching FDIC insurance for our customers and our leadership team actually raised half a billion dollars in 12 hours so that we could be ready to make employee payroll next week if it came to it. Thank goodness it did not come to it. I guess SVB, the whole experience is very similar to the actual go to Western Union situation and it pulled really everyone at the company together and frankly is an unforgettable day.

Tahlia Spiegel: Yeah, we might want to consider saying go to Western Union and JPMorgan Chase.

Kitty Kwan: And USPS.

Tahlia Spiegel: And USPS. For sure. I want to keep things moving. I know we have about 15 minutes left on this panel. I know SVB was a day that no one will forget. There are lots of challenges that we overcome daily. I’m going to jump, I think to you, Kim. I think, can we talk about an example of a really challenging request that we pushed forward just to support one of our upmarket customers, which is obviously a huge focus for us this year.

Kim Glatzer: Yeah, so when I joined Rippling three and a half years ago, I was the only TAM because we didn’t have that many customers that needed a TAM. My org is now 75 people because we’ve gone up market so fast, which is awesome and obviously we uncover a lot of new requests. One of the coolest ones is that our customers are now acquiring and merging with one another. There’s enough customers on Rippling that they may go through mergers and acquisitions with each other.

Kim Glatzer: Munira mentioned, imagine a single customer with 40 SKUs on our platform. We started facing this ask of, hey, now we have two companies that are this complicated. Can you combine them for us seamlessly? Combine all this employee data, make sure there’s no payroll ramifications, benefits are seamless. We started scoping this out and then suddenly two of our largest accounts needed to go through mergers relatively quickly. My team really looks at customer retention and this was a deal breaker for them. Can you merge our accounts and make it seamless or not?

Kim Glatzer: We brought the ask to Munira and actually to every, it’s the most cross-functional project I’ve worked on. Every single product leader had to be involved and bought in to understand what we would need to do and we’re in the process of making this happen. Right now, we’re at the tail end of this massive set of mergers that have helped us retain some of our most upmarket accounts.

Kim Glatzer: My favorite part about this has been the teamwork between our CX team and our product team. It has been nights of going to Western Union. I’ve personally been on late night midnight calls with engineers trying to get the data in the system the way that we need it. So it’s been a really fun mix of us doing a lot of hands-on work, but then also product actually building out solutions so that we don’t have to do it next time. We’re going to Western Union right now, but we’re also productizing this so that we’ll be able to do it in the future seamlessly for customers.

Munira Rahemtulla: I just checked on this and we’re down to one last task before we’re completely done. The fun thing about this problem was it was less about timeliness or urgency. It was that these companies needed to merge, but they didn’t need to merge tomorrow or next week or even next month. They just wanted a plan.

Munira Rahemtulla: The complexity here, as Kim said, was the number of teams that had to be involved and so coordinating across the entire organization was going to be the big challenge here. The way that we did this was first of all explaining the criticality of this problem to our customers and also sort of highlighting the fact that this year, 2024 is expected to see one of the highest velocities of mergers because of the economic conditions. This was a problem not just that our biggest customers were facing, but also a problem that we’re expecting to see over and over again.

Munira Rahemtulla: Then the second thing that we did as we reached out to all of these cross-functional leaders across all of these different products was encourage them to think along two lines. One is what can you build into your product that will automate this? The second is, what do you already have in your product maybe that could be reused for this or maybe changed slightly to be able to support this?

Munira Rahemtulla: I went back to Kim and proposed a solution that would not be a push button solution. Usually the things that we build at Rippling are like a hundred percent automated and there’s no manual involvement. But for something like this, I suggested that maybe we make an exception because this is not something that companies are likely to go through many, many times. It’s usually a one and done or more occasional situation.

Munira Rahemtulla: Especially for these first two, I proposed maybe we could come up with a hybrid approach where we had people on Kim’s team sort of patching together the rough spots where it was going to be too burdensome to automate things all the way across all of the different products and platform. I came back with a proposal, here are the things that we can automate for you. Here are the tools that we can use for the things that we can’t automate, and here are the things that are going to be hardest because we’re just really not quite there. Can we make this work?

Kim Glatzer: And so we did. Like Munira said, we’re wrapping it up right now and it’s really amazing. I’ve never been at a company where so many people when we ask them to do a late night call or ask them to do something incredibly challenging, they just say yes. And we’ve seen it again and again. Whether it’s SVB or something like a massive undertaking, merging accounts, everybody just wants to dive in and has this extreme sense of ownership. We’re making it work. We’re going to continue to make it work and keep making it better and it’s been a fun partnership along the way.

Tahlia Spiegel: Yeah, for sure. Don’t let those late nights scare you. Especially when you’re doing it with others, cross-functionally, globally, cross time zones. It’s always 3:00 PM somewhere in the world. Kitty, you are on the forefront of global. I think, I have been here a year and a half, we were in four countries, mid ’22. We checked this morning and we’re now in 19. How did we turn on 15 countries in 18 months?

Kitty Kwan: Yeah, it’s an undertaking. Rippling historically and currently is a company that serves primarily US-based companies. But two years ago, we made the decision to go global and start building payroll related products that serve a global workforce. The goal really was to build a platform to make hiring and managing and paying a global workforce really easy.

Kitty Kwan: The definition of global has actually changed a lot since two years ago. In fact, it changes weekly, but at its core, what we do today is we have natively built payroll and tax calculation software, in nine different countries? In nine countries. We have EOR services in another 11 countries.

Tahlia Spiegel: Employer of Record.

Kitty Kwan: Yes, Employer of Record. Essentially a shell company that hires employees on behalf of others. We do contractor payments in 50 currencies across 70 countries.

Kitty Kwan: Global has really expanded really our reach here at Rippling. To be honest, I think what is most impressive about global is the breadth of people that it touches here at the company. Just to rattle off a few examples. Legal gets in super early to essentially set up our entity in each country as well as research what employment risk there might be so that our EOR can be compliant. We have product managers and compliance people who are essentially serving as in-house accountants and defining every country specific rule that there might be so that we can build the software to be compliant. Trust me, they wear many hats along the way, and you’ll be surprised exactly how much a country’s taxes reflects the country itself.

Kitty Kwan: Other examples, you have engineering, obviously building the actual product. There’s a huge role around payments and our treasury function really to both set up a local bank account, that’s step one, but also researching what are the ways we can compliantly debit and move money on behalf of our customers from one funding destination to another payout destination. It ends up being much more complicated than you think.

Kitty Kwan: Global is one of those initiatives that touches everyone at the company. We’ve been, so we’re now live in 19 countries, but we are also launching two to three every single month. So it’s both, I think our platform capabilities, but also everyone finally knowing the roles and responsibilities that make it possible.

Tahlia Spiegel: Yeah, for sure. Obviously not one stop kind of fits all. Jennie, I think you’ve been imperative in figuring out how do we launch in all these countries that have very different requirements.

Jennie Doberne: Yeah, I think one thing I can share about this effort is that really early on, I think the focus was on building out global payroll and EOR. Really thinking about essentially full-time employees as part of a global workforce. On the research side, as we sort of dug into this really large problem space, talking to customers, talking to non-customers, talking to people who work globally, we kind of had this insight. We realized actually contractors are a huge part of this ecology, but we’re not thinking about contractors. Our focus initially, early, early on was on employees.

Jennie Doberne: With that insight, we realized that there’s kind of a funnel effect. Actually, in a lot of cases, contractors are converted into full-time employees, so there’s somewhat of a risk if you go to market without considering how contractors fit in. At the initial launch, we did have ways to pay contractors, think payroll for contractors, but we also realized that there’s a lot of different kinds of freelancers out there, whether they work for project-based milestones or time-based.

Jennie Doberne: One of the most exciting parts of this project that’s yet to launch, but very soon, was a close collaboration with product, with design, engineering and research. A lot of iteration and was kind of a brand new product that focuses on paying and invoicing for global contractors. I think this will be really exciting when it launches and just shows, I think, that in all of these ways that we go to Western Union, it’s not just for Rippling, but it’s really for all of the employees in this much larger workforce that we’re supporting.

Tahlia Spiegel: Yeah, absolutely. All right, we have about five minutes left. We would love to jump to questions. We have a mic that will be going around, and we have a bunch of very passionate Rippling leaders here, so ask away. Yes. Jen’s coming around.

Maureen: Thanks. I’m Maureen, and I had a question for Munira and also the whole panel. I loved your point, Munira, about how your platform enables product velocity. I’m curious how you folks decided what to get right at that platform layer. Was it lessons learned? Is it product expertise? How do you enable that platform layer to help you with product velocity?

Munira Rahemtulla: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think that there are a couple of things that we quickly, and when I say we, I’m going to give the credit here to Parker. When he founded the company, sort of recognized was going to be core to many different products. The first is the employee graph just at its core, but then also every product just has these commonalities. I think he just recognized this pattern of like, oh, every product has reporting. You want to report on all of these things. All of these products have permissioning, and as part of permissioning, they need to know about the employee graph. They need to know who your manager is. They need to know who your HR business partner is. They need to know, there’s just this commonality of things they need to know. I think the first part of it was that, just pattern matching and pulling those out into a layer that every product could use.

Munira Rahemtulla: The second way that we recognize what platform capabilities are important is every time we launch a new product, we look at what the requirements are for that product that could be leveraged across other products, and we pull that set of things down into the platform layer rather than building it at the product layer. Because we understand that if you do that, now you’ve multiplied the impact of that thing that you just built, whatever it is.

Munira Rahemtulla: I mean, somehow as the leader for HRIS, a lot of cross-functional projects seem to land in my purview, for better or worse. The best approach that I’ve discovered to sort of getting rallying teams around these types of projects is that we have five product verticals with a product lead in each of those product verticals. Those five product leaders are my best friends. I feel like I’m just joined at the hip with those leaders.

Munira Rahemtulla: I meet with them frequently and keep them really informed about any potential project that might be coming down the pipeline that might need cross-functional support so that when it does actually land, it’s not the first time that they’re hearing about it. They’re like, oh, yeah, you’ve been telling me about that, that it might show up for a while now. I’ve had time to wrap my head around it. I’ve had time to think about what the implications might be for my product areas and for all of the products that are in my portfolio and so I have some thoughts about how we can make this work and how we can simplify it and how we can make it easier rather than it being completely disruptive. I think a lot of those things are relationship based.

Munira Rahemtulla: No. [laughter] We do a lot of things over Slack, and that’s probably a superpower in terms of being able to work across geos because people will pick it up and see it when they show up, when they have time, when they’re doing their own work hours and ask the questions that they have. We try to overlap as much as possible so that we’re not losing a day on every question. When India wakes up and start, they’ll read the Slacks, they’ll catch up with whatever happened, they’ll start asking their questions right away, and we’ll try to overlap so that we can answer those questions right away and move quickly in that way. But yeah, we don’t try to do huge cross-functional meetings. Those don’t tend to work very well for us.

Tahlia Spiegel: We have one more question up front here.

Audience  Member: I have a question around so many products being part of your HRI system, how do you maintain the balance between a good UX, user experience, and features? Because I’ve seen so many of these products, tools we have used wherein they have tons and tons of features, but the UX is just, it’s unbearable. You can’t use them. So how do you, I’m sure, yeah, it’s a question for you.

Jennie Doberne: Yeah, I’m so glad you asked. I think one of the ways I’ll answer that question is by saying, I think when we think about these building blocks, so our permissions model, our reporting, our workflow automation, it’s all the same across Rippling.

Jennie Doberne: What that means in practice for our customers and HR, payroll, IT, and finance teams using the product is that they don’t have to learn multiple tools. There’s one reporting experience to learn. There’s that consistency that we’re driving for and so I think it not only lends itself to velocity of shipping new products, it actually lends itself really well to things that are typically hard, like change management and training.

Jennie Doberne: We’ve also worked really hard to keep the experience simple. So you can do quite complex things with Rippling, but we always, especially on the design and research side, try get feedback on the product from people of all sorts, people who are the most seasoned payroll admin and people who have been running payroll for two weeks. I think really having that, using those building blocks not only lends itself to kind of the magic of Rippling, but also the incredible kind of ease of use that I think really wows so many of our customers.

Munira Rahemtulla: I’ll add one more thing, which is that, as I mentioned, we use our own products here at Rippling, and so we get feedback from every person. If you build something that is not usable, you’re going to hear it from everyone at Rippling. I am terrified of launching a bad product because I know that that’s going to be Slacks directly to me one at a time that I’m going to have to answer one at a time.

Tahlia Spiegel: And in a few public channels too.

Munira Rahemtulla: Yeah, and usually in the general channel. That’s the other place people like to complain about usability issues.

Tahlia Spiegel: All right. I think, oh, one last thing quickly.

Diana Soare: Yeah, I just want to quickly add, one thing I’ve observed here is we keep on iterating on products too. We’re not stuck on a specific way we did it, and so I think that that also helps us in continuing shaping the products where we keep on changing them just based on feedback and what we hear from our customers.

Tahlia Spiegel: Cool. All right. We have another panel that we are going to jump to, which is Career Do’s and Don’ts.

Jennifer Hasche: Career Dos, Don’ts, and A-Ha’s. Let’s give these ladies a hand. Fantastic panel. We’re going to switch quick. Maybe start in two minutes. You don’t want to miss the next panel. Grab more food, more wine. Thank you and see you in two minutes.

Jennifer Hasche: Hi again, everybody. Once again, thank you, Angie. Thank you, Girl Geek. This is a great event. It’s our first event with Girl Geek, so really exciting and really fun to see everybody here. And so the second panel is Career Dos and Don’ts. I’m Jen Hasche, I do recruiting here at Rippling, and so I’m going to have each of the panelists do a little bit of a career summary career journey before we jump into the questions. So, Tahlia, I will start with you.

Tahlia Spiegel: Hi, everyone, again, Tahlia here. I’m on our HR team. I’ve been at Rippling for a year and a half. I have an accent. I’m from Australia, so I’ve been in the US about 10 years, have moved from New York, LA, and more recently the Bay Area. I think I have pivoted at least two times in my career and certainly can provide some tips for making pivots later on in life, but have been mainly in recruiting and HR for most of my career. And now HR for HR software, which is super interesting.

Maria Chavez Cantu: Hello, my name is Maria Chavez Cantu. I come from Twitch as a Director of Engineering for Ads. Prior to that I worked at Pandora also as Director of Engineering. My background is I was an engineer. I’m an engineer. And I’m an engineer that doesn’t normally look like me, right? So I’m Mexican American, born and raised here in California, and basically was, like any other engineer that could attest, was the only girl in her classroom and definitely the only Latina ever, right? And so it’s been a journey, it’s been a struggle. It’s been definitely imposter syndrome, but it’s also been a great challenge and a great success and I’ve had a great career, and I hope I could share some of that with you today.

Diana Soare: Hi, everyone, again. I’m Diana. I am the Engineering Lead for Identity Team here at Rippling. I joined Rippling seven months ago. I’m also an engineer. Started off college as a backend focused engineer. I worked in small start-ups, which was a great experience for me, just kind of be able to wear multiple hats and just have a lot of ownership. I joined Coinbase as an engineer in 2018 and that’s where I transitioned into management. And now here I am.

Nan Guo: Hi, everyone. My name is Nan Guo. My role here right now is as VP of Engineering at Zendesk. I’ve been with Zendesk for four years, but working in tech industries for almost 25 years. I start from very untraditional career. Actually, my training in the college is a medical degree, so medical doctorate in training. So I switched my career in the dotcom internet booming stage, become engineering, and then working in the biotech, search engine, content management, ad tech, and now customer experience space. So definitely have some unique maybe perspective how I transitioned from one industry to another, can share my experience, and hopefully will be helpful for you. That’s me, and I’ve been with multiple companies, large, small start-up and big company, so very diverse background there. And really nice meeting all of you to talk to you about my career journey. Thank you.

Munira Rahemtulla: Hi, my name’s Munira, again. I started my career as a software engineer. I studied computer science at school, and my first job out of college was as a software engineer and then became an engineering manager. And then I took a bit of a career break and taught databases in central Asia for a year. And then when I came back, decided to make a bit of a switch into product management. I spent a year as a product manager at a start-up, both of those experiences were at a start-up, and then joined Amazon as a technical program manager. I then became an engineering manager, so sort of flip-flopping between the different roles.

Munira Rahemtulla: I spent 16 years at Amazon and launched a couple of businesses. Two were in the ad tech space, and the last one was called Amazon Live, which is a video shopping program for influencers to sell products on Amazon. And I left Amazon and came to Rippling about two years ago. When I was at Amazon I was a general manager, so running both engineering and product and marketing, a couple of other organizations as well. And when I left I felt like I sort of had to choose. Not a lot of companies structure their organizations with general managers in business units, so decided to go back to product management, and so have been here for two years as the Product Lead for our HRIS product vertical.

Jennifer Hasche: Awesome, great intros. Thank you, ladies. Nan, I’m going to start with you. You have a really interesting background. You started out in medicine. Can you share with us how you got to engineering?

Nan Guo: Absolutely. Sometime your career turn is not really by your choice. So I came to America, actually, I cannot become a doctor just because I’m immigrant and you don’t get practice medicine in America without green card. So that’s just a realistic practical matter I have to deal with. I was started on the PhD program for biochemistry. On the first year, I did really well and my professor really loved my performance, but I don’t really like it. I was like, okay, it’s not really solving real time problem. It’s probably research five, 10 years from now. It’s not for me. I’m lucky enough at that time, internet booming, I was super fascinated with all the internet, what can bring to change people’s life. I told my professor, I said, “Look, I’m really interested in getting into computer science.” He was shocked. He was like, “You have no background in computer science. You study medicine. There’s just two different fields. Are you sure you want to change?” I was like, “I’m sure. I think I want to try that.”

Nan Guo: At that time, I’m young, fearless, I don’t know what I get myself into. So I went to the computer science department say, “I want to pursue my master degree in computer science.” And the dean in the department shocked say, “Okay, you have no background. I don’t believe you can make it, so give me a really tough job. Say I give you one semester to prove yourself out.” And so I did. I working so hard and prove myself out. Since then I was really enjoying solving real time problem with computer science and I got master degree in computer science. Since then, I work in the tech industry, so that’s just not my choice at that time. But I felt like I catch the opportunity at that time and I no regret.

Nan Guo: At the end of the day, actually my medical degree and computer science have a lot of commonality because it’s all about solving problem. So you can imagine that you’ll actually talk to a patient. You don’t wait for five, 10 years to solve their problem. You don’t do research on their disease, but you actually need to have immediate response to the problem at hand. The problem solving skill is exactly the same, that benefit dearly on how we solving computer problem and software development.

Nan Guo: Looking back, I would say that choice is I’m lucky enough. I was able to have a limitation about my career at that time, but I was be able to make decision for myself committed to it and really make a success. So that’s my journey. But I will say if you want to do it, there’s definitely determination and the resilience, you need to invest yourself into that, and stay learning because you are behind, but you actually want to make sure you be able to spend the time to catch up. So for me, I will say, I really enjoyed that journey.

Jennifer Hasche: I love it. And so the aha is the problem solving. It’s crosses in both worlds and the do is be resilient. Any other dos that you want to leave the audience with right now? Career dos?

Nan Guo: Yeah, so I will say in term of if you want to transition from non-tech to tech, if you are not starting from the computer science degree, but you want to get in the tech, first, you need to ask yourself if this is for you. You want to commit to it. It’s hard. I won’t lie for that. It’s not easy transition. You’re behind. People study in their college, and you are years behind.

Nan Guo: One thing is, I really looking back reflect, is if you aren’t good at something, you need to invest 10,000 hours into that topic. Some people spend four full years…If you spend eight hour day and you spend probably four years and to get their 10,000 hour. And if you want to accelerate that, you want to spend more time to get that catch up. I did.

Nan Guo: I think I would say determination, and you really make sure you want to do it and you actually invest yourself do it. But enjoy doing that, not just feel like you’re suffering, but actually when your time you’re doing it’s like you love doing it and you don’t feel this pain. So that’s for me. So I be able to catch up on that being a very short period of time, two and a half years, I catch up with everybody else. And also select the discipline you can excel.

Nan Guo: Tech industries, the technology evolves so fast. I select the data management, I select the big data and the database, and that’s the niche I want to get really deep and become expert on that. But you can select the discipline you love, but really get deep on that, make you an expert in that area. You can do it if you’re determined to do it.

Jennifer Hasche: Love it. Maria, you mentioned imposter syndrome already, so I’m going to play off that a little bit. And the career you’ve had working in this industry. Can you share more about that and what that means to you?

Maria Chavez Cantu: I have also been in this industry for about 25 years and it’s been a challenge. I was also ignorant to what I was getting myself into at school. I thought, yes, it sounds like a great career. It was very hard. It was very, very hard. But fortunately, my work ethic did not allow me to quit.

Maria Chavez Cantu: I come from immigrants. My father was a migrant worker in strawberry fields, and so he instilled in me a great work ethic, and so I applied that to my life. And I also started college with a computer science degree and thinking everybody has been coding since birth, I’m way behind. But I managed to stick with it and be successful there. So the imposter syndrome really came from that, right? You always feel like you are not enough. You always feel that you’re behind, that you’re trying to catch up.

Maria Chavez Cantu: One of my big do’s is to be confident in yourself with what you bring to the table. Everybody has something about them that is special. Figure out what that is for you because that will be your differentiator.

Maria Chavez Cantu:For example, in college, nobody wanted me to be on their teams. I’m the only girl in the classroom. They all think I can’t code. Nobody wants you on their team. What did I do? Aside from being a girl and none of these guys had ever been near girls before. That was one advantage. But two, was I actually enjoyed English, I liked writing. And so what I told them, “Hey, I will write your specs.” Guys hate writing, right? They hate writing specs. They’re always like, “It’s a waste of time. They go obsolete.” I was like, “No problem. I will write the specs. I’ll write the test plans, I will do all that stuff that is required in a course.” And sure enough, that’s how I got on the teams. That’s what I brought to the table.

Maria Chavez Cantu: Obviously, as you get ahead in your career, that evolves and what you bring to the table, like I said, is going to be my work ethic. It’s going to be my passion, the energy that I bring into the room or that I bring into the team, my ability to collaborate with people. Then, ultimately, as I got later in my career, it was my ability to lead people, to bring them along, to want to be part of what I was doing. And that part is influence. And so I think all of that is important with that imposter syndrome. You have to have confidence. Update your resume even though you’re not looking yet. Update your resume so that you can know what you’re good at. You have to believe in yourself before somebody else is going to believe in you. And so that confidence is really important.

Jennifer Hasche: Awesome. I like that. So I’ve had a few questions on the floor about hiring and connecting with recruiters here at Rippling. I know you’re all hiring managers, and so, Munira, I’m going to start with you, but I would love to hear what do you look for when you’re hiring? For me particularly, I look for can somebody unlearn? Are they coachable? They can be really great at what they do, but it’s going to be different at Rippling. And I want to know, can they adjust? Can they change? Can they be coachable? So anything like that or however, but I’m going to go to everybody in the panel, so get ready to answer this question because I think the audience is really curious about that. And for Diana and Tahlia and Munira, think about how we hire at Rippling as well.

Munira Rahemtulla: Can someone else? I need a second.

Nan Guo: I can definitely start. Two questions, I want to split into two things. One is hiring right people. What are you looking for in the people you’re hiring? Oftentimes, easily fall into exactly into the checkbox. Like, oh, I have this five requirement, check, check, check, check, and that’s the person I want. I constantly told my teams, no. Of course, if you find that unicorn, that person check all the boxes and also have the drive due to not only for now for future, great. Rarely you find people check all the boxes. But what you’re looking for is people have the solid foundation, they have a good training, they know how to do the work, but they don’t have the perfect fit about the technology you’re asking them to do, but they can learn fast. They’re curious enough, they have the drive to learn. They also have determination and resilience to learn. They’re looking for more soft skill rather than hard skill. So that’s on the hiring side.

Nan Guo:When you’re looking at how you grow your team when they’re hired, and that’s another one, is that person determined enough, ambitious enough, aggressive enough, they want to grow their career, they want to be, I will say, motivated enough to get to the next stage. They know there’s hard work to be done. They also waiting to take hard feedback. So if people glass heart, if you say something constructive feedback, they just falling apart, that’s not the person you want to invest. You want to invest people that have the resilience, have the drive. So that’s when you’re looking at us hiring and also grow your team.

Munira Rahemtulla: When I’m hiring, I’m usually looking for two categories of things. The first category I would call sort of hard skills, like the skills that are needed to be successful at the job. And right now I’m hiring into the product organization. So the most important hard skill that I’m looking for is good judgment and product sensibility and empathy for the user. When you’re thinking about how to build a great product… Someone had asked a question in the last session, how do you make sure that you’re launching a lot of features, but also making them really usable?

Munira Rahemtulla: I’m looking for people that can do that, take a really hard, complex problem and make it really easy for a lay user to understand. That’s the first category is whatever the job is that I’m hiring someone into, do I have confidence that they’re going to be able to have the skills necessary and the judgment necessary to do that job?

Munira Rahemtulla: And then the second category of things are that I look for someone that will meet the leadership principles of the organization that we’re working in. And so those leadership principles at Rippling are things like pushing the limits of possible, and this is really important. Is this a person that will take a really hard problem and say, I can figure out how to do this. This is the attitude that I’m bringing to this problem is, god, that sounds impossible at first glance. We’re never going to launch a rehiring solution in seven weeks. Are you insane? But rather someone that’s like, okay, that sounds impossible and I’m going to figure out how to do it. I’m going to run through walls until I figured out how to do it. And so we have a set of leadership principles here and we’re looking for people that are going to really excel in those areas.

Diana Soare: Let’s see. For me, I think, so we definitely have onsite and all of these stages where we try to evaluate candidates against expected checkpoints, to Nan’s point. I think what’s really important to me and what I look for in candidates, there’s a few things. Quality and an emphasis on quality. Do I see the candidate really, even if they don’t know something, being curious about it, or when presenting and talking about past projects, have they had the learnings? Are they interested in what could have done better to make a better choice in the future? And so I think we have a really high bar for engineering here at Rippling. And so trying to emphasize on that, it’s really important for me as I build a team.

Diana Soare: The other thing I would call out is ownership, and this kind of ties in what Munira was saying, but also going to Western Union. We really want people on the team that act like owners that can take whatever you give them and run with it, figure out solutions and figure out how to push it forward. Yeah, so I would say those two are pretty important for me.

Maria Chavez Cantu: I’m trying to think of something that hasn’t already been said. I think I echo leadership principles. I think that’s very important. I think it’s important to understand the full product, not just the piece that you’re involved with. What are you building and do you take that ownership from end to end? It’s about understanding the problem, providing the solution, verifying its quality, and that it actually solves the problem.

Maria Chavez Cantu: To echo what you said, curiosity. I look for curiosity. People that are curious will figure shit out. If they’re not curious, they’re just going to basically do what they’re told. And that’s not the type of person that I want. I want somebody who goes and finds things to do, finds the problems that needs to be solved. So I look for those thinkers, those problem solvers.

Tahlia Spiegel: Plus one to everything that’s been said, it’s hard to go last. But I think something that I look for in addition to all of that is structure and clarity of thought and communication. Are you speaking in plain speak? Are you articulating something that is just simplified? It doesn’t need to be overly complex. And do you allow for there to be a dialogue where people can double click in versus somebody just speaking for the first 10, 15 minutes uninterrupted? Never do that. Check in with your interviewer would be some of my tips.

Jennifer Hasche: Love it. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. Those are great examples. I know that was top of mind for the audience. I wanted to throw that one in there. Tahlia is in HR here, and I wanted you to talk a little bit about for people in the room that are thinking about getting into leadership, how would you give them some dos and think about that and transitioning from IC to manager, IC being individual contributor.

Tahlia Spiegel: We have our leadership principles here at Rippling, and they do not just apply to leaders. Everyone is held to that standard. And I think you don’t have to have manager or director in your title to be a leader. And my biggest tip would be start to demonstrate leadership qualities and behaviors before you even get recognized for it. There’s a term here that our COO, Matt MacInnis coins, which is reaching up and pulling down.

Tahlia Spiegel: How can you look at what your manager has on their plate and how can you reach over and take something without needing to be asked? It could be offering to lead a team meeting. It could be offering to recap and drive next steps forward for a group effort so that when that day comes, when there is an opening, it’s just a no-brainer. It’s like, oh, Jane. Jane already demonstrates leadership qualities.

Tahlia Spiegel: We have this manager role and we will take a first time manager. And it’s just undeniable because everyone in the room that’s part of that internal decision to promote or not promote into a manager can see it already. And that starts with exhibiting some of those behaviors before you even get recognized for it.

Jennifer Hasche: And, Diana, I’m going to piggyback off a little bit because this is one of the questions you and I were thinking about is you have an aha moment going from an IC to a leader. You mentioned that at Coinbase. What was that transition like for you?

Diana Soare: Yeah, that’s a great question. I would say it was very organic for me. I think sometimes I talk to candidates and they told me like, “Oh, I want to be a manager,” and they have this plan, and they kind of shaped their career around that. And it wasn’t like that for me. And so it was really interesting. But I think to what Tahlia was just mentioning, I think there were a few key moments within my career where I kind of got the confidence to be able to take that leap.

Diana Soare: Being an engineer at Coinbase, this was pre-COVID, we were in the office all day. And so I think just naturally I would have colleagues coming to my desk to either pair program or just solve problems together. And I kind of realized like, oh, I’m enjoying this mentorship aspect and reflecting, I think I didn’t realize it at the time, but I think it slowly built up within me.

Diana Soare: Then similarly, I did a project as a tech lead and I was working closely with a few engineers on the team, and the project went well, and at the end I was like, wow, this was really good to have this impact. How do I scale myself to have more? There was definitely a piece of timing as well where Coinbase was going through this hypergrowth. And so when the opportunity came, I think to Tahlia’s point, my manager went ahead and asked me like, “Oh, would you be interested? I think it would be a great fit.” And reflecting back on some of these experiences, I made a transition and I’m very happy I did.

Jennifer Hasche: I love that because I recently had a member of my team tell me they’re interested in leadership and we had a really, really transparent conversation. And I’m like, “Now that I know, now that you’ve raised your hand, I can scale you. I can give you things that are a little bit more challenging as an IC and how does that go?” But it’s really great to know. A do for me is let me know. And I think another thing that really helps is let that manager know it doesn’t have to be now, it can be in the future. That also helps a little bit with the pressure of getting that person to the next level immediately versus you have a little bit of time to get them there. I’m going to stay with you, Diana.

Jennifer Hasche: How have you been handling such a demanding tech job? But I want others to actually come in and answer this too, because this is very top of mind. I crowdsource a little bit out there. But how do we do it all? How do we work at demanding places like Rippling, like Zendesk, like Twitch, share some stories?

Diana Soare: Yeah. Well first of all, I don’t know that I am handling it. I think I’m still figuring out. But yeah, there’s definitely a few things that have helped me. I think one is setting boundaries, and I know this gets thrown out a lot. And to be honest, it takes time to learn what that even means. Like, does it mean not to be online on Slack and kind of take the time for yourself or … yeah, just what does that mean? I think every person’s different and that means differently to different people.

Diana Soare: The other thing I think that helped me is also a mindset change. And so I think before I was like, “Oh, this is too demanding.” I was just waiting for those days … actually starting the day with the assumption that it will be easy and then it’s not. And so I changed my mindset and I’m like, okay, I expect every day to be hard and to be back to back between personal life and work life and all the things that are happening. And then when the day is easier, I get to enjoy that. And so that also kind of bootstrapped that.

Diana Soare: I think my job also helps, because I do a lot of context switching and so I’m also able to go home and do dinner or whatever it is, and then if I need to go back to work or read a message then I can do that really easily. So I’m kind of fortunate that the job made me do that.

Jennifer Hasche: Yeah, that’s awesome. Anyone else?

Nan Guo: I can speak a little bit. I think my hardest realization of the difficulty and challenge between life and work is on my startup experience. I joined TubeMogul at that time. It’s a video advertising company and we are the … the year before it goes IPO, and you can see how intense that will be to take the company to IPO. I was leading the project to getting the company to be SOC2 compliant. Therefore, we can go that IPO at the time. We used to be talking about TubeMogul life is the dog year. So you spend one year in TubeMogul is like seven years in any other company. I see some of my coworker getting in there with … this guy have a … full of great hair and five year later he was bald.

Nan Guo: One project I was leading on the data transformation, we’re going … at that time it’s Kafka 0.9 and we are going from a batch processing for data to real time processing for advertising. Literally for three months straight, every day, I only sleep three or to four hours. And at that time I was working with people in their early 20s. I was already in my 40s. I was like, even though my heart wants to go there, my body cannot take it. I was like, I’m almost about to quit that time. I was like, “This is too much for me.” At that time actually, my son was every day coming home. He said, “Mommy, I want to play a little bit this.” I played half hour with him, and he actually just completely reset my, I would say, work-life integration, not really balanced at that time.

Nan Guo: Then also I decided to take one day at a time. I used to be plan ahead for one week, two weeks ahead. It just felt like too much going on. You barely can make today, right? I decided, okay, one day at a time, make it. But after three months, since getting better and we’re actually getting to more, I would say, reasonable hours and actually get over that hump. I would say those times do come. But if you really feel you’re actually working on an impactful project, and you will get over that hump. When you look back, you will actually … the moment of your career, you are so proud of that.

Nan Guo: I did have a few moments in that career, that’s just one of them. But I will say keep doing what you’re doing if you are really passionate about it, but you need to be able to feel this is the work you actually want to devote it and you want to really put your heart and soul into that. But I don’t regret … this is an experimenting. I was planning the joke for my bad experience and people laugh about it, but at that time I was literally thinking about quitting at that time. But get over that is a great experience and I can write a book for that.

Jennifer Hasche: Do you want a couple …

Tahlia Spiegel: I have a couple I can add. I think one, just to your point about the discomfort and just sitting in that. If it’s something you really want to do, the growth is going to happen at the edge of that, right? When you think, “What am I doing?” You are going to become faster, better, stronger, smarter, and things that were once hard will become easy.

Tahlia Spiegel: My second tip … and my boss bought me a book, Darcy McKay, she’s our SVP of HR here. It’s called Essentialism. And essentially the gist is you can’t do it all. So pick the things that you want to do really well and then be okay not doing some of those things.

Tahlia Spiegel: And my last thing … sorry, I’ll pass it … is just being a manager, at Rippling, we also do IC work, but the more you invest in your team …

Jennifer Hasche: Really?

Tahlia Spiegel: Crazy. The more you invest in your team and when they grow, you grow. So you will be moving on to new things and be able to do more as your team expands. So really invest in them and their growth and they’re going to reach up and pull down off your plate, and so the kind of story goes.

Maria Chavez Cantu: Yeah, I was just going to say one thing that gets me through it is don’t stress the shit that you can’t control or you can’t do anything about. So you’re going to have situations where people above your pay grade make decisions and you could completely disagree based on ideological or whatever reason. At some point you just have to disagree and commit and just move forward because you can’t be stressing about every single decision that comes down at you. It’s just like prioritization, right? You got to prioritize. What are you going to worry about? What are you not going to worry about? So that’s what helps me.

Jennifer Hasche: Great. And Munira, did you want to … ?

Munira Rahemtulla: Sure. Yeah. I mean I would say the theme from what we heard here is work hard. What everyone was describing is ways to work hard and long as well. It’s not … it definitely helps to get efficient at what you’re doing, as Talia was saying, but you still are going to have to work the long hours. And so when you think about how you fit that into your life, the other thing to do is take a hard look at your life and figure out how to simplify your life as well. What’s important to you in your life? And focus on … figure out what those things are that are important and how you fit those in. And then think about the things that are less important and how you can minimize them either in terms of how much space they take up in your brain or how much time they take up in your life.

Munira Rahemtulla: I have two kids and have the luxury of being able to afford different types of help. So if you have that luxury, think about what you can do to make the life part of your … the things that you don’t … aren’t important to you in your life, how do you make those things easier?

Munira Rahemtulla: I would also encourage you to think of it and invest as an investment in yourself and in your own career. So even if you’re early on and maybe not making a huge amount of money, or if you’re early in your career, whatever, still spending that money on making your life simpler enables you to then spend the longer hours at work. And that, if you do it right, will pay itself back. That’s an investment in your career, your ability to get promoted, your ability to do better at work, and therefore your ability to make more money. So you’re investing in your ability to make more money.

Munira Rahemtulla: When you think about it, when you sort of reframe that problem that way, don’t feel guilty about those things that you’re doing to make your life part easier. Maybe that’s as simple as Instacart instead of the hour you spend grocery shopping, right? But maybe it’s something more involved like a nanny or an au pair or whatever it is or something that helps dinner prep go faster. These are all … if cooking isn’t your thing, if cooking isn’t the way you unwind after work, maybe you want to make dinner prep easier, maybe you spend money in that area and you should think of that as an investment in yourself and your career.

Jennifer Hasche: Yeah, the only thing I’ll add there is ask … so I had a daughter when I was 19, so it wasn’t expected. And I was in an office where everybody could stay late or do things and I had to bolt and I felt so awkward and weird because I had to bolt. And I was a recruiter at an agency and it was commission-based. It was a hundred percent commission based, so I really wanted to put in the hours, and I just … this is a long time ago, so you’ll laugh. I asked for a laptop. Nobody had a laptop back then. And I just said, “Hey, can I get a laptop? I’ll work from home. I don’t want to leave at 4:00, but I have to pick up my daughter,” and I never looked back. ometimes you just have to, to Munira’s point, there’s things that can … your employers will think about ways to optimize you, believe me. You just sometimes have to put the idea out there. And sometimes that makes your life easier too. I know we’re at time, but I do want to give the audience … Jen, if you’re still here. Yes, Jen’s got the mic. And great job, panelists. Thank you for sharing all this. It went by so fast, but any questions for our panelists?

Catherine: Hi, I’m Catherine. I was wondering … so for context, I’m reaching seven years in my career and I grew up and was raised as work really hard, put your head down, stay quiet, all of that. And now I’m reaching that point where it’s like that doesn’t work. And so I was wondering if you folks could share, assuming you reached that point, how did you pivot your mindset in terms of what steps did you take to work smart versus harder?

Maria Chavez Cantu: I had a scenario where I was an engineer doing the same thing. Hard worker, head down, company’s best kept secret, right? There was an opportunity where there was an architecture, an architect role that was opening up. And I recall seeing all these guys walk into the chief architect’s office to interview for the position. And I was just like, “Oh, that person, and oh, that person, that guy, okay.” It’s all guys. “That guy.” And then I started going, “Wait, that guy? That guy? Wait, I’m better than that guy.” And so what I did was I basically updated my resume and I looked at the job description and I wrote a cover letter and I went in there and I said, “Hey, I know how to do every single thing that you put there.” And I gave myself that opportunity. It was an aha moment for me, because until I saw all those people walking into that room, I didn’t know where I stood.

Maria Chavez Cantu: You have to give yourself that opportunity. You have to know what you’re capable of and make sure that you advocate for yourself. Nobody’s going to advocate for you. You cannot wait for your manager to just magically give you a promotion because you’re working hard. You need to ask for the promotion and then it’s up to the manager to tell you either you’re right, you do deserve the promotion, or let’s work on what are the gaps for you to get there. But at least you’ve started that conversation, and that’s what you need to do. And you need to do it as soon as possible, right? Unfortunately, not wait seven years. You need to do it at two, you need to do at three, right? Or you move to another company and they give you the raise, right?

Nan Guo: I couldn’t agree more what Maria is sharing here. I want to share two additional things that helped me. I was in the same situation before. In my first eight and a half years, I have no promotion. Some is because I’m on the immigration getting my green card. But my manager is super nice to me and I was just like, oh, this is a great manager and really nice to me, really loving, caring. But no promotions, no raise, but all the hard work I’m doing recognized. “You do great work, but not really career development.” So don’t mistake a manager nice to you to the … a great manager. Great manager give you constructive feedback. That feedback is really hard to hear. While my best leader I follow, he’s the leader I thought … I got fired by him. He’s the only leader to almost make me cry.

Nan Guo: I’m a really tough girl, but hard to make me cry. My stress was really high. At one moment he almost made me cry. He’s a co-founder at that time for T-Mobile. I thought I got fired. But he said, “No, actually you did a wonderful job. I just want to push you more.” That’s the leader you want to follow. That’s the leader who will give you constructive feedback, help you to improve and also give you opportunity to sponsor you for your growth. My tremendous growth was coming from that kind of leader. That’s one tip.

Nan Guo: Second one, don’t mistaken working hard depending on what product you’re working hard for. You need to be very select on the project. Don’t shy away from impactful project, training and project, even though it’s hard as long as it’s impactful, impact customer, impact business guide on that. Don’t just working for easy project. Because sometimes easy project have a higher chance with success, quite the opposite, because easy project have higher expectation to be successful, even though your successful is given.

Nan Guo: The hard project, impact for project, you’re getting surrounding systems supporting you to be successful. You get a lot of visibility. You’re also getting … if you are successful, you’re getting a lot of great opportunity to grow. Those two tips, I will say. Work smarter, selective on the project you’re working on, and the leader you follow.

Tahlia Spiegel: Two things. One, are you positioned for opportunities at the current company, right? If things are slow, stagnant, there just isn’t that much, it’s going to be harder, right? Are you at a company where there’s a ton of growth and a ton of internal mobility is kind of one piece.

Tahlia Spiegel: Two, assuming that you are in a company like that, yes, your manager and all the things that have been said are super important to your own growth and development and mobility. But also how are you leveraging the people around you and your network and building those cross-functional relationships so that other managers on other teams also see the good work that you’re doing? Because good work rises to the top.

Tahlia Spiegel: With performance, we do calibrations. We get in a room with managers and we talk about what does good performance look like? And if someone’s like, oh, “Jane is amazing, Jane’s a five, she greatly exceeds high expectations.” And every other manager’s like, “Who’s Jane?” The best kind of discussions around calibration is when everyone’s like, “Yes, Jane, absolutely. She’s a five, undeniably.” So build that network and ensure that others can also see your good work so that if they have opportunities, they might kind of tap you as someone that they’re interested in.

Jennifer Hasche: Great advice. Good question. Thank you. One last question and I’ll let you get back to the food and wine. Anybody else? Yes, up here.

Tricia: Hi, I’m Tricia. You’ve all spoken so much about your individual strengths and your work ethic. Can you speak to someone who’s been a good mentor or role model for you on your journey to where you are today?

Jennifer Hasche: Munira, you want to take it or do you want …

Nan Guo: I maybe just tag on what I was sharing the leader you follow, right?  I was lucky enough to have a leader challenge me. And at that time it’s very uncomfortable. First you need to be looking at the leader truly investing in you, and you need to be worthy of investment. So when leader are looking at, okay, does this person actually have the good drive and the curiosity and learning and be able to have the potential to grow? The leadership will invest in you. Also don’t be afraid to ask that leader. If you see that leader and try your best to get connected with that leader, and then the worst you’re going to … sometimes they are shying away from, oh, this leader is so influential for the company. He doesn’t know me. I mean, whether I can connect with him or not, the best thing, you just ask. The worst thing is you get no. That’s okay, right?

Nan Guo: If you get connection to that leader and the leader actually sees your potential that you invest in you, they give you the real feedback, not just feedback, “Oh, you’re doing a good job. Keep up what you’re doing.” That’s meaningless. The meaningful is the more constructive, “Okay, I see you can do one, two, three, then I can help you connect the other leader, give you impactful project, but also help you to grow your career.” That’s kind of mentorship and the sponsorship.

Nan Guo: There’s difference between mentorship and sponsorship. You need to take initiative to approaching them and identify a leader you want to follow and also connect with them. So that leader will invest in you, but you want to work in yourself. What value do you bring to that leader? They want to invest in you. So therefore they both can be beneficial, because leaders are also looking for that potential people they want to grow in their organization. So looking at both sides.

Munira Rahemtulla: Sorry, sometimes I just need a minute.

Jennifer Hasche: I love it.

Munira Rahemtulla: There’s lots of different ways of thinking about what you want out of a mentor and maybe it’s a sponsor, maybe it’s a mentor. In my career, I was actually … and actually the reason I said no to answering this question initially is that I’ve had a lot of mentors that I didn’t feel like I got a lot out of and frankly thought was a waste of time, and so had kind of written off mentorship to some degree, and especially the type of mentors that would try to tell me how to do my job, like, “Oh, you should sit at the head of the table or speak more confidently,” or, I don’t know, whatever that feedback was. I can’t even remember. But I never found that super useful.

Munira Rahemtulla: But there was one mentor that was just incredible for me, and I was actually mentioning it earlier, which is that when I was running Amazon Live, which is a live video shopping business, I had the fortune of having Emmett Sheer, who is the CEO of Twitch, as my mentor … CEO and founder of Twitch. So he founded a live-streaming business and he was able to talk to me about actual ideas for my business. And I found that just mind-blowingly amazing, just the way he thought about his business, the way he explained what was important, what metrics were important, what he tracked, what a good benchmark looked like for any given metric, what’s a good average viewing time on a live stream, for example. That really helped me take my thinking about my business to the next level.

Munira Rahemtulla: So I guess I would say think about what you’re looking for in a mentor, but also consider something that’s maybe not the first thing. I feel like the first thing people think about in a mentor is someone that’s going to tell you how to do your job, what to do or how to act. But also consider that this other really important thing, which is that if you can connect with someone about the details of what you’re trying to accomplish and they can help you in that specific knowledge area, that can be really transformational to you as a leader or in what you’re trying to accomplish.

Tahlia Spiegel: And I think different role models give you different things, right? And you will take inspiration from all the different leaders that you touch, cross paths with, et cetera, et cetera. And you’ll select what are the things that I think are going to make me … if I do that, if I try to work at that, how can I incorporate that into my practice? And those things are going to also serve you well with mentorship and stuff like that. And I think, yeah, you can’t force it too, right? You’ve got to … sometimes it’s opportunistic, sometimes you need to know what you’re looking for, and sometimes those learning moments just happen organically versus a mentor-mentee type formal relationship.

Jennifer Hasche: Wonderful. And I’ll just add on to that. Sorry about that, yeah. Sometimes I forget the mic’s on. Back to the dos and don’ts, don’t think it has to be this certain person, at this certain level, at this certain company. It’s everyday moments. I think I get the most learning, aka mentorship, in the moment from things that scare me, from leaders that I don’t see eye to eye with and/or I’m just, “Wow, that person feels like they’re hard to work with.” But that’s when you’re learning, when you’re actually really sticking with somebody who’s a very different point of view from you, but you can pull back and learn. And those are what I call every day mentoring moments. You get them, you just have to be aware that you’re getting them. All right.

Maria Chavez Cantu: I have one more thing to add to that.

Jennifer Hasche: Please.

Maria Chavez Cantu: Another alternative to mentoring is some coaching circles. For example, at Twitch, there were five engineering leaders that were women and we would have coaching circles. And it was great because all of a sudden you’re interacting with all these people, you’re having meetings with executives, you’re having meetings with particular individuals and they’re like, “Oh, that person’s not really that bad if you approach them like this,” or, “This is the right way to write a strategy document and who to send it to.” Those types of things, that is gold, right? If you can get a group of people that support each other, especially women in an organization, it’s amazing.

Jennifer Hasche: Awesome. All right, well a special thank you to Nan and Maria for joining us tonight. Really, really excited you’re here. And thank you so much for saying yes. Again, thank you, Girl Geek, and I hope you guys all enjoyed it. I think we’re going to send out a survey to get some feedback. And there are some people from recruiting. If there’s no recruiters left, you can come talk to me. But it’s J Hasche at Rippling. Happy to connect you. If not … and Nate’s here. He’s raising his hand. And so Nate will help me out. And again, thank you for coming. Enjoy the rest of the evening. We’re going to stay around for a little bit for some networking. Otherwise, safe travels on your journey home. All right, thanks. Bye.

“Speak to Impress: Elevator Pitch and Crafting Impact”: Hana Rasheed, Senior Engineering Program Manager, Office of CIO, Cloud and Software Optimization at Adobe (Video + Transcript)

In this session, Hana Rasheed discusses the importance of having an impactful elevator pitch and shares her own journey of finding her voice and career success. She emphasizes the need to tailor your elevator pitch based on the audience and situation, and highlights the importance of numbers and specific skills in making your pitch impactful. Rasheed also provides tips on building confidence, making eye contact, and practicing your elevator pitch.

Transcript:

Hana Rasheed: Thank you so much, Amanda. Happy to be here. And also thank you so much for everyone who have joined here and have believed in this platform that Girl Geek community have brought in. I’m a huge fan of Girl Geek community. I have been part of that since 2015. And this session is more for you. And I would love to know from you and your journey about why are you here, because I wanted to ask you guys about your journey, and why is this session, which is to carve your elevator pitch? Why is it important for you? And I would love to see a lot of your responses in the chat.

And I would love to share my journey. Just like Amanda shared about my experience, I would like to add why am I passionate and why am I here, because I myself have been an introvert early in my career and [inaudible 00:01:11] 15 years of experience, and I would say it’s only in last five years that I have found my voice thanks to the community. I have lived in San Francisco, recently transplanted in Texas. And in my career, I have been in Massachusetts for five years, in San Francisco Bay Area for eight years, one year in New York. And what I learned from all this transition and travel was, A, there are career transition, B, there can be a rollercoaster ride in your journey and, C, how would you communicate your journey to other people and make it more impactful? So you make a mark on people’s mind that, “Hey. I met this person at this place.” This is a great takeaway of finding your voice.

And my journey I would like to share, but please use the chat why is it important for you to have an impactful elevator pitch and why are you here. So my journey started, I graduated from graduate school, background in electrical engineering and computer engineering, network management. I had a job while I was graduating, but since I am an international student, my paperwork was not available. They did not come on time and my offer was rescinded. In 15 years, I have come into a plan of having a better immigration strategy and now I have a green card. However, I have been through a stage of being an immigrant, being on student visa, being on work visa, being on dependent visa, getting laid off. I had a rollercoaster ride with multiple reasons and multiple breakthroughs in the country.

And when I graduated, I was looking for a job and when I found my career path, it happened to be based on my networking skills. I landed a technical marketing engineer role at NetApp, Network Appliance Company, which was back in the day a competitor for EMC and now a competitor for Dell. And this is the place where I got the opportunity to travel across the world, present in front of 200 people. I was part of product management, but still an engineer which I started my career in. But also I learned from my reporting director, my manager who at that time was director of Product Management. And I learned by connecting with them that, “Hey. I would like to shadow. I would like to learn, I would like to explore,” because being an engineer, just sitting on the desk was not something I would want to do. I was in lab working with all the cables. I was in front of customers as sales, training them on technical pieces. I was working with marketing. I was working with engineers. It was very cross-functional role.

And this gave me an opportunity to dive into different areas, but what I went through was a rollercoaster ride where I got laid off, immigration things changed, and I got opportunity to connect with a lot of professionals in my industry. And guess what? Somebody from my friends hired me because I went on few trips or a reunion trip you can say and they saw me how I’m managing the skills of having a whole group together and making a plan to go somewhere, do the activities, and I got the role in a utility company in New York. But that helped me with it, it helped me in transitioning from an engineer role in analytics and going towards project and now program manager role.

It was not an easy ride. And as I say, why this workshop? Because I had been through multiple layoffs. I had been through multiple rounds of interviews and still have gotten rejected. I’ve been in video interviews even before pandemic started. I’ve been in the shoes of people who are struggling now or have never had a chance to go to the networking event and find their voice of like how can they articulate their journey based on the audience. And I am now in Texas living in a house, having a great husband in my life. Why would I need to do that? Because I know I want to give back to people in the community who look like me, that I did not have in my time.

So that’s why since 2018, I started helping people out on LinkedIn by making their LinkedIn profile optimization, helping people with salary negotiation. I started a podcast, Hire Talk. I started a community when I moved to Dallas Fort Worth area, because I did not have friends, but I did want to give back and contribute to the community because I felt the same thing, being the only woman in the room, being the only woman in leadership, being the only woman in the lab or in the workshops that you are conducting and going to the conferences. There were hardly 10 women among 100 men.

So here is the agenda. Please share your why because that’s where I would love to help out, make it more interactive, and let’s start to help each other out. Now one more thing I would like to say, if you are sharing your why, I would like to [inaudible 00:06:29], but also, this is your chance to connect with everyone in the chat too. Drop in your LinkedIn profile. Connect with each other. Send a personalized invite saying that, “Hey. I was in the same session as you on Elevate Career Conference and we attended the session of Elevator Pitch Articulation, and would love to connect.” This is how you will grow the network, and this is how I used to do. If I could not [inaudible 00:06:59] connect with the panelists, I would also connect with the people who are attending because guess what? They are in the same boat as I am. And you can find my LinkedIn profile in my session. It’s also on my page. Hana Rasheed is my name on LinkedIn as well.

Now your why. I [inaudible 00:07:21] quickly go through some of the why’s. It is so important to practice an elevator pitch. It feels so much more [inaudible 00:07:24] otherwise. Sometimes things you say, someone else needs to hear, and never [inaudible 00:07:30]. I love that. I just bought a house. So I’m terrified of even the idea of layoff. Absolutely. I [inaudible 00:07:39] support piece of community that just need little help. So far in my career, I have been software developer for only nonprofit. I’m here on the session, we’ll learn about it [inaudible 00:07:49] more effectively with my colleagues. I’m here to learn from each other and help each other out. Community is incredibly important. [inaudible 00:08:00] love to refresh and refocus on [inaudible 00:08:02] absolutely we all need to learn, even [inaudible 00:08:05] who’s the senior product manager. Highly experienced person, but every stage of life we need to learn because we are what? Millennials, or maybe not, and there is Gen Z who’s coming in. So we have just keep up with the new generation as well.

I do not [inaudible 00:08:25]. Absolutely. There are people who have told me, “Why don’t go open a business?” And I was like, “I have never thought about it.” And this is happening since last 10 years. And pandemic happened. I started exploding and things started exploding as well. Now, let’s go quickly on our session and I would [inaudible 00:08:47] click on this. Now, this is why I said community support is important. Just spam the chat with your LinkedIn profile. Click on all the tabs. You can send the Connect, Invite afterwards, but spam, spam, spam, spam. Because chat is what you would need. I’m sorry if it’s going on YouTube, but still. You have to learn to pay it forward. If you are going forward in your leadership role, put back the ladder and bring those other people up because we need more women in leadership role to build up more and more [inaudible 00:09:23] network. It’s amazing to see a room full of women leaders that you can connect with and you will also [inaudible 00:09:30].

And one thing I want to share if you want to… This is something a lot of people have said. If you want to get things done, hire a woman. If you want to get everything done, hire a mom. I’m not a mom yet, but I still vouch for a mom. So whoever is mom in this group, kudos to you of working in so many roles in your life, as well as in your career.

Here are a few tips and I would say there could be even more that come up. So what is elevator pitch? Can you guys share in the chat please? Elevator pitch is basically your introduction. It can change based on the audience, based on the place you are in. And introduction, we’re in an era of Instagram, Threads, Twitter, where everything is changing every day. Attention span is not more than 30 to 60 seconds. That is why the elevator pitch has to be less than a minute. In an interview, it can be two minutes when you have an interview or job interview, but otherwise, keep it brief, keep it simple. Know your audience. If you are in a networking event or a baby shower or in a housewarming party or in a kids play area, your elevator pitch would be different compared to if you are meeting somebody at a conference. If you are meeting somebody in a meeting or a customer meeting or in your work trip, your elevator pitch will change.

And I will still be amazed by guys. We have to learn a lot of things from men because there goes the confidence. I met a guy in one of the ice cream social and he was talking to me everything technical and I heard him same thing talking to someone else but marketing focus. I was like, “Hmm. What is this guy doing?” But that depends on your audience. Your audience is important. If you are in a job interview, you look for jobs. And I’ll talk about that example later in the slide too. You talk about the job. You talk about the job description. You do the research on the company. However, in the social environment, if you are in a happy hour, if you are in a conference or interested in networking even, your elevator pitch would be different. But how can you make it impactful?

And I would like to ask you guys in the chat, how would you make it impact? Because it does not matter if you are in a leadership role or if you deal with finances or not. But the number gives you the data and the data shows the impact of your work. And there are some examples I can give you, which is even before I started handling finances and stuff, is number of projects [inaudible 00:12:20] worked in. And start with number of years I have worked in. It does not matter which role you are in, but it does matter how many years of corporate experience do you have? And even if you have started working from the age 16, that’s something you can share in your personal life story too.

But when you start about your professional experience, number of years you work with, number of projects you worked with, if you have worked with different number of stakeholders. For example, I have worked with 25 stakeholders in 11 projects and the dollar amount of that project is $500 million. Even if it’s not $500 million, even if I’m working on 100K project but that is a dependent project for a $500 million project, that is impactful project for you. And that’s something you must say because it can become a risk for a bigger plan, bigger company vision. So that is why numbers are important. Now, if you have worked with different geographic location people, that’s a number. If you have traveled to number of places, if you have worked with X number of customers, that is a number you can talk about. If you have bring in savings of X dollars amount, that’s number you can talk about. If you have improved number of cycles or efficiencies or performance of any kind of software tool, that is a number you could talk about. But keep it simple.

Something that you must learn and explain what you do, what are your skills. If you are transitioning from a certain role, suppose journalism, to QA or journalism to any other role or from UX design to a product manager, talk about your transitional skills. For example, in my case, I’m an engineer with number of skills that I can translate to for project manager. I’m more of a people person. I like working with one-on-one. That’s your USP. Make [inaudible 00:14:23] about how you are different from others. Mention your goals specifically and bring a specific interesting hook, which is, “Oh, by the way, I love photography. Oh, I went to podcasting. I love to share these things with other people and love to help and give back to community. I love to do volunteer work.” Those are the things that you can be very specific and you can stand out.

And what you do is you quickly go over. On the confidence side, be more persuasive, make more eye contact and practice. Every time end your conversation with your LinkedIn profile QR code. That’s how the [inaudible 00:15:03] one round circle of connecting with people. And it’s okay if you have not talked to anyone and gone to a conference or in a networking session. Happened to me five times or more and I made a goal of, “Next time I go, I’ll talk to one person and come back.” That’s a goal I would have. And then I increase one by one. And that’s how I practice my elevator pitch.

Now what not to do. When I’m nervous, I ask or I ask or talk too fast. And a lot of time it’s taken as, “Oh, she’s an immigrant and she talks too fast. I don’t know of her lingo,” but that’s not the case. It happens to everybody. So what I would say, practice, practice with pause, because whenever we are nervous, we are verbose and we talk too fast. And you have to emphasize on the work that you want to emphasize in. For example, I have 15 years of experience working in five different companies in the cloud environment. Do you know? You have a pitch voice going up and down. That’s what you have to elevate and not restrict yourself in one pitch. [inaudible 00:16:12]-

Amanda Beaty: I’m so sorry. We’re out of time. And there’s so much interest in this topic. Thanks, everybody, for joining us. Thank you so much, Hana, for your time and for putting this together for us. And we will see everybody in the next session.

“Engineering Your Impact”: Sumita Palanisamy, Director of Engineering at CarGurus (Video + Transcript)

In this session, Sumita Palanisamy discusses the importance of self-advocacy and how it is essential for women in the tech industry to speak up for themselves. She emphasizes the need to prioritize work that will lead to promotions and to avoid taking on tasks that do not contribute to career growth. Palanisamy also highlights the importance of having a sponsor and mentor, using social media to showcase achievements, and being one’s own cheerleader.

Transcript:

Sumita Palanisamy: Thank you, Amanda. Thanks for having me and thank you everyone for attending. Super excited to be able to have this opportunity to talk to everyone and kind of discuss how to engineer your impact. So the session that we are going to talk about today is how to engineer your impact as a woman in the tech industry. So in true engineering fashion, I wanted to kick off the session with some cold hard data. What we are seeing right now in this particular slide is research based on McKinsey & Company. All women lose ground on the first rung to manager, but the broken rung holds black women and Latinas back the most. While companies are modestly increasing women’s representation on top, doing so without addressing the broken rung is not really a fix, it’s just a temporary stop gap. Because of the gender disparity in early promotions, men held up holding about 60% of manager level positions while women occupy 40 positions.

Since there are so few women to even promote to senior manager, the number of women decreases in each level. So as we progress, you can see how as an entry manager, a senior manager, to a C-suite, the number of women is consistently decreasing. And you can also see the disturbing trend such as the percentage increases year over year is really small, and also the number of women who are just leaving the workforce is really great compared to the amount of men of the same level who are leaving the workforce. So now we have seen the data and I think now we know that there is a plan or the need for a plan as to why we need a strategy to engineer real impact, and what are the valuable steps you can take to do so, and what would be the ripple effect, the after effect, of what you can experience as a result of engineering your impact. So this is what the session is going to cover, so let’s get started.

The first thing I want to talk about is self-advocacy and why that is so essential. So a lot of us have problems about self-advocating for ourselves, so please tell me if you ever had issues with self-advocating for yourself. You can say thumbs up… Yeah, exactly. So this is a common problem that we all have about like, ‘Oh, why do I need to do this?” Right? I see all your responses and I hear you. I see you. This is the same with myself. Whenever I talk to my friends about what is the reason, this is the same thing about why you’re here. Mary, I see your comment about how you have self-advocated for other employees and helping people. I feel like as women, we are really good at doing that for others, but not for ourselves, and this is something that I really want to nail down and see how you can love yourself as much as we do it for others. Yeah, exactly. So I think we need to change it a little bit and look into ourselves as to what can we do to do that to ourselves.

So the reasons I hear are modesty, shyness, cultural norms, fear of no, also to be grateful. Yeah, that’s so true because if you don’t have the option to speak up for yourself, you are essentially losing your most powerful advocate. No one cares about your career more than you do. And why to speak up for your career? This is the most important thing, to make sure that people know what you’re working on and to be able to talk about it as to, okay, this is what I have done and this is the impact I have created. And also, in today’s world, there’s lots of reorgs going on about people trying to save money, companies merging, acquiring and all that, so this is an important reason, again, to talk about your success, and also to have control of your career. I feel like too much power is given to bosses as to how they decide what are we going to do next. Instead, I think it’s time to take some of the control for yourself and decide, this is what I want for me in my future and this is how I want it done.

So we spoke about the essentials and why to do it, and the way that I usually prioritize this is to make sure that you only say yes to the work that will actually lead to a promotion. So don’t take on work such as planning office parties, planning a holiday event. How many of you have done these things? I myself am guilty of all of those. I have planned office events, I have planned… Yes, exactly. So this is something that I really don’t want to spend time on anymore because this is not something that you would put in someone’s promotion document as to, “This person planned a birthday party.” Right. Exactly. We do it as a part of our natural process, but it’s a time thing as to what can you ruthlessly prioritize. If you can study something or talk to an important stakeholder at the same time as planning for this party, what do you prioritize? So being ruthlessly prioritizing and being able to pick the time and your projects carefully is important. And not all projects are even given to us.

Stretch assignments are only given to people who are in good terms with the stakeholders. So making time to establish that is important. And we’ll dive into more of that in the coming slides, but I just want to kind of emphasize that pick glamour work and not office housework. And also making sure that you have a sponsor and a mentor. Women are often over mentored and under sponsored, so making sure that you have people who will speak for you when the room is closed and you cannot be in the room to self-advocate is important. And also use social media to your advantage. If you have a boss who does not advocate for you, always use this. Always talk about your achievements, always talk about what have you done and what are you doing. It’s not just important to learn things and achieve things, it’s equally as important to talk about them. I cannot emphasize this enough. All in all, be your own cheerleader, be your number one cheerleader, and to be able to stand up and be able to advocate is, I think, comes with practice, but definitely doable.

The other thing that I wanted to dive into today is a relationship hero. So what do I really mean by this is essentially, we’ve all had disagreements at work. Have you ever had a disagreement with someone at work who as soon as you say something, they’re just like, “No.”? I have had this at my workplace. There are some people who as soon as you project an idea, they’re just like, “No,” Just because it’s coming from you. So being able to take that on and being able to advance that objective is really important, especially because you can actually hear what are they trying to say and what is their exact pain point. A lot of times I’ve found that I’ve actually waited for them to finish their sentence so that I can talk. I realized that’s not the way it should work. We should actually learn to disagree and kind of see what is the way forward in this for the both of us, what is the middle ground that we can so importantly do?

Learning how to disagree can be a huge career advantage. It’s not something every people is good at. A lot of people avoid disagreements by, “I don’t want to meet that person. I don’t want to be in that room when this disagreement is happening,” Is usually people’s philosophy, but learning how to disagree is very important, and also equally important is to get buy-in from stakeholders before you get into that meeting. So you know that this SVP already agrees with my idea, so I can propose this forward, is important. So knowing when to disagree, the timing of when to say what, and also getting as much stakeholder buy-in as you can before you know that you’re going to get into a contentious meeting is important. So being able to say that, yes, I disagree, and this is the reasons, so people know that you actually stand up for yourself and you have ideas that will help the company grow.

And it also depends on the type of company you work in. If you work in a company that actually promotes active disagreements and you can work through them, then that’s perfect. If you don’t, then that is a different strategy. So knowing what kind of company, knowing what is the kind of person, and… Yeah, it’s definitely challenging to find a culture where discussing disagreement is encouraged. So knowing the type of environment and knowing the type of person beforehand. Essentially, pregame the meeting and prepare for the meeting. Another thing that I would like to highlight is, essentially, objectivity. We’ve all had projects that we are really passionate about. You know that that’s a good thing and you know that this is what you should do. How many of you have had projects like that that you know in your gut that this is it? Yeah. So we’ve all had this before. The problem is if you have a person who is a person you have to convince to buy into the project, acting passionate about it actually works against you.

So this is another key of where you can clearly point out, these are the pros and these are the cons, and kind of leave it up to the decision maker, the key stakeholders to make the final call. So end of the day, the way this works, that I see, is a win-win is because no matter what is chosen, you always get the credit because you are the person who actually did the research to present the pros and the cons of both. So no matter what wins, you always win. And also because you are not the final decision maker, if this project goes sideways, you’re still okay. So making sure that objective point of view, and as a person who has that is important because people will know that, okay, this person always has a clear point of view and has a fair point of view. So even though it may differ from their opinion, people know that you are a consistent source of truth and that’s the kind of name to develop way going forward.

And this is one of my favorite books. I love this. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it. This is at a very pivotal point of tech for us. Like, Gen AI has taken every industry by storm. There’s not a single industry that’s unaffected by all this. So one thing I would suggest is knowing what your CTO cares about. What does your SVPs care about, what is it that matters to them, and upskilling yourself in this. I cannot emphasize this enough about how essential it is to get our teams and up skill our teams in this. Let’s say that your CTO really cares about Gen AI and wants to see how can they improve business process and where can we put this process in place. Being able to know that piece of information and being able to push in that perspective is important because that will give you the edge over people who are just watching this from the sidelines.

So don’t just get the information, but actually act on it so that you know are pushing on the right buttons and so that when there is an opportunity in that space opens up, they know that, oh, I know that this person is already upskilled in this area, or this person has already upskilled their team in this area, so why not consider this person? So I would up skill in this area, talk about this on social media so people know that you are learning and you’re upskilling and your expertise is known, hence also connecting your self-advocacy matter into this. So it’s essentially a ball of things that I would consider doing to engineer your impact.

And finally, I would also talk about paying this forward. A lot of people here are directors and managers who manage people, so this is really important for us as managers to be the best possible manager for our reports, to make sure that we avoid confusion, to make sure that we motivate and recognize our reports. And lots of people don’t leave companies, they leave their bosses, so to make sure that you’re the best possible boss for that particular employee and doing right by them is important. So let’s say that there is an office event that you need help for and you need planning. Have a spreadsheet of people who have volunteered before and make it fair so that everyone signs up regularly and you’re not asking anyone for volunteers, you’re instead just telling them, “This is a thing that I need help for. You did not volunteer. Can I get your help?” So let’s play it fair and make sure that we do right by our employees.

I would like to open this up for questions if there’s any. Yes, what skills to up skill at? I would look at what are the things your CEO or CTO are talking about? What is the thing that are being discussed in the quarterly earnings call? What is the thing that’s always coming up is kind of things what I would look into. And growing up in a different culture and absorbing a new culture is super difficult, I 100% understand this. And yes, it is 100% relearning new skills and how do we adapt and grow in that direction. Pinpoint the company’s CTO’s focus is essentially looking into what are the strategic objectives? Where are they putting the money at? If they’re putting money in AI or data models, then you know that’s where it is. If they’re putting the money in some other technology like data mesh or data governance, then that’s what it is. See where the money is going, that’s the skill you want to focus on.

“Are You Brave Enough To Write Your Eulogy?”: Eileen Grimes, Founder of Loved As You Are (Video + Transcript)

Eileen Grimes explains how writing your own eulogy is a mechanism to reshape your life, define your own path, and live your fullest life.

Transcript:

Eileen Grimes: First of all, I’m so grateful for you being here today with me. My name’s Eileen Grimes. I’ll dive into that a little bit later. But I first wanted to invite you today to show up as you are, as deeply as you’re able and whatever mental space you’re coming from. And first and foremost, I love the live chat piece of this, and I think the connection is so incredibly important here. So I would love to see who’s here. Say hi, show me you’re here. I see Sophia. Hi. How are you doing? Hey, Angie. And where people are coming from?

I find that these events are so incredibly powerful in the connections that we create, and so connect with each other, find ways to talk with each other in this space, but also outside, whether it’s in LinkedIn or other spaces. I would love to connect with people. So definitely feel free. We’ve got some LA, we’ve got Atlanta, Florida. I’m coming in from Spokane, Washington, but lived in Philly for a while myself, as well as lived in Berkeley for a little while and grew up in Seattle on the west side. So been all over and it’s wonderful to see so many people from so many different places. So I wanted to just first and foremost say “Hello, I acknowledge that you’re here. I’m not just talking into this empty space.”

So with that being said, please connect. That is one of the most powerful things that we can do as women, as allies, as people in this space together, is to find that connection because we are so much stronger when we’re together. Gosh, has this not been an incredible day with amazing speakers? I truly feel so honored that you made this space to show up today for yourself and just show up with me here on a topic that, my gosh, I don’t know that I would’ve necessarily wanted to approach, because we’re going to be talking a little bit about mortality.

So thank you for being brave just in showing up. I want to start. So one of the things that I’ve been doing or a lot of centering practices and been working on those with clients, and I felt really called to share one of those with you today. So wherever you are, hopefully in a space that you’re feeling comfortable, but do this to the best of your ability with wherever you are and wherever you’re at. So whether you’re sitting or standing, whatever feels the best for you, I want you to start by first grounding your feet to the floor. And if you feel comfortable closing your eyes and then start taking some breaths in. And as you breathe in, I want you to really focus on that space that’s deep down in your torso, down to your sacrum. That sacrum is that bone that’s fused together by five bones located at the base of your spine. And as you breathe in, I want you to imagine a ball of light in that space.

Notice its color, its brightness. Does it have a temperature or texture? As you breathe in, feel the light strengthen on every breath, whether that’s the size, the shape, the opacity, whatever way that is, let it strengthen as you breathe. And as you’re breathing out, I want you to let go of anything that doesn’t continue to feed that light. Anything that’s not yours to hold onto. Anything that’s just not part of you. If you feel called to put your hands on your belly or your heart, do so. If not, keep them to your side or at your legs or on your lap. Just to know your presence in this space, to feel your physical presence taking up space. I want you to continue to breathe in and out, noticing that light, not in judgment, not hoping for it to be something it’s not. Seeing it as it is. I want you to take about five more deep breaths in and out, just seeing that light.

Now as you take one more final breath in, I want you to hold it, hold the breath and that light as long as you’re able, let it fill you up and bring you here fully and completely. And then when you’re ready to let go, think about those last things you’ve been holding onto from today, from the week, from the month, my gosh, the year, we’re at the end of this year, that are going to allow you to finish this day for yourself at the most present that you can be. And then let it go. Let that shit go. When you’re ready, I want you to feel free to open your eyes if you’re not ready and just feel free to focus on that image as I talk and keep that sense of awareness inward because we don’t always get that time. We don’t always get that time to feel fully present. And if that’s what feels right, right now, please feel free to do so.

So my friends, thank you so, so much for having me. My name is Eileen Grimes. In addition to my roles as mother, author, founder, podcast host, chief growth officer of a human-centric leadership and cultural consulting firm, I’m an innovator and passionate, curious, continuously self-reflective, he and a healer, a light bringer, and the list goes on. Now, it wasn’t until after I decided to write my own eulogy in 2020 that I’d be able to fully sit with you here today and declare those things about myself.

I don’t know about you, but sharing about me, and especially things that are my strengths was not always my strongest trait or one that I felt very comfortable in. In fact, right now, I want you to share in the chat what are some of your strengths. For some of those of you who are in the corporate world, you might be in self-evaluation time right now, and it is time to shout that from the rooftops. How have you succeeded this year? What have you learned? How have you grown? Share some of those things in the chat. We want to celebrate each other and be able to hear those things. So what are your strengths?

Determine and resilient learner. I love that, Caitlin. Yes, definitely. Connecting dots across functionalities. Yes, it’s amazing what can happen when we see how we cross those gaps, certainly, and bringing people together. Relationship building, thoughtfulness. Empathetic. Mission driven. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Keep them coming. Growth mindset. Raised 500,000 for my nonprofit, Kendra. Heck yeah. That’s amazing. Oh my gosh, yes. Please keep these coming. I love this. Let us celebrate this, and that’s the next piece of this. I want you to take it further. And how are you celebrating those, not just writing them down. I love that we’re sharing these, but how have you paused to celebrate where you are now on December 6th, this Wednesday, December 6th, about how much you’ve learned and grown since January 1st of this year. I mean since the day you were born, really. But even since just January 1st, is anyone celebrating? I highly, highly encourage you to do so.

I myself love dance parties. But you… Celebrating by making awesome coffee for myself. Yes, Ingrid. Absolutely. So finding those ways that we can celebrate even if they’re small celebrations, but just to acknowledge that we’ve made it where we are. So definitely keep those coming. I love hearing these and we are allowed to take up space by sharing these things because we deserve this. We have done the work, and you are here and deserve to be heard. So I’m going to go back to the eulogy. So this lead up to writing was wrought in the fires of living my own life’s trauma from abusive relationships and losing pieces of myself to them throughout my life, to almost losing my dad to encephalitis in 2019. And then that facepalm of some large events in 2020 that we don’t need to talk about because we all know them.

It all came to a head. The past however many years long of hiding behind the walls of perfectionism and not feeling at ease with who I was and how I showed up in this world brought existential gut punch after existential gut punch. So I sat down with my own mortality and wrote, I asked myself, “If I left this earth today, what was I leaving behind? Who was I showing up as in this life I had been living? Was it the fullest version of myself? Was it one that I was okay being shared in front of family and friends?”

Do you ever feel like there’s, sometimes you hear the same message over and over and over and over, and then one day you hear it again, but this time it’s different This time it’s from the messenger who opens up your soul and allows the words to flow in. Well, apparently that messenger was me. After writing the first eulogy I cried. That cry you just can’t stop, the kind where years of shoving things down finally opened the floodgates and strangely brings in more calm. It was the start of grieving the time I had spent trying to be some version of myself for others I didn’t even know. After taking up space with those tears, I knew things were never going to look the same again. I took the time to decide for myself what I wanted from this life. What were the values I had to live this one life I had without abandoning myself?

What success mean to me and what were its dimensions? And I talk about dimensions because success isn’t one thing. I created the definition for me that was based on the impact that I wanted to have, the influence I had with others, the financial freedom that aligned for me and what time meant in a life that was my own version of success. Who did I spend it with and what did I spend it doing? With those self-reflections I wrote a new version of my eulogy, one that I now strive for daily, one, which my mind and heart are aligned and I show up as my full imperfect self because that’s the only one I can share my unique perspective and experiences that I’ve had. One that’s creative beyond belief, one that knows when we share spaces in which we can see each other. That’s what I’m talking about right here. We can see each other in our lights connecting. We can change the world.

So I ask you today to consider how are you showing up in your own life? Where do you dimm that light you felt and saw earlier? How are you leading those around you? In my heart, I know great leaders emerge when they ignite their own radiant light, shine bright as fuck, pardon my language, and spark the potential of others. And I want to see your light shine. So I’m giving you some homework. Did I mention I taught high school math on my very winding path to sitting with you here today? Nope, I did. So your homework is, as much of this as you want to take on. Define what success means to you. Follow those dimensions to success, what matters to you most? What is the most important to you? Get clear on how you want to show up in this world and share that with at least one other person.

And I am happy. If you want to share it with me, please, please, please slide into my dms or shoot me a message over on LinkedIn, whatever it looks like. But share it. Keep that light your very own and shine it as bright as you’re able to because it is you and you deserve so much to be seen, heard, and loved as you are. Thank you so much for having me here today. I am so grateful for having this opportunity to connect with all of you today. I hope you had a moment to pause, center and see the light that you truly bring into this world. I will end this a little early just to make sure that there is space if anyone has questions. But please, please, please enjoy the rest of your time here at Elevate and have a kick ass rest of 2023.

Thank you.

“Harmonizing Passions: Navigating a Career Transition from Music to Cybersecurity”: Danielle Good, Channel Account Manager at Thales (Video + Transcript)

Danielle Good shares her journey from being a professional singer to working in the cybersecurity industry. She emphasizes the importance of adapting to different audiences and roles, soliciting feedback, and celebrating wins in one’s career. Good concludes by offering advice on how to pivot into the cybersecurity industry, including networking, reading industry publications, and finding the right fit in a company.

Transcript:

Danielle Good: Thank you, Angie. It’s great to be here. My uncle came to visit us in Florida when I was six months old. One morning my mother was talking to my uncle and he said, “Your daughter has a beautiful voice.” My mother thought he was crazy. Flash forward a few years later, I was jumping up on our coffee table, belting out my favorite songs. This passion led to voice and piano competitions, musical theater productions to majoring in music in college, singing in Italy, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and even for Pope Benedict XVI. I moved to Manhattan to pursue my master’s degree in singing. I sang locally and wrote my first musical called Okay Cupid. Yes, it is based about online dating.

I loved everything about performing, the people, the places, everything but the pay and my rent was rising. My voice teacher recommended I work at a law firm as a day job. I was organized, worked well with clients, and by 5:00 PM I was jumping into rehearsals for my musical, auditioning, and gigging around the city. While I could now pay for my rent, the dream and glamor of a professional singer was starting to fade. I got an audition callback for a show where I was asked to line up on the back wall with a dozen other women where the director pointed and said, “Yes, no, no, yes, no.” I was a no. I turned my focus to my day job and my musical. I used the latest music software, the best recording devices, the best technology for Okay Cupid, but when I arrived to my nine to five, the law firm technology was behind the times, heavily paper-based, on-prem, and no backups.

So I proposed to modernize the tech. I owned the migration, the integration, and the education of all the lawyers, and this is where the start of my new passion came, helping people through the power of technology. At night, I was singing in a musical, and by day I was speaking in a boardroom. At night, I was telling stories of love and loss, and by day I was telling stories of data loss. At night, I was directing actors and by day I was directing a team. I finished writing my musical, raised money, cast it, staged it, worked with lighting engineers and sound engineers to produce my show. Seeing the culmination of my years of work all come to life on stage was a dream. And doing all of that made me realize it wasn’t just performing that I loved, it was putting on a show.

Today I may not be singing on stage, but I do put on shows. At Thales, I have the privilege of working with technology partners to make our customers safer. And as a channel account manager, I educate sales associates at resellers on cybersecurity solutions. In my day-to-day, I jump up on stage in front of 50 to 200 sellers leading technical and sales training. In this role, I’m creative and I’m filled with passion and purpose because I help companies protect their data, protect their people. It seems like every day we’re hearing about a data breach. Did you know that less than a quarter of companies know where their data is and that 52% of companies have experienced a breach at least once in their history? Now, more than ever, it’s important that companies are in the driver’s seat of their data. And there are so many jobs out there where you can help them, from marketing to engineering, to sales, to channel. My way into cybersecurity was not a straight line and yours doesn’t have to be either.

In my career tree, I have many branches, music, legal, operations, customer success, and channel sales. In music, I became a strong communicator, a strong presenter, but I needed money, so I worked in law. I was a customer of legal software, realizing it could be better, and spearheaded a successful implementation. I put the success of the migration on LinkedIn, and before I knew it, someone called me to consult and that led to a string of consulting gigs. If you follow me on LinkedIn, you’ll see I’m very active. I hit a ceiling as a director of operations and law and wanted to continue to grow, so I decided to move fully into tech and after six months of interviewing, I got a position with a ServiceNow partner implementing ServiceNow for customers. I then moved into leadership where I enjoyed growing my team and building their careers and helping our customers.

I wanted to move into sales because I wanted to be at the beginning of the customer relationship instead of joining in the middle. I could set customers up for better success by meeting them at the beginning and selling them the right solutions. In channel sales, I train resellers on Thales solutions, which means I am a teacher, a presenter, a panelist, from boardrooms to big stages. I’m still performing just as I was performing as a professional musician only now it’s to sellers and to customers, and whenever I jump up on stage, I remember the lessons I learned in music. What is my role? Who is my audience? Am I the lead in this customer meeting? Am I the supporting actor? Am I the comic relief as this customer is having a bad day or am I a teacher? For instance, as a supporting actor, I need to ensure not to upstage the lead role. Let them lead the questions because if I jump in, I might undermine their credibility.

Who is my audience? As an artist, I would adapt my singing, my body movement, and acting to my audience. How I perform in a small theater for an Italian-speaking audience is completely different to how I would perform in a large auditorium for American children. In tech, we must do the same. What level am I speaking to? What is their native language? Is it storage? Is it networking? Is it security? And what language are we technically speaking to? 2 inches deep, 20 feet, or 200 feet deep. Perfect practice makes perfect play. I grew up playing piano and for my four other siblings, they did not like listening to me practice because practice did not mean playing a piece from start to finish, it meant focusing on one measure over and over forwards, backwards, with piano pedal, without, with different accents, at different speeds. Now instead of listening for the melodic line in a measure, I’m listening to my customers refining their use case and measuring how I can bring value with the best solution for their needs.

I also apply this same discipline when presenting. My father once told me, “If you prepare 10 minutes for a 10-minute presentation, you’ll present for one hour. But if you prepare one hour for a 10-minute presentation, it will be 10 minutes.” Perfect practice leads to perfect performance. Whether it’s on a call with your customer, your team, or your boss, showing up prepared demonstrates your dedication, respect, and pride for producing good work. Solicit feedback. What landed and what didn’t? I used to record every performance when I was on stage. Not to listen to how I had done, but to listen to my audience, to hear what landed and what didn’t, what joke got laughs and what fell silent.

Soliciting feedback of what went well and what didn’t has helped me tremendously in my career. After a customer meeting, I do a team huddle. I ask, how did we do? What resonated with the customer? What could I have done better? When you’re a manager, it’s a little trickier. Your team can be reluctant to give any negative feedback, but by asking what would’ve made this meeting even better can set up a conversation that’s more positive versus critical. Soliciting feedback from your team, your direct reports, and your bosses can help you identify how your efforts are landing. Remember, all the world’s a stage and stage lights are bright. It may be difficult to see everyone’s perspective, but through collaborative feedback, we all grow.

Celebrate the wins, create the applause. After a performance, there’s always a big applause. Recognition of good work, recognition of performers. In today’s tech world, we do not celebrate our players enough. Take the opportunity to celebrate the wins, create the applause through kudos that echo up and down the company chain. CC their boss, their boss’s boss. Like any production, it takes a team, and when people feel a part of a team, the team will be more successful. Find your spotlight. In theater, you can walk out on stage, start to sing, only defined the spotlight didn’t make it to your mark. While maintaining character, you have to feel for the warm light on your face until you find it. In my career, there were times I could not feel the spotlight. I did not feel valued and I did not know which direction to go to find it. But by being true to myself, embracing change, being open to opportunities, and feeling for the warmth, I found my spotlight.

These are some of the principles I’ve followed in my career. While pursuing a career in music, anytime I met accomplished artists, I would ask for advice. And while at the time they were speaking about the arts, I realized that what they shared with me is still applicable now. I’d like to share two stories with you today. I was singing in a music festival in Perugia, Italy. One morning I woke up early and went down to the hotel restaurant for breakfast, and much to my surprise, no one was there except Anthony Hopkins eating his meal in the corner. I gathered my food, walked past Sir Hopkins, and said, “Good morning.” He said, “Good morning,” and asked what I was doing in Perugia. I said I was singing at a local festival. He invited me to join him for breakfast and told me one of the pieces he composed for orchestra was also premiering at a festival.

We chatted about life, the arts, opera, and piano. He told me he wasn’t good at school, but he was great at piano and that was going to be his future until one day he auditioned for a community theater production, and that’s when he knew that acting was the path he was meant to lead. I asked him, “What advice would you share to young artists?” He said, “Stay on top of your technique. You won’t notice a change day to day, but six months will go by and you’ll notice a wrinkle. Thank everyone around you. It’s the effort of the group that makes something extraordinary. And the minute you think you’re good, you’re dead. You stop growing.” Even in his eighties, Anthony has always had this always-growing, always-learning mindset. Anthony Hopkins won his second Oscar in 2020 at the age of 83.

A few years later after I graduated school, I attended a Julie Andrews book signing. She asked how I was doing. I said I was wonderful, and she said, “Yes, you are.” I congratulated her on her book and asked what advice would she offer to young artists? She said, “Always be prepared. Do your homework. You never know when an opportunity will pass right by your nose. And speak forward and out. Let your words carry. Let your voice be heard.” Although I originally applied this to singing, I still apply this to my day-to-day life. My voice can carry on stage, can carry in a boardroom, and as a leader, I embrace my voice and my message.

As women, we too often feel upstaged or that we need to stand in the chorus, but like Julie Andrews said, “We must let our voices carry, let our voices be heard.” I’d like to close on one final note. It’s okay for your dream at 5 to be completely different at 35 or 55. I’m still an opera singer. It’s part of my dream, but my dreams only got bigger. My dream of helping people through the power of technology, my dream of being a wife to my husband and a mother to my daughter. Dreams are complicated and messy, but as they come to you, awake within you, they are beautiful. So please imagine me on a coffee table as I sing. (singing). Thank you.

Oh gosh, I love all these comments. Thank you everyone. I see some comments in the chat regarding how to pivot into cybersecurity, and I’d love to offer a few pieces of advice. First and foremost, the cybersecurity industry is huge. I would say focusing in on the role that you think you’d be a good fit for is a good start, and then meeting with five people in that role. See what they like, what are the challenges, what are they seeing with their customers kind of learning the language of that role.

Next, I recommend reading. Every single day I wake up, I read The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, all of the tech sections to see what are some of the problems that my customers are experiencing, why did this data breach occur, what solutions do we need to make sure that we’re providing for our customers. In addition, Krebs on Security is also a great thing to follow. He’s an amazing journalist that focuses on cybersecurity. And then after that, once you start interviewing and connecting with different companies, you can see what’s a really good fit for you and how you can grow in that company.

Angie Chang: Thank you so much for your talk on your career transition, and we’re really excited to connect with you on LinkedIn, and now we’ll be moving on to our next session. So thank you, everyone.

Danielle Good: Thank you.

“From Good to Great: Strategies for Achieving Excellence in Technical Project Management”: Shayla Gibson, Technical Services Operations Manager at Treasury Prime (Video + Transcript)

In this session, Shayla Gibson emphasizes the importance of leadership and team management skills, stating that people skills are a superpower that can set project managers apart. She also highlights the need for technical proficiency, explaining that project managers should have a deep understanding of technical tools, processes, and industry standards.

Transcript:

Shayla Gibson: Thank you Amanda and hi everyone, I hope you’re doing well this lovely Wednesday and happy hump day everyone. So, welcome to Good to Great Strategies for Achieving Excellence in Technical Project Management.

Little about myself. My name is Shayla Gibson. I have roughly eight years experience in project management and seven of those have been in the banking and finance sector. I have led company-wide agile transformations and created and revolutionized project management techniques for small businesses and small corporations. Some of the topics we’re going to go over today; leadership and team management, technical proficiency, tools, and project management and its aliases.

So, first things first. What is the difference between project management and technical project management? And apologies in advance that this seems kind of obvious, but it’s the technical aspect. Technical project management requires knowledge and expertise in technical software development or specific technical domains and a deep understanding of technical tools, processes, and even industry standards. Project management can be on a wide range of projects and a wide range of industries, including construction, marketing, and event planning. It doesn’t mean that technical project managers cannot also be in those fields, but the difference mainly is just the technical aspect.

Now, leadership and team management. If you Google or search project management, this term is probably within the top five of that list of skills that you need. But I like to bullet down even further and for me, it’s the most important thing to have; people skills. People skills are your superpower. Can it be taught? Sure. But if you’re good with people, if you’re good at persuading people, sharing your narrative, your story, inspiring them, talking to them like a person, everything else can be taught. I can teach you the intricacies of how money truly moves through our banking system. I can teach you how to read NACHA Fedwire files. I can teach you change management or how a system works, but if you know how to manage people, manage a team, manage stakeholders and executives and everything in between, then that is your superpower.

And I want to make it clear, you do not need to be defined by being an extrovert or an introvert. I know plenty of introverts that are amazing people, have amazing people skills, and I know the exact opposite with extroverts. The thing you should focus on is, can you use your people skills? Because if you can, that is the excellence that’ll make you stand out from others.

Now, back to the defined bullet points that I have. You need to be able to lead a team, lead by example. If you are working hard, your team will also work hard. You need to inspire and motivate. Sometimes we have to work on things we don’t always care about or don’t even have the complete vision. Technical project managers and project managers need to have the ability to explain that vision and to keep their team motivated and going. You also need to have the confidence in the decisions that you have to make. For me, it’s making sure I have all the information, all the sides of the stories, and all the risks laid out. So even if I make a decision and it doesn’t pan out for the best, I was confident that I made this right decision with the information I had.

I have a little story time and it is going back to that bullet point about inspire and motivate. I worked with various technical teams. Some comprise the developers, engineers, product owners, product managers, you name it. This particular team was mainly developers and engineers and they worked well together. So this is not a story of where they weren’t working together, they didn’t mesh, and I came in and saved the day. No, they worked just fine with each other. If you ever meet me in person, I am this bubbly ray of sunshine and I actually really love bad jokes and dad jokes. So, every Friday that team will actually get a bad joke from me, a dad joke, and I can hear the eye rolls and the groans, and that’s what the team gave me too, but I still did it every single Friday. Eventually my team was, I’ll say, bold enough to all start ganging up on me and tell me how terrible these jokes are, that I need better jokes or some of them just don’t make sense at all.

Eventually, they started posting their own jokes. I didn’t even have to post anymore, but I still did because I love doing and I love hearing the groans. Eventually, they started giving each other feedback on these jokes, whether they were good, they were bad, whatever. Eventually, my team started going from working well with each other to great to excellent. Why? Because they were able to communicate together. They were able to collaborate and give each other feedback. Now, I’m not saying this is the secret sauce. All I know is that I’ve done it multiple times with various different groups and I’ve gotten the same outcome. So that is me using some sort of people skill, my superpower, to inspire and motivate a team.

Technical proficiencies. So what do you really need to know to be considered a technical project manager? It’s not knowing how to code. It’s not me logging into GitHub and looking at failed processes in sandbox, debugging it, and figuring out the best way to resolve it. It’s not me knowing that in a NACHA file for ACH payments, one place I can find a routing number is in the file header record, which always begins with 101 followed by the routing number of the originating sending bank. It also includes some date timestamps and the originating bank and the company name. But what language they use to code, knowing that some of their errors are flagged in GitHub, or even that my engineers need help debugging it, maybe this is an error that we see regularly.

Now, let’s go back to that technical statement that I just said, and feel free to fact check me on those routing numbers. Understanding the technical aspect, understanding the technical language and be able to spit it back out so others can understand is key. Things are always changing so you need to stay on top of them. So I’ll repeat that technical statement, then I’ll repeat it back in a more digestible way. So the technical statement. For a NACHA file, one place I can file a routing number is in the file header record, which always begins with 101, followed by the routing number of the originating sending bank. It also includes date time stamp, as well as the name of the originating bank and company name.

Here’s a more digestible way. ACH, it’s a payment type. And for banks to digest it, there’s a file format that’s called NACHA and this format is regulated federally. So there’s certain rules that all banks need to follow. The routing number, and I’m sure everyone here has opened a checking account or a saved account, we all get paid. You get a routing number. In this massive network of banks, that routing number is how we know which bank is which. So Bank of America, Chase, you name it, they all have their own individual routing numbers. So if I’m looking at this NACHA file and if I can find a line that starts with 101 and then right after that should be the routing number. Now there’s additional data in there and sometimes it’s going to look like a date timestamp or company name, but as long as I find 101, right after that should be the routing number.

That’s much easier to understand, right? And that is what we need to do as a technical project manager. Understand the technical and have the ability to rehash it for others to understand. We don’t need to be the smartest in the room, but we need to know how to talk to them.

Common questions I always get asked is, where can I get training for this? And the safe answer is starting with a PMP or a course in project management, figuring out what types of technologies or software are in your industry of choice, and learning about them. But this is the digital age and I can’t tell you countless times someone has asked me about a project or to look into something that I have never heard of. But YouTube has, Google has, and I am never shy to ask 1,000,001 questions. Sometimes it just takes that initiative.

Lastly, cross-functional understanding. Going back to the example I gave, not everyone in your company is going to have the same level of knowledge as you. So you need to be able to rehash those technical aspects and understand the 360 view. On the screen, you’re going to see a list of tools and you don’t need to know all of them and you may have came across them, you may not have, and you may, in your career as a technical project manager or a project manager. But if I can zoom in on one, the project manager software box, there’s two listed in there, but there’s probably 1,000,001 out there. Project manager software tools are all the same with different colors and maybe a slightly different feel to them. But let’s say you know nothing about Tableau or Power BI, once again, it’s a digital age. So somewhere someone has figured out how to use it and has put it online. Let’s work smarter, not harder.

Professional development. So I already touched a little bit about this, but just to give you some more color, I am actually currently studying for my PMP. So in the world of project management and technical project management, there is the infamous question, PMP or not? All I can say is this; whether you get one or not, experience is going to be what you can follow on. And also a PMP might help you get your foot in the door. I don’t have a complete answer, but just like anywhere else, if you look up professional development, you need to keep networking, talk to other project managers, technical project managers, certifications out there, especially within the industry of choice, and conferences and events like the one you’re attending now.

All right. Last but not least, technical project management and its aliases. So here’s a short list of what a technical project manager can look like in the world. It can be an IT operations manager, the DevOps project manager, or a implementation manager. If it walks like a project manager, or a technical project manager, it probably is, but just make sure you ask your questions too. Here’s an example.

So at my current company, my title is a Technical Operations Manager for our Technical Services Management team. I work on special projects that pertain specifically for the Technical Service Management team or the Operations team, and I mainly focus on our internal clients. But when I started at this company, I was actually implementation manager, getting our clients’ implementations up and running. It was very customer facing. I was working hand in hand with our solution engineers, our engineers, our product managers, and I was in charge of creating a template project plan and then following that through through its ups and downs. And before that, I’ve had many other tiles, but they were all within project management. Just make sure you do your research and you ask your questions when you’re seeing titles out there.

And thank you everyone. So glad you came to listen. Please get in contact with me on LinkedIn. Amanda, I don’t know if we’re open for questions. Do we still have time?

Amanda Beaty: Yeah, you’ve still got a couple minutes.

Shayla Gibson: I see one in the Q&A, I think this is a good one. So, how do you think AI is going to change up the situation for program or project managers? I think AI is a tool that we need to get used to and that we can use to our advantage. Going back to that this is a digital age and that there’s so much data out there, there’s so many tools out there, AI is just another tool that we can actually learn to use for our benefit. So, I would actually encourage you to learn a little bit more about AI and see how you could use it in your day-to-day. But I think they are only up to date until April this year, so be careful what you ask AI or ChatGPT or whatever you use, and it is just a tool, so you will have to actually read it and make the decision if you can use it or not. I will take one more if I can and I said-

Amanda Beaty: Yeah, go ahead. Yep, you’ve got three more minutes. Go ahead.

Shayla Gibson: So, do recruiters look for PMP or mainly reply, I think rely, on the experience of project management and roles? I think that’s really dependent on the company. Like I said, some really, really would love to see a PMP and others are more lax on that. So, unfortunately there’s not a really good answer, it really depends on the company, but sometimes the PMP just gets your foot in the door, and then other times if you can prove that you have the experience.

How to mention transferring skills in another industry when transitioning to tech. Are all program and project managers fundamentally doing the same core work? That’s a great question. If you have the basis of project management, you should have some of the basic skills to go and take that from one industry to another. However, I will say this, in tech it’s all about your experience with tech and how much you know. So if you are going to be transferring from a different industry into tech, make sure you do your research, learn as much as you can on some of the tech fields and most popular fields out there. And that way you can still use that within your resumes and your interviews to talk about that experience. I think I’m at time now.

Amanda Beaty: Yep. Let’s go ahead and call it and we’ll pop over to the next session. And thank you so much, Shayla, everybody really enjoyed this and thanks everybody for joining us and we’ll see you in the next session.

Shayla Gibson: Thank you.

“What Does ‘Being Innovative’ Mean in Digital Transformation?”: Anusha Dharmalingam, Executive Director and Senior Architect at Athenahealth (Video + Transcript)

Anusha Dharmalingam emphasizes the need for a culture of innovation within companies and provides tips on how to foster such a culture. She explains that innovation is about putting creative ideas into practice and highlights the importance of desirability, feasibility, and viability in the innovation process.

Transcript:

Anusha Dharmalingam: Hope you can all see the screen and can hear me fine. So here I am to talk about what does being innovative mean in the digital transformation. So a few words about me… Thank you for the feedback. It’s really hard to know if everybody can hear me. So a few words about me. I’ve been in the industry for 23 years, primarily in the technology industry. So today I play a role of an executive director and a senior architect at Athena Health. So I have played different roles, as you can see over the pie chat, like a software engineer, a development manager, program manager, and architect. I have been in the consulting, banking, and high-tech, and healthcare industries. My expertise is in the cloud technologies, and I’m really very passionate about women leadership and especially in the technical leadership. I’ve led digital transformation projects over at various companies at different roles.

On a personal note, I am a mother of two boys and I love to spend time with them and to bike when I can. So with that, let’s move on to our topic for today.

So I would like to start this presentation with a small story, a story that would ground us all on the essence of innovation. At the same time, give us the significance on why the culture of innovation is important for the long-term success of a company. It’s a story about a Stanford graduate back in 1990. He was a computer science graduate who started a company named Pure Storage… Pure Software, sorry. It was a company that built diagnostic software for unique based applications. Back in those days in 1990, that was very rare. So the company gained quick in popularity and had revenue that doubled year over year. So finally they sold the company in 1996 to National Software and they were very successful at it.

So this founder of the company had a moment in his life which would change the movie watching experience for all of us down the line. So the incident goes like this. He basically rented a videocassette from Blockbuster for a movie named Apollo 13. Despite his wife’s continuous reminder to return the cassette, he actually misplaced it and returned six weeks late. This incurred him about $40 of late fee. He had a very embarrassing experience on this that he decided not to even share it with his wife, and was constantly thinking about this on why did he have to pay a late fee for just misplacing his video rental. So he misplaced it and he was not very happy about it. So later when he went to the gym, he realized that the gym’s model of working was far better than what he had experienced while renting his movie.

So in the gym, all he had to do was pay $30 per month and there was no limits on number of workouts that he could do on a monthly basis, and there was no late fee concept. So he wondered, what if he applied the same concept, a concept of a monthly rental for the movie rental business? And that’s exactly what he did. After selling the Pure Software to National Software, he started a company which we all cherish today as Netflix. So in 1997, Reed Hastings, along with Marc Randolph, started Netflix as a movie DVD rental that would be delivered to your doorstep. So as customers, all you had to do was log into the website, choose your movies that you would like to watch, and the movies would be delivered to you at your doorstep for no late fees, but for a monthly subscription fee. So this whole business model took a while to gain popularity, but around 2000 they started making profit.

So in 2000s they went to Blockbuster, at that time a $4 billion company with 6,000 brick and mortar stores, went to them and said that, “Hey, could we partner?” Could you buy us by taking 49.5% of our share so that we could become a digital arm for you? But Blockbuster rejected that offer, and so Netflix went back to the DVD rental business. But Netflix did not stop there. They observed the digital era that was picking up in 2000s, so Hastings went to his board and said that we are in a pivotal point for our company. We either choose to stick to what we have been doing, or we embrace the digital transformation that is going on in the industry and start moving on to the steaming services business. Very reluctant, the board slowly accepted Hastings proposal and they invested on that proposal. And thereby in 2007, Netflix started their streaming services.

And from then on we all know what happened. Netflix thrived and thrived. And they did not just stop there. That is not the only reason they thrived. They actually build the culture of innovation within their company and they continue to innovate on a day-to-day basis. Some of their innovations that we are all familiar of are their recommendation algorithm, which suggests movies for us when we watch Netflix, or the ability of being able to stream out of Netflix on either your movies or on your phones or on your DVD players when those things existed, on your iPad, whatever. In all possible devices. So they worked with hardware vendors to make sure that that is possible. And apart from that, Netflix also started producing their original content. So we have their series, their movies, and whatnot today. So with all these things, they have now made their name as a common household name, not just across the United States but across the world.

While along the same lines, Blockbuster on the other side stuck to their original model. They did not adapt to any transformation that was happening in the world and they had filed bankruptcy in 2010, and they do not exist anymore. So these two companies gives us a stark contrast of the power of innovation, the transformation that it could bring in any long-lasting business. So this clearly sets us on why the topic of discussion today is super important. So with that, let’s start talking about… There are two things I wanted to cover in this whole session. One is to understand deeply what does innovation mean. And number two, to give you all some tips based on my experience on how to build a culture of innovation at your workplace.

So when you talk about innovation, it has a slightly different meaning than creativity. Creativity is about an idea, right? You have an idea on how to do something. Innovation is about putting that to practice. It is about making change to something that’s already working, something that’s already established. You’re making a change to that. It does have some few characteristics that are being shown here, the desirability. So for you to do an innovation, that should be a need, that should be a customer demand. And this demand can be implicit or explicit. Sometimes the demands are implicit. That might not be an explicit need for that, but it is somewhere there. There’s an indirect need for it. So that is the desirability. And the next important thing is feasibility. You can have whatever desires you want and you can come up with ideas on how to implement the desire, but that implementation should be feasible. It should be on top of your current operational capabilities.

You can’t be a company doing a movie dental business and want to suddenly provide cargo for airplane, or something of that sort. It should be aligned to your business. And the third important thing is the viability. The cost for buying that product, or the cost for building it should make some business sense. It should be possible, it should mean something, or it should be delivered in a medium that is possible to be consumed. So those are the viability things. So when we innovate, it is important that it has characteristics of all these three things and it intersects to meet at a sweet spot, which will give us a successful innovation. So with that, let’s slowly talk about why do we innovate. What better way to explain that than the story we just talked about, that clearly showed the contrast of a company that innovated and the company that stuck back and what happened.

But all said, the main thing on why we innovate is to meet our customer needs. So we need to deeply understand our customers, empathize on what they actually would need, and build products or solutions for that. It also helps us to have a competitive advantage in the market. Of course, it’s for growth, for us to make money and reduce the cost of how we are doing things. And overall, it provides adaptability. You’re constantly in the lookout of what is happening in the industry in the world, and you’re able to adapt to what it is. And no one said that innovation is easy and it can be easily done. It really involves some thought process and some investment to kind of get this going and to keep it up and keep it running in your workplace and the company.

There are different types of innovation that could happen. Let’s start from the right corner over here. The radical innovation. This is the one which I was talking about earlier about implicit demand. So when smartphone came into the industry, none of us knew that we needed a phone which could do all in all everything, where we can watch movie and listen to music. We didn’t know that we needed it, but it did come. So somebody radicalized and they introduced it into market and we soon adapted to it. So that’s a radical innovation. A disruptive innovation is in an existence market. So radical innovation creates a new market, a disruptive innovation is on an existing market, a totally different way of doing business. Say for an example, an Airbnb. We already had a hoteling industry and a lot of hotels, but Airbnb came up with a new model which would disrupt that and do something different.

Same with Squire. We all knew how to use credit cards, but to enable to swipe credit cards on a mom-and-pop shop using just a smartphone, that was a disruptive innovation. If you move towards the left, the architectural innovations are one where in an existing product, in existing market, whatever you’re doing, you’re doing a significant improvement. Doing something drastically different that would strengthen your space in the market, like the GE’s Ecomagination products. These are products that already existed, but to adapt to the climate change and being concerned on the environment, GE came up with these new set of products that made them leaders in those kind of products. Incremental innovations are one which I’m sure most of the companies are doing on a day-to-day basis. For example, the new versions of Apple iOS versions, which comes with newer features, or even the Netflix recommendation algorithms that keeps changing constantly. I’m sure all of us are continuously evolving our products that we develop, and those are all part of incremental innovations.

So at a different point of time, the companies would play a different role in each of these quadrants. And like already mentioned, innovation is not a one-time thing. It’s very similar to the agile methodology that is being recommended for a development process. It’s very similar to that, but it does have its own differences. So as you can see, the cycle starts here, right? You challenge the status code that you are in today. You say that you want to move away from whatever you have and you want to do something different. That’s where the creativity idea sparks up. You take the idea and you build, what we call as a prototype, or a minimum viable product, and that’s when the cycle starts.

You take the product and then you apply it to your user base and see if the product has its feasibility and is it viable to build it. And once it is done, you measure the metrics out of it. It is always a data-driven decision. So you measure saying that how much impact did it make in terms of the users, in terms of the revenue that it generates, in terms of the metrics that it provides you, performance. Whatever makes sense to that particular idea, you want to evaluate those metrics. And if those metrics are great, you would want to continue invest more on that and start to build that as a product and evolve it again and again. What’s very different about innovation cycle is sometimes it could so happen that these metrics clearly indicate that the idea that you came up with does not work. It’s not going to work. It’s either not viable or it’s not feasible, or it is not exactly meeting the demand that your customer wanted.

So in those cases, you happily pivot. You celebrate failure. What it means is you basically learn from what happened. You learn from what was done and how was it different than what was asked, or how was it different in terms of the cause that involved and whatnot. So these things are compiled and that is what is applied in your next set of learning. So this cycle continues and this is what is the innovation cycle. And this is very important that it continues on and on, and it does not stop. To have such an environment where these innovation cycles continue, you need to make it a part of your culture. It does not happen like one-offs, it has to be part of the company’s culture to do that.

For that, I would like to quote this from Grace Hopper, which totally resonates on this theme, “The most dangerous phase in the language is, We have always done it this way.” If you all stick to saying that we have always done it this way, then there is no way we are going to innovate. We have to challenge the status quo, that’s the first step. So you need mechanisms within your company or within your group, whatever level you can operate in, to promote those creativity ideas. And how do you do that? You do that by creating a conscious environment where those ideas prop up.

So you need to have forums where you can listen to your customers, where you bring in all people from different levels, from different groups all together, and democratize the idea generation process. You talk about the problem that your customer had presented, or you talk about the problem that the company is facing and democratize the ideas. So create an innovation lab. Innovation lab is where again, you are throwing a problem space and you are having people come up with ideas, and you pick few ideas that might work and you try it out. That’s pretty much it.

In all these environments, the hierarchy of your company structure is super important. It has to be flat, but it has to be strong. It has to be flat in the sense that the participants of the innovation group or the members or the employees should feel very safe, courageous, and should not worry about what would happen and things like that. So it should be such a safe environment for them. We need to enable the environment to be experimental, but it should be highly disciplined. When I say highly disciplined, it means that you should have proper focus on the scope of what you’re trying to achieve and the metrics that will be measured as part of that.

It’s quite successful in the companies that I’ve worked on when the reward structure is very much aligned to these innovation impacts that you make. So it naturally encourages and motivates the members when your reward structure is aligned to that. And also, it’s important that we provide the training and the tools required, especially in the technology area, so they can learn the new technologies. Like now gen AI is a thing and everybody would like to learn it, so provide the training for that. And always encourage collaboration. So it is not one kind of role, it has to be collaborative across multiple teams.

The last, it’s important to learn from these failures and treat them as opportunities, and also very important to have some fun when you do all these things. So with that, I would like to leave this whole session with the simple innovation framework that you all remember, especially on this winter month of December, FROST. So let’s remember this FROST. FROST is nothing but being focused, so the innovation group should be focused on what they’re trying to do. It should be regular. It should not be like, “Oh, I have a escalation today. I have an emergency today, so I cannot do it.” It should happen at a regular cadence. It can be once a week or once a release or once a month, whatever makes sense for your organization. It has to be on a regular cadence.

It has to be open, like it said. You do not have to specify this is how we should be done, it’s more open. Just take the problem, the ideas flow, and you will try and implement it. Safe. Everyone should feel safe, and people should be ready to accept their mistakes and learn from it. They should be ready to take risks. It’s a trusting environment. Trust each other kind of an environment.

Angie Chang: [Inaudible 00:18:11] sorry.

Anusha Dharmalingam: The most important thing, the output of this whole thing should be tangible. It should be tangible and it should be put to use for building your product.

Angie Chang: Thank you.

Anusha Dharmalingam: I want leave with this note, that remember FROST. So you can build an innovation culture within your organization if you adopt these few techniques within the group.

Angie Chang: Thank you so much for sharing this-

Anusha Dharmalingam: And to conclude the session-

Angie Chang: We are out of time.

Anusha Dharmalingam: Thank you so much for listening to me. And this is my LinkedIn, feel free to reach out to me and I will share the-

Angie Chang: Thank you. Thank you so much.

“Prepping for Execution: Metrics Interviews for Product Managers”: Tanvi Shah, Principal Product Manager at Upwork (Video + Transcript)

In this session, Tanvi Shah discusses the importance of metrics in product management and focuses on the concept of North Star metrics. North Star metrics are particularly important for prioritizing features, aligning with stakeholders, and measuring personal and company success. Shah outlines a four-step process for finding the North Star metric, which involves thinking about the business, identifying audience segments, brainstorming metrics, and narrowing down based on the stage of the business.

Transcript:

Tanvi Shah: Hi, everyone. I’m going to be talking about metrics and we’ll talk about interviews and we’ll dive into one specific topic, but let me quickly thank you, Amanda, for the introduction, but I just wanted to do a quick, better introduction here where I’ve basically worked as an engineer starting off at NetApp and then I transitioned into product management into the B2C world. Worked at a number of tech companies, both small and big, but being in B2C has helped me being a lot more metrics focused. I’ve learned a lot on the job as otherwise do. Personally, I’m also a mom. I have a six-year-old son. I also am a trained Indian classical dancer and I love reading books on the side. You might see me binging on two, three books at the same time. That’s a little bit about me.

Before we dive deep, I want you all to keep this in mind. Whatever I share today is like a toolbox. Use whatever you need, tweak it as you need it. It’s not gospel truth, you can change it. Don’t forget the big picture. When we talk about metrics, we get so deep into it, but we forget what the big picture is, so don’t forget that. Do a lot of mock practices when you’re thinking about interviews and prepping for interviews, and then run through more examples of interviews and compare it against the real world and quarterly statements of big public companies to understand what metrics they’re following. At the end of it, it’s really fun to understand metrics and to track them, so have fun while you’re doing this. It’s really important to keep the fun part of it here too.

All right, why do we need metrics? Let’s start there and then as we keep going through, I’ll ask a few more questions. Please interact in the comments. It helps me understand if some of this content makes sense or if not, we can diverge a little bit here. So why do we need metrics, quickly? We want to make decisions. We want to make projections. We want to have quarterly reports. We want to understand how an AB test works out. We want to understand what is the opportunity analysis for any feature that we’re trying to do, and that’s where metrics comes into play. There are three types of metrics, interviews generally. We talk about North Star metrics, there is a trade-off metric conversation or a diagnosis question. Diagnosis questions are not as much used these days, but I’ve still seen a few. North Star and trade-off, really big topics. North Star, there is another variation called dashboard. It’s kind of treated with the North Star here, so that’s why I’ve clubbed it together.

Today we’ll talk only about North Star because we just have a very limited amount of time. Why is a North Star metric important? Why do you think we should all care about it? Basically for three things. One, it helps us prioritize as PMs which feature is more important in the roadmap. It also helps align with stakeholders who might be talking about different metrics, and then you align metrics against company metrics and it ultimately helps succeed as a person because your performance review goals are definitely tied to this, and as a company it definitely helps them succeed.

Now, how do we find the North Star metric? It’s a four-step process. The first step is going to be thinking about the business. We’ll run through a mock question and we’ll go through the answers, but the first half, first piece here is thinking about the business. The second half of it is thinking about audience segments. These two then go into the third part, which is thinking about broadly brainstorming the metrics for the business and the audience, and then the last one, the fourth point, is to narrow it down based on where the business is at, in which stage is it, and we’ll go through all of them now.

Let’s run through this. What is the North Star metric for Airbnb? I think an example explains it better than simply giving ideas and how to do it in framework. For Airbnb, let’s start with what kind of business is Airbnb? In this case, the first thing that we want to start thinking about is the different types of services Airbnb offers or different business lines that it has, and the second one is it a B2B company or a B2C service? Again, they have business lines and what are the services here? With that, if you can take a stab at it, can you answer in the comments, what kind of services does Airbnb provide and what type of business models are these? This will help us dive into the next part. Add in the comments if you can answer the different types of services, types of business models.

Perfect. I see B2C. Yes, travel. Great. I’m seeing amazing things. One more thing to remember here is Airbnb has two major business lines. They do have the whole rental side of it. They also have experiences and that’s something that came up new. Now for each of these business lines, Airbnb travel is a B2C as some of you mentioned here, and Airbnb experiences both B2B and B2C because they do work with small businesses that are providing services. Now with that in mind, let’s talk about audience segments. How do we think about audience segments? Let’s run through a quick example.

For an audience segment example, let’s think about Amazon. For Amazon, there are three major types of audiences. We have the end consumers, there is the shopkeeper of B2B of business, and then there’s also the delivery person that’s involved in the Amazon side of things. [inaudible 00:06:22] is just an example to showcase the difference audience segment. What we are trying to do here is to then bring strong metrics. Who are the audience segments at this time for Airbnb? Can you answer in the comments based on the different business lines that we talked about? I’ll give a minute here. Who could be the audience segments for Airbnb Travel experience? Yes. Travelers host services. Yes, that’s correct. For experiences, who are the audience segments? Yes, consumers. Yes, yes, all of that is correct. I’m seeing good, but when we think about these different types of experiences, it’s necessary divided out.

For renters, there’s renters, there is the host, and for experiences, there are the experience seekers, the end users, there are hosts, and also there could be guides for physical tools or maybe there’s an in-between party that’s helped manage these services. This gives you the broad picture and now we go broad. Let’s try to find metrics for each business line and for each audience type. What we do is basically we use something like the Heart or the AARM metrics framework that’s out there to actually think about metrics for each of these audience segments. I’m going to pause here for a minute and ask again for the interaction in the comments. What are the metrics for each service type that we talked about? We have the Airbnb travel experience and the Airbnb experiences. What could the metrics be? If we go back to thinking about acquisition, engagement, monetization? What kind of metrics can we start thinking about for travel and for experiences?

Can some of you add it in the comments and then I can show what I came up with when I was doing it? Yes, number of bookings in a month, number of renters, hosts. Yes, very good. We also have, don’t forget, the Airbnb experiences. We want to ensure we are thinking of metrics for both service lines for the different audience segments. We have hosts on the platform, number of nights booked, and also visitors who are coming back. We have talked about metrics on all angles, also there’s revenue. Then on the experiences side, we are thinking about the number of experiences booked, revenue from these experiences, number of hosts, number of visitors. Again, all of the things that we did on the audience segment and the business side comes in here when we start brainstorming metrics.

Now, if we have a list of metrics, the next thing is to narrow it down to get to the North Star metric. What do you use to narrow down metrics now? We basically use stage of the product to define the company goals and to help us narrow down metrics. This is a rough framework where early stage companies are more about acquisition, product market fit goes into engagement. Growth is about user segment acquisition, engaging existing users, monetizing, and then expansion and maturity. Now, let’s think about the two business lines we talked about, Airbnb travel and Airbnb experiences. What kind of stage are they at? Can you answer in the comments again if you think Airbnb travel is growth or expansion or product market fit at this time? Yes, Airbnb travel is definitely mature. What about Airbnb experiences? Is it in the growth stage? Is it in the expansion stage? Is it in the product market stage? Yes. Airbnb experience is actually in the growth stage at this point. The comments are right on.

Mature phase, you think about monetization, retention as metrics. For growth phase for Airbnb experience, you’re thinking about engagement, monetization. Now this helps us narrow down from that bigger list of metrics to get to the North Star metric for Airbnb. Without giving away too much here, I wanted to basically take one beat here to really understand if we get the North Star. For Airbnb travel, who do you think is the North Star? We talked about a number of metrics here. Out of this, which is the North Star metric for Airbnb rentals or Airbnb experiences? Can anyone add it in the comments? Not sure would be one or two metrics at this point of time. Basically I know Priya asked what is the question? The question is trying to understand which is this one metric that really defines what should the company really aspire for?

Airbnb rentals, yes, nights booked is actually a good one. This is what it comes up with ultimately. Nights booked and revenue are actually the two metrics that they look at and they actually report this in all of the quarterly reports and Airbnb experiences is experiences booked revenue from experiences. Yes, the growth and maturity stage metrics look really similar, but I’m sure back in Airbnb they’re looking at a few deeper level metrics, but when we’re asked to report metrics, which is at a very high level, what is the North Star metric that I have to worry about as an Airbnb PM for renters or for Airbnb experiences or what is the CO looking at? These are the metrics they look at and they report on that. Basically this is a Q3 2022 readout of their quarterly report. Airbnb rentals and experiences, they reported 100 million nights booked and experiences booked 29% revenue year over year.

Now how are you going to use North Star metrics? You are going to use North Star metric as a PM most of the times to really prioritize your roadmap. But this exercise comes up a lot in the interviews and this is one of the frameworks of basically using it to get to your North Star metric in going broad and then narrowing down. I want to end it with saying that if you are interested in more metrics, if you’re interested in understanding more about trade-off and the others, well, definitely there is this … I think there’s a survey after this. Please express interest. But apart from that, these are the resources that you should look at. Lean analytics has been a Bible for all of my metrics things. I go back to it every time I interview.

I’ve heard about Gopractice.io. I have used a little bit of it. This is great for practicing and also don’t forget to mock interview with others, especially a lot of these execution interviews happen that way. That’s pretty much it. It was a quick rundown of metrics, generally takes longer, but if you have any other questions, please let me know. Amanda, I think we are right on time.

Amanda Beaty: Yes, you did great. Thank you. It’s a lot of interaction there. It looks like the audience enjoyed your talk. Thank you so much. Thanks to everybody for joining us and we’ll see you in the next session. Thank you so much.

“Building High Performance Teams”: Stephanie J. Neill, Vice President, Product, Twitch at Amazon (Video + Transcript)

Stephanie J. Neill discusses high-performing product teams and scaling effective product leadership. She emphasizes the importance of creating a high-performance culture and outlines the key elements of a high-performing product team, including clarity of purpose, psychological safety, and effective processes. Neill also highlights the importance of team composition, incentives, and managing underperformers.

Transcript:

Stephanie J. Neill: Thanks for having me Angie. And hi everybody. Wish I could see you. So I’m Stephanie and I’m here to talk to you today about high-performing product teams as well as how to scale effective product leadership. I do want to say before I get started, I lost my voice inconveniently today, so if my voice is cutting out, it’s not your computer, it’s just me. But yeah, hopefully it stays strong. Alrighty. So a quick intro. I’ve been doing product basically my entire career and close to I guess two decades now, I’ve been leading high-performing product teams. I’ve worked across a number of big tech conglomerates generally on e-commerce or content marketplace type sites as well as platforms and services. So the internal guts, all the fun stuff across federal government as well as private sector. I tend to enjoy leading smaller teams, so I’d say my sweet spot’s probably around 20. Smaller teams with outsized impact working on a mission-critical endeavor that helps vulnerable populations.

I guess the last part is probably the most important to me. I really want to feel like I’m having impact on people who need it. And then personally, I’ve lived all over the world as the child of a diplomat does, moving every couple of years. So I think it’s probably pretty small on the slide, but you can see a lot of the little blue dots just littered around. I’m also a Enneagram three for those in the know, which is basically very success-oriented and driven, but I guess always wanting to feel that I’m bringing value in everything that I do, which I think is probably a universal trait, but they ascribe it to the number threes. I’m also a Pisces, so sensitive and confused, I guess. Two fish swimming in different directions. And then I don’t have this on here, but I’m a big I little D on the DISC assessment, which means I’m basically a megaphone.

I love to amplify people and ideas and concepts that align with what I believe. And then I’m also a ENTJ, a commander personality, so very focused on getting shit done. And yeah, in general, I love these little personality tests and I actually see them as great tools for teams, to be honest, to compare and talk about themselves because one, it creates self-awareness, but it also creates shared awareness across the teams of why certain people might behave certain ways or might think certain ways. Of course the disclaimer is these are pseudoscience, so it’s really just a fun thing, but I think it really helps with culture and getting to know each other and all that. So that’s part of why I wanted to share with you today.

So a lot of you have probably seen this adage, I’m sure it’s been across the internet forever, but people plus process equals performance. I very much subscribe to this philosophy, and as I’ve mentioned, I’ve been leading teams for far longer than I’ve actually been shipping products, like hands-on product. And as many of you probably know from experience, when you move into management, you get further and further from a lot of the aspects of PM that initially drew you to it and gave you life. So there’s no more exhilaration of a launch day when you know you’re accountable for success or failure. There’s no more knowing every detail of how things work or what your customers need. You have to rely on others for that and you should, because no one person can keep all of this in their brain. And there’s no more deep camaraderie that comes with the pain and challenge of shipping a product with your building partners.

So this can be a huge mindset shift for people who move up into higher leadership. How I flipped that in order to keep my personal product power source strong was really to continue to apply product thinking at a more detailed level by thinking of my team as a product portfolio, like not the actual products they were managing. Of course, practically speaking, that is a portfolio, but thinking about the actual people as products in my portfolio. And so really looking at them and understanding what’s their vision for themselves and how does this company, how does this role, how do I fit into that and what does success in their life look like? What are they really trying to accomplish and achieve? Where are they’re trying to go? And then working with them to really put together a plan. So to me, each team member is a product and their success is ultimately my success, which is ultimately the company’s success. So this is sort of like the cynical take on servant leadership, but you’d be surprised at how easily you can manage your career and yourself like a product as well.

So, but today we’re going to talk about high-performing product teams. So one disclaimer I do want to give is that when I say product teams, I don’t actually just mean PM at all by any stretch and you can apply these principles to that, but I’m actually more thinking of the people who are accountable for building the right product in the right way at the right time for the right users. So not just the PMs, but really the triad of tech leads and UX designers as well as all the service-oriented groups who help make product launches a major success. So I’ll start with a definition. What does good look like for a high-performing product team? So I’ll state the obvious. A high-performing product team is one that accomplishes the outcome that they set out to achieve, assuming it was the right outcome, but I don’t actually see that as sufficient.

You can death march a team to success, they can achieve success or people can have a really great time together, but be chasing, I guess, the wrong outcome or not even moving any needles toward it. So I really see it more as a high performing team is one that accomplishes the outcome they set out to achieve, but they have fun doing it and they want to keep doing it together. And that last part is important. I’m going to double click on that in a sec. So that’s effectively the outcome or the output. You could measure it as an output. That you want them driving measurable impact to success metrics that matter to the business, and you want them aligned on values while also having high trust. So we talked about this people plus process equals performance construct. That is great and it does work well for a team, but it’s not necessarily scalable.

The way to make it scalable is to actually create that culture. So you’re not really creating a high performance team. It’s not what you’re really seeking to create. It’s really you’re seeking to create a high performance culture because culture will become self-sustaining, and that is how you can scale it. It’ll monitor people. It won’t be just you sort of having to look and check every box and make sure that every corner of your earth is tidy and perfect. There will be people within the culture who will do that. My favorite definition of culture that I’ve ever heard, I think about it all the time. Culture is the worst behavior that a leader is willing to tolerate. And I believe that so wholeheartedly. If you let infighting happen, if you let bad incentives be built, if you let people be rude to each other, it will detract from your goal of having high performing teams that are sustainable.

And I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the fact that it’s obvious to all I think, product is a journey. It’s not about shipping one big success and then like woo-hoo we’re done. So it’s easy for I think a team to get together and stay focused on a specific goal and make something happen, but it’s not sustainable over time and product needs to be sustainable. So it’s about consistently delivering value to your customers, having fun while you’re doing it, and you can measure the success in terms of team retention I think is a clear one. Team learning velocity, which to me is really, it’s really about how fast are we validating insights by shipping, so shipping does really matter. And then ultimately, what’s the impact to key metrics over time?

So I tried to sort these into the people, process sort of performance framework there, but the conditions that you as a leader at the highest level need to set, it’s really clarity. Clarity on outcomes. What does it mean to perform? What are the results that actually matter to the business and to our customers and how does that work in concert? So as the leader, you have to set clear expectations of what good looks like and how we know if we’ve achieved it or if we’re achieving it, but also the guardrails of how do we know we’re not achieving it? The team needs that structure, that top-down structure to be able to work backward from. And then you do need, I shorthanded this as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but you do need to start there. It is incredibly, like psychological safety for me is probably the most important factor for a team in order for them to really bring their all to bear and for everyone to trust that their special expertise and we’ll complement each other, we will find a way to complement each other.

And actually there’s a book, Culture Code. I forget who wrote it, but I really liked the way he described sort of a low trust culture versus high trust. Low trust is like everyone is like alone, scared guard dog barking at social threats, which creates interpersonal conflict and just all sorts of noise versus a high trust culture, which is basically a pack of wolves hunting down a shared goal together and winning together. And then lastly, but honestly probably most important because these are your feedback mechanisms of whether what you’re doing is even working. You need to have the right guardrails and mechanisms to take the guesswork as well as the busy work out of the repeated activities that lead to success.

So I’m going to talk a little bit more about each of these. Sorry for so much text on a slide. Hopefully it’s useful if we can share these slides. But talking about the leadership expectations, the clarity of expectations, there’s really three dimensions to shared purpose, right? So you need a vision, you need success metrics and you need guardrail metrics. That’s still important, but taken together, that’s purpose. Right. And in order to really institute shared purpose, you need the clarity, you need shared clarity of that purpose. People all need to understand. I often see these pithy sort of like vision statements or strategy statements, and those are good, but they can be interpreted many ways. So you need to ensure that there’s a shared understanding, a shared clarity against that purpose.

You also need to make sure that there’s actual alignment to that purpose because some people might not understand it very well, but just frankly disagree. And in many cases people can be kind of passive, I guess, aggressive against that. And it can keep people from rowing in the same direction with all their might. Some people might be just coasting on the oars or even digging into the water. And then that leads to empowerment and that empowerment of the team assigned, the accountable team to go after that shared purpose as hard as they can. So these are the three sort of management dimensions or leadership dimensions that I think are really important for you as the leader. And then of course, yeah, from a people perspective. So attending to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Again, psychological safety is super, super important.

I really don’t believe that you can accomplish great things for very long when that is lacking. I also think as a piece of that, we need to create space for more voices. So I often observe on teams, there are certain personalities that are very comfortable speaking up and sharing their opinion or sharing their thoughts or sharing their disagreements. But then there’s often many more that are not comfortable doing that. And so I take a lot of time with the teams and I instill this in my leaders as well to pause. I will oftentimes ask a question in meetings, and then I will sit there for an uncomfortably long period of time just looking at the team and smiling until someone is uncomfortable enough to speak up. Or for folks that I know are more introverted or less comfortable speaking up, I’ll ask them a very specific question.

I’ll be like, Hey, Fred, blah, blah, blah, because I was thinking, and then I’ll talk for about 30 seconds intentionally to buy them time to process or give them something to key off of. And then I repeat the question anyway, Fred, I’d really love to hear your opinion on X. So just those little tricks, like it creates a warmth I think, for people and a welcomingness that lets them bring their best to the table. And then being really explicit about your values, even writing them down honestly. What are your values? And then working with the team to develop team values, which I believe is great as a shared exercise because it makes everybody really think deeply about what they care about in terms of delivering value to this audience and solving the types of problems that they’re here to solve.

And then I also want to talk a bit about, I should highlight a bit about team composition. For people, it really matters. So I strongly believe in the triad, so PM, UX, and tech lead as the core components of the builder team. And I feel when you are missing any one of those, you’re not going to get to the right outcomes. You also want to guard against ratios. So if the ratios are off, for instance, if the PM to engineering ratio is more than one to 10, 10 is like a max, right? They call it a two pizza team at Amazon. If you go beyond that, which I also see too often, the PMs get so stretched thin that it becomes this feed the beast mentality where they’re just, they’re not thinking about the right work, they’re just thinking about getting engineers work. And that can, again, take away from the team being able to target and hit their outcomes that they want to and achieve their outcomes.

Of course, bad incentives, that’s like the quickest way down the wrong path. So you have to be careful. I know in some companies I’ve worked for, paths to promotion can sometimes create engineer or create an environment where engineers will seek out really specific types of work rather than doing maybe the less sexy, important work. So just making sure, like that’s just an example, but bad incentives are everywhere. So making sure that you’re really thinking about how are you incentivizing the team and how are you reinforcing it with your feedback mechanisms? What do you praise? What do you recognize? The people that you promote, what are the traits that they exhibit? And then I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about making sure that you’re actively managing underperformers and thinking about the mix of people you have. If you have too many type A personalities, if they’re going to be like beta fish in one pot, you need them in their separate. So you need to think about who are the people that I’m bringing together and am I setting them up for success?

Woo. That was more than I expected to say on that one, but I just, I really care about people, I guess. And then as far as process goes, you need accountability checkpoints. So opportunity assessment, like make sure the team is coming to you and speaking with you. Oh shoot, I’m already up. Is speaking with you. Make sure co-escalation paths are clear and not fraught with terror. Make sure there’s an emphasis on learning and make sure that product teams are really doing proper stakeholder management and they’re communicating internally as well as getting information internally. Oh, and you have to make it insanely easy for them to access customers. That’s the last one I’ll say. And I look forward to seeing you all again.

Angie Chang: Thank you, Stephanie. Everyone connect with her LinkedIn and we’ll hop to our next session now. Thank you so much.

Stephanie J. Neill: Thanks everyone.