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Sukrutha Bhadouria: Up next we have Xinran, who’s a senior software engineer at Netflix. She’s on the personalization data engineering team, building data applications to power ML algorithms and product innovation. Before Netflix, she worked at Confluent and Target as a data engineer. She founded a publication dedicated to data engineering called “Data Engineering Things” and writes regularly. Welcome.

Xinran Waibel: Yes, thank you for the introduction. Hi everyone. My name is Xinran Waibel and I’m a senior data engineer at Netflix. And today I’ll talk to you about how to engineer data for better data quality. And I personally love emojis, so if you see anything in my presentation you love, bring out all the emojis, <laugh>, I love them.

Xinran Waibel: Let’s get started. And so here’s agenda for today. I’ll first tell you a little bit about myself, and for those of you who sound familiar with data engineering, I’ll give you a summary of what the engineering is.

Xinran Waibel: And since we’re gonna spend the whole time talking about data quality, I’ll talk about why the quality should be the bottom line of any data engineering system, how to define data quality, how to monitor data quality as part of your data system. And at the end, I prepare a sweet summary of the best practice that you can use to ensure high data quality in your data system.

Xinran Waibel: First of all, little bit about myself. My name is Xinran. I know this, the name is kind of hard pronounce, but the trick is that the X is pronounced like “sh” and I have been working this engineering for about six years now, and then I’m still having a lot of fun loving it, and I always tell other people that being an engineer, like I get to solve Data Apollos every day and it’s very rewarding. And right now, so I’m a member of personalization data engineering team at Netflix and my team build various different data system that feed data into our personalization data algorithms.

Xinran Waibel: I also personally really like writing about data engineering too. I created this publication called “Data Engineer Things”, some Mediums, and then I write blogs every once in a while to share my learnings of what I learn at work. And I hope you check it out later after the presentation. And in my personal life, I’m a dog mom. Here’s a picture of me and Foxy. We spend a lot of time together and and also I love pottery. I just learned to do ceramic last year and then absolutely loving it. Actually this year I just set up a small pottery studio in my garage and I’m very excited to do most pottery at home. So get to the technical topic.

Xinran Waibel: What is data engineering? And if you search about data engineering online, you might see so many different keywords that you see here is about building data pipelines, data plumbers, data cleaning, and the ETL, ELT, and you might learn about batch and streaming and frameworks like Kafka and Spark. But what is data engineering like?

Xinran Waibel: From my perspective, like all of this is all part of data engineering. However, it is only describing data engineering from a specific angle. And here’s what data engineering is in my own eyes.

Xinran Waibel: For me, data engineering is all about making data accessible in optimized formats. When I say optimized formats, the data is enriched with business logic and metadata, so it can be easily used to solve business problems. And data is also stored in efficient data schema and storage system, so if your downstream user are going to process this data further, they can get great performance in their data processing too. And last but not least, data should be available within the desirable latency because there’s some data you would get more value when you build up a significant amount of history, but also their datas would lose its value as the delay goes up.

Xinran Waibel: You might need to build a data system that’s runs daily or hourly or you streaming system that process the event as it comes in. And most importantly, all the data engineering system should provide data in high quality. And I believe that is the bottom line of any data engineering system.

Xinran Waibel: So why is data quality so important? The main reason is because the outcome of data engineering system is used to derive data insights. Whether it is used to generate some metrics dashboard for executives, or it is used to directly power some product feature, or it is used as input data to your machine learning algorithms, and any data insights can only be as good as the source data. As you can imagine, if your data engineering system is producing incorrect data, any of the decision made based on those data will be at risk as well.

Xinran Waibel: This stock meme here, I love it, and it perfectly summarized that why I want to give a 20 minutes presentation today on data quality itself because I’ve seen so many data systems in the past, including the one I built myself that don’t have data quality check, and the data engineers don’t even know when the data systems are not running correctly or producing incorrect data. And at the same time, important decisions are being made based on those data, and that is a very dangerous situation that you don’t want to be in.

Xinran Waibel: Now that we’re all on the same page about why data quality is important, let’s talk about how to define and measure data quality. Defining data quality is not an easy task at all. The first and also the most important step before you define the data quality is that you have to know your data.

Xinran Waibel: Ask yourself these three questions, what does my data represent? How is my data being used by downstream users, and what could possibly go wrong? And for any data engineer to answer those questions, I believe business context is really critical because you have to understand the business problem first before you build your data system, and of course, before your design data quality for a few reasons. The business model determines the nature of the data and for example, how your business works is directly associated with the data that’s getting produced. For example, what is the relation of account and the profile that is directed, that was directly impacted by how user can create account in the profile when they use your product.

Xinran Waibel: And another example is that, business model also determines the traffic pattern that you might observe in your data. Let’s take Netflix for example. If you work for a company who’s based on it is about entertainment like Netflix, then you might have more traffic during holiday and weekend, versus on weekend or on weekdays. However, if you work for a software company who builds software for business users, then you might have more traffic during weekdays versus on holiday. And also, business contacts help you spot the potential edge cases too. Let’s say, if you work with playback data on Netflix and you will think about, hey, how will my data surface edge cases like where the user tried to start a playback but then didn’t start, how would you spot / identify those cases in your data and how do you want to deal with it as part of your system?

Xinran Waibel: And because any data engineering system is built at the beginning to solve specific data business problem, in a way, the downstream use cases actually define the expectation of your data. And also that means that the definition of your data quality is only valid for the use cases in mind. And those sounds might sound kind of conceptual but let me give you an example because the data quality itself is a very subjective matter, it’s really depending on how you expect the data to be used and who’s using it. Let’s take Netflix for example. Let’s say you are building a dimension table that represents a Netflix movie, and then you have a category field. For when you talk about category, and it might mean different things. When we talk to different departments, it could mean the category that we surface on to our product for user to select, to explore movies, or if you’re talking about category on the content side, it’s a different category when it comes to content production.

Xinran Waibel: Let’s say if you build this data set for product use cases, then your data quality will be at risk if you start surfacing the production category in your data set. So that is an example how data quality is relative to the use cases. For this, engineers, my recommendation is always that if you ever feels like you don’t understand your data well, I recommend you always talk to other teams, your business partners, so that you get more business context and understand how the business is associated with your data.

Xinran Waibel: Assuming that you have a good understanding of a comprehensive understanding of your data, now it’s important to establish some clear expectation for your data first, and also tolerance, because no data is perfect. For example, the column should only have values and meeting certain criteria. And you know, for example, the membership tab should only be basic or premium, and data should somewhat align with historical value. For example, the number of accounts that you see today should be very close to yesterday.

Xinran Waibel: Another thing you could also set is that the data should be somewhat aligned with another data set. Let’s say you have a data system that process input data and then does approximate one to one mapping, then you can expect the output is relatively aligned with the input as well. And from <inaudible> perspective, we can expect data to be you know, available within certain latency. Let’s say if you have a daily workflow, then you can, you know, have the expectation that daily job should finish before Pacific AM every day. This is some of the very basic expectation we would have on data set, but also depending on the data and the data system, you might want to add more to the list that’s more complicated.

Xinran Waibel: Now that you have a clear set expectation of your data, the next step is to compute data quality metrics that help you qualify the deviation of the extra data from your expectation, and then you can compare the deviation with your tolerance, to see whether the data quality is up to your bar. Here are some of the examples. You can compute the percentage of playback events when the membership ID is invalid, or you can check the the number playback today, assuming today is Thursday, and compare to previous Thursday average.

Xinran Waibel: I really love this example here because it gives you the idea of that how you can kind of incorporate the traffic pattern that you are aware of, data to your audit so that you can audit on your data quality more effectively. And another example is that you can calculate the percentage playback events, but only those with membership tabs basic and compare it to the seven day average. This is also a great example that how you can add more dimension and breakdown to your database, based on your best understanding of data to ensure that data quality is is high. And another, from a SLA perspective, you can measure the end-to-end runtime of your job and making sure that it meets the SLA of your downstream user. There are so many possible data quality checks you can have in place and you might be wondering, oh my god, what, how much, how many is enough?

Xinran Waibel: I mean, honestly there’s no right answer. However, my personal rule of some is that, you know, with this list of data quality check I have in place, if they all passed, I can confidently say for sure that I know my data is all good. That is the principle I really use when I designed data quality checks.

Xinran Waibel: Next section: monitoring data quality. This section is important because data quality check isn’t a one time task. You know, beyond all the unit task and integration, task integration task you’ll have as part of the development process, you also want to monitor your data quality continuously as part of your data system, so you can keep track of your data quality as your business and data evolve. And this, this section, I’ll talk a little bit more about how exactly we do that.

Xinran Waibel: The methodology of integrating data quality checks in your system is a little bit different for batch and streaming system. In the batch world, we typically use this pattern called Write-Audit-Publish. The first step is that you run your batch shop red output to a temporary location, then you run your data audit check against those output if it passed, then you publish your data to the permanent location. And as you can see from the screenshot here that when the data audit didn’t pass then it will send, actually send the pager to our on-call and on-call will intervene and investigate If everything’s good, then they will manually unblock it, but if it doesn’t, they’ll reach out to other teams to investigate further. That is the Write-Audit-Publish pattern that we typically use for batch pipeline.

Xinran Waibel: In the streaming world it’s a little bit different. In for event streaming job, we would typically alert based on some of the realtime metrics we collect from application. It would include some of the job health metrics, for example, the number of jobs that’s running of the consumer like watermark, making sure that the the job is making progress / is not left in behind, and also we also have a lot of custom per event metrics we capture as part of the data processing logic as well. Like for example, the number of events are filtered in or out, the number of parts fit we’re getting, the number records with in invalid fields, and also the output volume. Those are just the, some of the simple examples you could do.

Xinran Waibel: And another thing I want to mention here is that because this stage is actually really common to write the output of your event streaming job to a table, you can also use the right audit published pattern on your streaming output as well. The only difference is that it is the delay that introduced because you are running your audit at theoretical manner as part of a scheduled batch shop.

Xinran Waibel: Assuming that you are responsible data engineer, you know your data well, you also set up all this great data quality check as part of your system, what could possibly go wrong from here? And this is another scenario you could be in that you have so many data audits, that’s firing alerts all the time, and some of them may not be reflecting your real issue. You don’t even know which fire is real, which fire isn’t. And that puts your team in a lot of on-call burden and also just operational cost as well. And that leads to the next section – the common challenges of maintaining data qualities in production.

Xinran Waibel: One of the common challenges as I showed in the previous stock meme is that you might have a lot of data audit that’s very noisy and the noisy one might distract you from the real data quality issue. For example, it might be because that you have too low a threshold and or because that you totally ignored the organic traffic pattern as your data quality so you’re basically alerting based on the organic traffic pattern that’s expected. The recommendation here is always revisit your data theoretically to see which one need to be tuned so that it can be more accurate and not producing unnecessary noise.

Xinran Waibel: Another challenge here that sometimes data orders don’t get updated as you update the business logic as part of your job. You know, like we talk about before, data quality is relative to the business problem you are solving so that whenever you update the business logic as part of your system, you should also revisit your data alerts so that your data quality check is up to date as well.

Xinran Waibel: Next one. You know, that one is also really painful that because you don’t log enough information as part of your system and also your logging, it’s very difficult to troubleshoot failures. This will actually apply to both batch and the streaming world because a lot of times, we might see a realtime metric saying, oh hey, like we have a spike of passing failures. However, it doesn’t log enough information about the event the identifier of the event. It’s really hard to go back to troubleshoot what event get jobs for what reason, and similarly for the batch world, a good example is that if you have a Spark job that have 20 filter on the source data and the the data, all the data might get dropped because that one filter, but it could be really hard for you to figure out which is that filter that is causing the problem.

Xinran Waibel: And that is all because of like logging or intermediate data you are producing, so just be mindful about what data you should log or intermediate data you should pro produce so that’s easier for your oncall and yourself to troubleshoot the issue when it comes.

Xinran Waibel: Another common challenge, which is actually problem that my team deal with a lot is that a lot of times your data, all this fire ,not because something went wrong with your data system, actually, it has to do with upstream data changes. It’s very common that in some of the data systems that you build your data system based on some assumption of your source data ,and therefore there’s certain type of data contract there between you and your source system. However, because when those data contract is not enforced through some programmatic matters such as like, integration test, then it could be broken all the time and then you catch those issues in your data system instead and then you have to go back and forth with the upstream team to fix them.

Xinran Waibel: in this case, it is really important that you enforce the data contract with your upstream through some programmatic mess methods so that it’s less likely you know, for upstream to introduce unexpected data updates.

Xinran Waibel: Another problem that’s probably applies everywhere is that, people come and goes and they might not have enough documentation on the data quality check and you might not know why data quality, certain data quality checks there, and when it fails you don’t know what to do. It’s always the best practice to add enough documentation for data quality, and the why that that exists, and what to do when that fail.

Xinran Waibel: Another one but this is very interesting one because we don’t run into this very often, but it’s also quite interesting problem, is that when we build data all this, a lot of times we would explore the data based on the historical data already available and then that can help us understand the data a little bit better and set some tolerance. However, if you are building a data system for a completely new product, you will have no historical data to refer to, so it could be very difficult to set data quality check and the tolerance you have. In this case honestly I don’t have any really good ideas, but I think the best thing you can do is just keep a close eye on your new data pipeline and this data get getting produced because as part of the new service and then revisit the data audit maybe after a week or months after it’s released, so that you should just have to keep an eye on it.

Xinran Waibel: Another really important thing I wanna cover at the end is about data recovery. Because no data is perfect, so you are going to eventually have a lot of fail data, all this that is gonna tell you, hey, like there’s some serious issues, system is producing incorrect data and what could you do? And sometimes, you might be able to fix it very easily, however you, if the data is already produced and you have to have some backup method to re backfill the data, to mitigate downstream impact. And then the methodology for data recovery is actually different for batch versus event streaming system.

Xinran Waibel: In a batch world, it’s pretty much guaranteed that all of your system will be back fillable because you know, you are, you are reading from data from a location where the data have really long retention and then you could just simulate / rerun your batch job and then also ask your downstream to rerun, and then you just basically do this over right, the partition and the data could be fixed.

Xinran Waibel: However, in the streaming world, not all system is by default backfillable. That is mainly because the source of the data you already have very limited retention. In most cases, that is a Kafka Topic and it’s very expensive to have very long retention for your Kafka data if your data size is really huge.

Xinran Waibel: There’s some options for backfeeding streaming job here. I’ll just like give you guys a quick summary, but <inaudible> talk about this for an hour if I want to. Yeah.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Can we Xinran, can we, can we wrap this up now? We have people in the next session ready?

Xinran Waibel: Yeah. Can we, yeah, definitely. You know there’s also options for backfilling, but then my recommendation that you should always have you know, some backfilling options in mind when the data outage happens.

Xinran Waibel: Just a quick summary of the best practice I have in mind for data quality. First of all, you want to design every data engineering system with data quality in mind. You must know your data and business problem well, and then you want to integrate your data quality metrics and alerts as part of the system. That means that when they pass, you can reassure that knowing that now is good, but also in fail you should have clear action item to follow up with. Last but not least, you should always have a backup plan for data recovery so that when the outage happens, you have a way to mitigate downstream impact.

Xinran Waibel: Sorry for running out of time. That’s everything I wanna cover for today. Feel free to find me on LinkedIn to connect with me. And if you want to learn more about data engineering, check out the “Data Engineering Things” Medium.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you, Xinran, this was wonderful. See you in the next session.

Xinran Waibel: Right.

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

• Check out open jobs at our trusted partner companies.
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Angie Chang: Welcome to Elevate. Melsha Key is a senior manager of marketing at GAP. She has an MBA in marketing and her unique approach to putting customer experience at the center of all her decision making has made her a successful in multiple industries. She’ll be talking to us about managing our pie today. Welcome, Melsha.

Melsha Key: Hi everyone. I am super excited to be here and thank you so much Angie. I’m really excited about the topic that I’m going to share. If you see me looking away, I am trying to set up my slides. My name is Melsha and I am so excited to be talking to you today about excelling in your career by managing your PIE. PIE is performance, image and exposure. And we’ll go more into this during the presentation. This is a quick outline of what we will be discussing today. I’m gonna give you a brief introduction.

Melsha Key: We’re gonna talk about some career misconceptions. We’re gonna go through the different slices of the pie – you see where I did there – and you are gonna have the opportunity to get some of my information to connect with me. I am a wife and a mom. I reside in the California Bay Area, although I do have roots on the east coast. I am a senior marketing manager at GAP Inc, and I do have an MBA in marketing from Rutgers University and I have 15 years of marketing experience.

Melsha Key: I was introduced to PIE from a mentor at my company. She became my mentor simply by me reaching out to her for a 15 minute chat. That turned into various times where we would meet, all online, and at some time we built this trust and I just confided in her about being a little frustrated because I am rocking in my career, I am delivering results, but still no promotion. And that is when she introduced me to PIE and she had me take a good look at it to see if I was really operating in excellence in all slices of the pie. And that is really what I wanna share with you all today. Let’s talk about some career misconceptions.

Melsha Key: Performing well in a role means you’ll be promoted. Mmm, not really. And working hard, you’ll get ahead, yet I’m here to tell you that that can happen and you still not receive the promotion that you might be desiring. Has your hard work gone on notice or have others moved ahead and you’ve kind of been stuck in the same old role? Are you subscribed to the “work hard and you’ll go far” club, or how about hard work and results are rewarded with promotion? I’m here to tell you to cancel your membership to that club because it’s not about hard you have worked, although performance is a part of it. Promotion is not all about getting pro promoted based on performance.

Melsha Key: If owning, controlling your career is your goal, you must learn how the system works. Employees win when they understand that they have to be intentional with the choices that they make to reach the top. Let me tell you a little secret.

Melsha Key: Upward mobility happens from the top down. That means that your leaders are advocating for your promotion. How do you get seen by them? How do they know who you are? That’s exactly what we’re gonna cover today. Understanding PIE helps you understand why some people have success and others do not. The concept is not new and I was surprised to learn that. I thought this was some new type of theory or strategy, but it’s not. I was just recently introduced, which I’m sure some of you might be recently introduced to it today.

Melsha Key: Let’s get into it – PIE. We’re gonna first start off with Performance. This is about the day-to-day work you manage and the quality of the results you deliver. Harvey Coleman in his book “Empowering Yourself: the Organizational Game Revealed”, success is based on pie. Each piece of the pie is critical to your career growth and advancement.

Melsha Key: One thing I wanna drive home that my mentor shared with me is that the slices of the pie are not equally weighted. Wow, that was kind of mind blown. Not only that, but different stages in your career, the slices kind of change in the magnitude of the focus that you should have on it.

Melsha Key: With that being said, let’s jump on in to the different types of times in your career and how each slide might be different. Early in your career performance is 50% of the PIE.

Melsha Key: Mid-career… you’re thinking like junior, senior level roles all the way from like an experience or even a new manager all the way to like a senior director, that’s probably within the mid-career scope Performance is 25-33% of the pie. And the mature career performance is actually less than 25% of the PIE.

Melsha Key: Let’s get into the early career. Focus on learning, improve your knowledgeable about your role and your area of expertise. This is the time to study your craft. Attend conferences, training, take additional classes. You can be the subject matter expert but it takes intentional action of learning and growing in this stage.

Melsha Key: And don’t be shy about sharing positive feedback with your with your manager. If your business partner is just singing your praises, tell them, Hey, would you mind dropping that note from my manager? So your manager’s also aware of the things that you’re doing to become or to show that you’re a subject matter expert.

Melsha Key: Operate with excellence. Do not give subpar work. You have to show up and show out with the work that you’re doing. Make sure that your definition of excellence align with your manager’s definition of excellence because if you two are not aligned, how are they going to advocate for your promotion and exceed expectation and continually raise the bar. Don’t just do the work that you that you have to do. See how you can align with the department goals.

Melsha Key: Align with the organization strategies cuz that is what’s gonna help highlight your performance mid-career. This is when we start to move through into management. You might start to get a direct report. You may be leading a team building. Strong teams enable strong performance. Hear me, I’m gonna say it again.

Melsha Key: Building strong teams enables strong performance. I’m going to say it again. Building strong teams enables strong performance. At this level, not only are you performing at an excellent level, you are now responsible for having your team perform at an excellent level, giving them the tools that they need to be successful.

Melsha Key: Mentoring, coaching, all of that comes under the umbrella of performance. Your manager’s managers should at this level know who you are and being very familiar with your performance. Be proactive on being solutions-oriented and keep over-delivering.

Melsha Key: And at the mature stage of your career, performance is at a larger scale. You are driving strategy for the company. You’re delivering on earnings, you’re talking to Wall Street, you’re driving and leading high performing teams. So that was all performance. Performance once again is very necessary for promotion or for a success in your role, but it is not the only indicator that you’ll get promoted.

Melsha Key: We’ll go into Image. This is what other people think of you, the impression they have on you and how you are showing up your personal brand. Do you maintain a positive attitude? Do you lead with solutions to issues, or are you a person that’s constantly being negative saying, oh this can’t be done, we’ve never done it before. We’ve tried that, it didn’t work. That’s not the image.

Melsha Key: You should be the one that’s optimistic. And even if you’ve never done it, if you’ve never been able to do it before your, your image should show that you’re gonna try to figure it out. Understand that image matters according to an article by Monica McCoy. Image accounts for 30% of the reason someone is or is not successful. How others perceive you and how you make others feel, feel it matters as much as the results you deliver.

Melsha Key: People are surprised when they discover that how they see themselves is not how others view them. This misalignment can stall your career. Let me give you a true story on this. I once let a mentor tell me, Hey, you need to ask for feedback and you need to make sure that how you see yourself aligned with how others see yourself.

Melsha Key: I I booked some time with some of my peers, some junior level employees that I worked with and also some senior level employees that I worked with. And through that feedback, I was able to identify themes – and themes meaning like ways that I was showing up that I may not have intended to show up in that way. And so I took that information and then created the strategy to make sure that how I was showing up is how I was being seen.

Melsha Key: Now asking for feedback, I’m not gonna lie, it’s sometimes is very hard because it doesn’t always feel so good. But it is one of the key ways to understand how you are performing, how you are showing up, how others see you. Because as I mentioned before, image it really does matter.

Melsha Key: Personal branding, which is so key and so important in this stage, is more than what you say on LinkedIn. And it’s so much more than what you put out there about yourself professionally on social media. What personal branding is, it shapes the perception of you in the minds of others. This includes building your reputation, showcasing your strengths, effectively communicating your unique attributes and being able to market yourself. In other words, your personal brand will speak for you when you’re not in the room. So make sure that your personal branding is speaking, and it aligns to your professional brand.

Melsha Key: Image – let’s look at it at different parts of our career. Early career, 20% of the PIE. This is where you try to predict what your manager and your business partners love and deliver on this. An example is, if your boss loves to see things in a bullet-point format, give them summaries and high-level overviews and recaps in a bullet-point format. The reason is cuz you just don’t want them to trip up on that cuz that’s not even the meat. The meat is the recap, for example. You wanna present them information in the way that they’re used to seeing it. And this, how does this align with image, is because they can count on you. they start to look at the work and then they can look at you and say, oh, I can always count on this person to give me reliable work or they’re always consistent. You leave out all the things that can trip them up.

Melsha Key: In the mid-career managers to new directors, be seen as a person that can manage a team and deliver results. If you don’t manage a direct report, it’s a great chance in your company to to lead a cross-functional team. Ask for that or ask for an intern. That’s a great way to start to build up your management skills and director to senior director. Be seen as a thought partner and strategic thinker to your team, business partners and senior leadership. And in, in the mature part of your career, image is critical. We notice that it’s 50% of the PIE. Image is critical and at this stage in your career, people need to be able to trust you and follow your leadership.

Melsha Key: This is also a time that you can have the power of sponsorship to help shape other careers of more junior employees than you are at this stage. And you are a thought partner and also a strategic thinker, so take the different opportunities to speak at conferences, TED talks, really build that you are the professional or any other part of your personal branding that you want to come across. Image holds a lot of weight and it’s not easy to change. It will affect how people relate to you and how they treat you. So make sure that you work, be intentional about your professional brand, and really work on what that is for you.

Melsha Key: And finally we’re gonna get into Exposure. Visibility is important to the right people in the right manner at the right time. It represents the people that will get to know about your results and your image. Who knows about you and what you do? It’s great to be a high-performing employee, but if no one knows the work is coming from you or no one knows about you, that is an area of opportunity to work on in the exposure part of the PIE.

Melsha Key: Exposure is the key to success and to get ahead. Relationship-building is key. Take time to build genuine relationships, and it doesn’t always have to be face-to-face. I will have to say one of the benefits for me through this pandemic is the amount of people I’ve been able to connect with just by saying, oh, I love your career path. Can we just have 15 minutes to talk?

Melsha Key: It’s been people within my organization as well as outside of my organization. You don’t just have to network internally, you have the ability to network externally. One of the mediums that I use is LinkedIn. I just recently reached someone that is probably two levels from where I currently am and I was very interested in their career path and they shared some nuggets with me.

Melsha Key: And I think another way to add value is to follow up and let people know, “Hey, I took your advice and this is what the results were”. People love that. They appreciate that because they know that their investment of time was worth it. Always have the mindset of adding value, and this is how you make your mark on people.

Melsha Key: At different points of your career exposure, early career exposure is about 30% of the PIE, mid-career is about 33%, mature career is about 30%. So early in your career, ask for those speaking opportunities, put yourself out there, grow, lean in on your manager to help identify those opportunities for you. Join a cross-functional team. Real quick., I did that just to get to know other people, but the reach was far more than what I thought. I actually wound up presenting in front of a very senior leader who sent a message after I presented about the work that I did and how impressed they were. Sometimes you don’t understand that reach, but join those cross-functional teams, build those relationships. Join employee resource groups and professional organizations and volunteer to share learnings that you’ve had.

Melsha Key: Mid-career? Volunteer to do stretch assignments. Work with your manager on that and work with other teams. Speak at large events. Always take advantage of different opportunities as it comes to those exposures. Also, make sure that it feels right for where you’re trying to go, but take advantage. Don’t let fear stop you. Also, director to senior managers, they take on larger stretch assignments, join task force, speak at town hall, and then from a mature career, you’re running divisions, you’re running regions and developing new and improving existing markets. So you’re already really out there from an exposure part, but that is 30% of the PIE.

Melsha Key: We’re gonna do a quick summary. Be intentional about your performance, but effort doesn’t always equal impact. You want your performance to impact the business. Don’t get caught just doing busy work. Ask for feedback. Once again, do not shy away from that. Give people the permission to be honest. You just don’t need, oh, you’re doing great, you’re doing great.

Melsha Key: Dig deeper, ask for more feedback. That’s really gonna help your career. Look for themes and when you get this feedback and decide if it aligns with your personal brand, understand that PIE components change as you move in different roles and even as you move throughout your career. And be aware of that network internally and externally and you can network virtually. I will be the first to say, I recently got a promotion and it was all over our remote environment.

Melsha Key: Don’t think just because hey, I’m a remote employee, I can’t get promoted. You can, or if other people are back in the office and you’re still working remotely cuz you were hired remotely, you can still, you just have to be intentional about the parts of the PIE. Questions to ask yourself, how does your work align to the organization’s goals and strategies?

Melsha Key: Once again, don’t be a busy bee. Be intentional about your goals and how that helps your department win because then that sheds a a wonderful light on the work that you’re doing. Are you great at what you do? If you don’t feel, take an honest assessment. If you don’t feel like you’re great at what you do, then take a course, talk to your manager, attend a conference.

Melsha Key: You have the power to change that image. Do you have a professional brand statement? If you don’t, I will recommend that you take the time to do it because you don’t want anyone owning your voice. And the professional brand statement is your voice and you don’t want someone to own that. Be intentional about that. When was the last time you asked for feedback from your business partners? Do people enjoy working with you? That is a key.

Melsha Key: You can be the best performer, but if people don’t like working with you, that’s the problem. So make sure that you are a person that people wants, wants to work with exposure. Are you intentionally building your network? Is your manager’s manager familiar with who you are? So these are some homework assignments.

Melsha Key: Finally, you could connect with me on LinkedIn. I’ll be happy to connect with you. And this is my personal email. I just love the whole mantra of “Lift as you climb” – you also have the responsibility to lift others up as well. Please feel free to reach out to me. And I believe there’s also an opportunity for us to connect in rooms later on. I will try to make myself available for that as well. Thank you so much.

Angie Chang: Thank you, Melsha. That was excellent. I love your slides. I’m sure we’re all gonna be hitting replay as soon as this session is over. And thank you so much for giving this talk and then we’re gonna move on to our next session now. See you on the other side.

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Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hi, I hope everyone’s having a wonderful time in the conference. Up next we have Carly. Carly is a developer advocate at Elastic. Prior to Elastic, she spent over a decade working as a technologist at the large investment bank specializing in front-end web development and agility. She’s an agile evangelist, UI enthusiast and regular blogger. Welcome, Carly.

Carly Richmond: Thank you. Thanks for having me and lovely to see everyone. Hi. Today I’m going to talk about a problem that I’ve actually seen for a proportion of my career when I worked in an investment bank. And the main problem I’m going to talk about is regarding adoption of features and user experience. Trying to determine, this is something that I’ve always really struggled with as a front-end developer, yet it’s something that’s critical to my understanding of, you know, how I can build better software.

Carly Richmond: And today that’s exactly what I’m gonna talk about. I’m going to talk about why it’s a hard problem to solve, how we can do this in a more quantitative way and how we can use tools such as Google Lighthouse, Synthetic Monitoring, and Elastic Real User Monitoring to achieve that. Okay, so as I said, I used to work at the bank and within that time I used to work in a mixture of waterfall, scrum and kanban paradigms depending on the team, which meant that we did a lot of reviews with our users talking about features.

Carly Richmond: I found to extend the analogy, reviews were really similar to giving gifts at Christmas or birthdays. And normally you’d have one or two particular scenarios working. Either I would, they would immediately open up, see the new features and they would think it was great, you know, they wouldn’t stop talking about it. They would be super excited. Most likely, I would come away from those sessions with a list of, you know, so many other items to add to the backlog. It was great and you knew straight away from that that things were great and that this feature was most likely going to be adopted. And then sometimes you got something that I would mark akin to that moment when you get that awkward Christmas jumper from that looks a bit itchy and uncomfortable and not quite your style, where you get a kind of smile and a nod and you don’t really get any information at all.

Carly Richmond: And particularly if you’re working with people that you know very well, you work within the same company, it can be really difficult and awkward sometimes to get that negative feedback. And the reality is that’s a problem because do you know when we find out about it, when the panic station hits, when red alert starts going off and you’re running as a developer to your console, to an escalation, searching through logs and panicking and trying to figure out what’s going on. And normally when you know the lights turn back to normal again the panic is over. It was always these points where I thought, could I have caught this earlier? Was there other means in which I could have got better feedback earlier? So I’m gonna tell you a little story and it was basically one of the main turning points for me where it made me realize I need to do something else about this.

Carly Richmond: Once upon a time in a very large investment bank, a group of eager developers had been busily building new features for months, regularly showing the features to users and had a very happy sponsor at the end of it. Yet a few months later we’re getting a phone call in a panic saying, you know, the screens are slow, we don’t know what’s going on. The analysts don’t wanna use this, you need to fix this right now. We’re diving through the server logs, everything seems to be ticking fine, but it’s all based on the front end that something is wrong. And I had a colleague come to the rescue, he pulls up Chrome developer tools and we start looking through the profiling. So using the flame graph to see what’s going on. But we also started using a tool called Google Lighthouse, which you can see on the screenshot in front of you.

Carly Richmond: And this was the first time that I got to see some example metrics that I thought I could use to determine web performance and the user experience in my applications. And these metrics are called Core Web Vitals. They were initially announced by Google in May of 2020. And there are a series of measures that are used to evaluate the user experience of websites. For anyone who’s looking more from a search engine optimization perspective, you might have heard of these two. And the reason for that is that they were included as part of the course search ranking criteria in Google as of June 2021.

Carly Richmond: There’s three primary measures that we’re gonna talk about today that are the main part of the suite and the first of which is called Largest Contenful Paint. LCP is basically an indication of that initial response time, time. When a user is navigating to your site, are they actually going to be able to see something or is there a potential that they might think your site is unavailable and maybe end up going somewhere else perhaps to a competitor?

Carly Richmond: Ideally, we’re talking about a measure of on 0.2 0.5 seconds and the render time that I’m talking about here is about the largest image or text block that’s visible within the view port. As I said, that initial experience for a user, the second measure we often talk about with Core Web Vitals is what’s called First Input Delay. Now it is about user responsiveness. It is the time for when a user inputs an action such as a click and when that corresponding command is executed. And ideally you want this to be under a hundred milliseconds, we’ve all been there in that situation where we think our site is not responded to click and we start mashing again on the mouse or on the keyboard. And the hundreds milliseconds is run about the threshold when you start thinking something’s not quite right.

Carly Richmond: And then the final measure, which I consider the the most complicated in the one that maybe we don’t initially think is important, but it really is, is Cumulative Layout Shift. It might seem a bit strange that we’re talking about movements and layouts and webpages, but the fact of the matter is that if you have a page that is moving around a lot and is unstable, that means there’s more of a chance for user error.

Carly Richmond: We’ve all been in that situation where another option pops up above the one we want and we end up inadvertently hitting the wrong thing. Your C ls is calculated from all of the shift scores across the entire lifetime of the page. All the ratios of movement are calculated and then the largest burst is your CLS for the page. And that should ideally be under not 0.1. We can calculate these using Google Lighthouse either within Chrome developer tools as I showed before, or also we can do smart things like including them using plugins in our continuous integration pipelines or even running them ad hoc as reports on the command line.

Carly Richmond: It’s a great point to do this at different stages in your development cycle, but one of the problems I’ve found is normally I’m using Google Lighthouse when it’s too late cuz I’ve already detected with my spidey sense that something is wrong. And while this gives us the Core Web Vitals and the opportunity to evaluate the user experience, it doesn’t address the question of are our users indeed using it so we know we need something else. And we know as well that potentially if we’re doing the recording function for this, that we’re going to be making assumptions of what the user workflow is and we’re capturing metrics on that rather than what they’re actually doing.

Carly Richmond: One way that I’ve seen people try to rectify this cuz they don’t really wanna spy on their users and monitor them is we use Synthetic Monitoring. I’m sadly not talking about having my lovely workmate paper here sitting with you actively running the workflow against your website.

Carly Richmond: I’m talking about the use of scripts and workflows to basically stimulate the behavior a user might engage in. And you can do this in one of two ways. You can either trigger regularly an endpoint such as an http service every 10 minutes or so or whatever your frequency is that you desire and see that it’s still alive. Or you can make use of more sophisticated things such as browser monitors, which normally use scripting technologies such as playwright, which I’ve got here in order to emulate the user workflow. Similar to end-to-end testing if anyone’s done anything like that and be able to basically see every 10 minutes if that workflow is running as expected, is it perhaps starting to lag and slow down, in which case there might be a degradation of performance to look at or even if particular steps are failing.

Carly Richmond: Synthetic monitoring is a great way to try and look at the performance of a website. However, it still doesn’t answer that question of are they really using it? So we need something else to compliment these technologies and it’s time to crack out the rum. Now I am not talking about favorite alcoholic beverage pilots, sorry I know it’s early in the morning for everybody, but what I’m talking about is Real User Monitoring and this is a mechanism for collecting navigation information errors and other metrics based on the real user behavior against a website.

Carly Richmond: You might have heard of OpenTelemetry, which in observability circles is the open standard for an open protocol for capturing traces. Sadly, there is not a realm equivalent at this time. There’s a great proposal. Anyone who’s interested to go check out the the GitHub, however, what you can use is view user monitoring agents for whichever observability platform you are using. The way they work is that they’ll run alongside your JavaScript application. I’ll show you how to instrument the agent in a moment. And then in the case of Elastic, although other observability providers will do something similar, all of the traces and metric information will be sent to the integration server.,APM Integration, which will persist the data down into an elastic search index. And then you’ll be able to see the particular traffic messages either via the apps within Kinbana that are dedicated to observability, case in point, user experience dashboard, or also within Kinbana Discover where you can build your own dashboards too.

Carly Richmond: I promised you some instrumentation, I have some code here I’ll walk through briefly. But if you wanna dig into this or examples on instrumenting backend services with APM, I’ve got a handy link at the bottom in the QR code. Go to the GitHub, have a look at the code and please do contact me with any questions or if you wanna chat through any thoughts. it’s a case of using the Elastic APM RUM dependency installed via your favorite package manager. So MPM or yarn. And then what you’ll do is you’ll run the initialized command passing in the name you want to give your service known as the service name. You’ll pass in for any cross origin requests, the URLs that you’re going to be sending them to, cuz by default, although it enables distributed tracing, it’s only done on a single origin with the agent unless you specify that option, you specify your Elastic cluster and then you have optional attributes such as the environment and service version.

Carly Richmond: If you want to get into more detailed view and compare changes over time, you might be wondering if you’re using particular JavaScript frameworks well does that change anything only slightly? You might need to make use of an integration to take advantage of custom error handling or routing that is given on top of these frameworks. And the example I’ve got in here makes use of APM RUM react, which is the additional MPM dependency or yarn dependency you’d need to install. And you can see I’m using that route in place of my traditional reactors or route which will capture the navigations for me. Simples, if you want to dig in, please check out the GitHub. The codes at the bottom corner or if you ping me afterwards I can send it to. So I now have information I really wish I’d had at the time when I was a front end developer.

Carly Richmond: If I could hop back in my door and travel back in time just like Marty from back to the Future, I would be taking rum with me and trying to use it to solve some problems that I had in my time as a front end engineer. I’m going to talk through some stories in the remaining time and show how I would use RUM to solve these problems. Let’s go back to that performance story that proved to be the kinda wake up call for me and one of the issues I highlighted was that we weren’t sure where the problem was.

Carly Richmond: We were diving through into the server logs as well as looking at the front end to try and identify the issue. Being able to have Core Web Vitals was one of the things that proved to be a turning point. But rather than having to calculate it using Google Lighthouse and a custom instrumentation, if you make use of RUM, the dashboard will actually calculate what these vitals are based on the real user traffic, which can be a great time saver if you are running about an emergency trying to fix something urgently.

Carly Richmond: But because it’s also capturing the real user behavior, it also gives you traces which anyone from an observability background might be familiar with views such as this. What you’ll see here is I’ve got two services being captured. I have in green the front end which basically has, it shows you the key execution time for loading of my JavaScript files for triggering the calls on that side. And then you can see the subsection in blue, which is my back end node JS server. And then fat the majority of the time is taken up with front end transactions in this case, which can be a useful thing for identifying bottle mix.

Carly Richmond: The second challenge I sometimes came across was that I would get conflicting accounts from users. Now I was in a privileged position, all my users sat a couple of floors down for me when I worked on one particular team and I could just hop down and ask them what they thought about things in addition to trying to get feedback in those reviews I talked about.

Carly Richmond: But one of the things that was interesting was I would get different answers depending on who I spoke to. So some users were really early adopters and would use features very quickly and straight away. Some might have used it once or twice but then fell back to their own process and then some might not have heard about it, maybe they were on holiday or out sick when that review happens and that information hadn’t maybe permeated through. So they give you aggregate information when you use ROM agents such as this. And the total page view that I’ve got highlighted up there is a key example. Being able to see the total views of a particular page and subpages as well is vital when you’re looking at adoption. Not just cuz you want to see if there’s a general upward trajectory, but also if you want to see if there’s patterns for perhaps planning for capacity.

Carly Richmond: We know that there’s particular times that might be especially busy. So for example, black Friday for e-commerce is a big one, but there might be particular spikes or frequencies that you might not know about. For example, maybe they thought they were gonna use this feature monthly and it turns out they’re only using it quarterly. Knowing these kinds of things can help us plan for capacity, plan for support, and maybe asking questions about how the future could be adapted, if there’s something perhaps missing that we need to consider. Sometimes it doesn’t work for one particular user. We’ve all had that joke. It works on my machine movement writing code, right? While I’ve had the situation where it doesn’t work on one particular user’s machine and I’ve not been sure why, but it’s worked for everybody else and they’re all happy and I know they’re using it because I’m getting great feedback and I’m getting a ton of feature requests as well.

Carly Richmond: In this particular case, I actually turned up at this individual user’s desk one day and I wanted to see what they were doing and I found some information I’d struggled to get from chatting over the phone. Firstly they were using Internet Explorer, which the application had not specifically been built to support.

Carly Richmond: And the second thing that was of interest was that they had some custom cookie settings that were enabled which had to be cleared out and then ta-da by magic it worked and I was able to tell that through using the Chrome developer tools consult. I could see the stack trace within there. You’re not always gonna be able to do what I did and hop over to your user’s desk. So how do we get this information? Well, rum captures it too. It captures information about the agent that’s accessing the site.

Carly Richmond: As you’ll see here, I can see a visitor breakdown in the first pie chart there, which is each of the individual browsers that are using this particular site. And then I can also see the operating systems as well. Now some people might still in particular domains such as healthcare still need to support Internet Explorer, but even in the future there might be browsers that are dying off that are being decommissioned that you’d need to consider if you need to warn your users off using it or provide support for that browser. Furthermore, if you’re not using a mobile first development strategy, you might want to see what different operating systems and devices are accessing in order to plan, you know, do we need to make a move to mobile development? Do we need to build out that desktop app when we started at mobile? And vice versa?

Carly Richmond: Sometimes those errors are gonna appear. Rather than having to rely on me walking over and seeing the console, just being able to see the occurrences of these particular errors over time, see the stack trace and also the metadata associated with it. You’ll be able to see in the error occurrence, just underneath it does actually see which browser is using this. And then if you want to do smart extensions you’ll be able to see the metadata as well. And the stack trace, this requires uploading of the source maps because obviously for production code you’ll be using JavaScript and this source maps allow you to kind of reverse engineer to see the traces. But obviously this information is vital as well so that you’re able to basically see what’s happening remotely without having to necessarily dig around in the console on a user’s computer.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: We need to wrap <laugh>. Sorry about that.

Carly Richmond: Yeah, no worries. The last thing is sometimes they might not be U, they might think they’re not using it, but they are. I know that sounds a bit strange, but particularly if you’re working for large institutions that are trying to reduce their footprint decommission legacy software, you’ll probably need to know if it is indeed being used and get assurances before you switched it off. And I’ve had this situation before where despite assurances I’ve found that it is indeed being used on bank holidays in one country and that would’ve been really difficult to find had it not been from looking through the network logs.

Carly Richmond: However, if you make use of these controls in a way that you might not expect, you can answer these information, answer these questions. Taking a look at page mode by duration, by region actually gives you not just the idea of seeing where low bandwidth items are, but bandwidth countries are. But you’re also able now to see as well where in the world it’s being used.

Carly Richmond: With all monitoring, of course, I have to put the useful responsive reasonable responsibility disclaimer app, make sure you use these metrics responsibly. They are not meant to be for spying on your users. They’re meant to be for improving your application. Use them with that ethos in mind. And thank you very much for your time everyone.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you so much. This was wonderful. Bye everyone.

Carly Richmond:Bye.

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Angie Chang: It’s our sixth annual Conference and Career Fair and we are so excited to have with us today Cynthia Harbor, who is a champion for women and girls in technology. And she’ll be here, she’ll be speaking with us today about gatekeeping culture. Welcome, Cynthia.

Cynthia Harbor: Hi. Thanks so much for having me <laugh>. Hi everyone. Here we are. I’m Cynthia Canteen Harbor and I am a walking, talking manifestation of God’s light and love. I reflect this with my family and friends, acquaintances, and in my career. I strive to be a loving mother, daughter, wife, sister, friend and colleague, and I try daily to acknowledge and honor my Gullah Geechee ancestry and culture.

Cynthia Harbor: Welcome everyone, and I started with that because you have to know who you are without the titles, roles and responsibilities. They do not define you professionally. I work with CACI as a senior technical program manager. I’ve been in my career a little over 20 years now. Having been at one point a developer a business analyst, a project manager, and now a program manager overseeing a program worth about 55 to 60 million.

Cynthia Harbor: I have the pleasure of working with the group of talented people on the public health surveillance system, providing technical and programmatic support to our client at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the last 14 years. I earned a bachelor’s from Shaw University the oldest historically black college in the South, and I’m very proud of that. I also earned a master’s degree from University of Iowa – go Hawkeyes. I’m a daughter of the American South. I was born and raised in the low country of South Carolina in a small seaside community called Georgetown. And you’ll see Georgetown there in the background of my slide. It was there. I developed many of the skills and the resilient mindset that has helped me in my career.

Cynthia Harbor: If anyone tells you that they have all the answers on how to navigate the tech industry run, no one person holds the key to the kingdom. In full transparency, I’m gonna have what we say in Gullah, a ‘troot mout’. A ‘troot mout’ that means to tell you the real deal for a moment. It’s in spaces like these Girl Geek X, these types of platforms is how you gain insight on how to create and navigate your journey in technology.

Cynthia Harbor: It’s sharing our collective experiences that inspires and basically informs us. And the truth is, you’re going to have many challenges. You’re going to experience many challenges within your respective college or certification programs and even on your job, like there are barriers like gatekeeping, which I’ll discuss a little bit more, more later, to getting into technology and into the industry. There’s no one path to take.

Cynthia Harbor: Linear thinking does not serve you well here. And then when you finally have arrived, you’ll need systems in place to keep you there because the truth is women hold <laugh> 26.76% of tech-related jobs, and there are even fewer of us in tech leadership. But here’s some more truth. You have more power than you realize.

Cynthia Harbor: Sometimes it just takes us to pivot or reevaluate our perspective to realize we are in control of our actions. We may not control the outcomes or get what we want as quickly as we want, but we can certainly control how we respond.

Cynthia Harbor: And here’s a little bit more truth: we are intentional, not imposters. There’s been a lot of talk about imposter syndrome and how it’s real. You know, you may feel that you don’t have enough education or the proper training, or that you’re not technical enough. We’ve all been told to sort of fake it until we make it. But here’s my truth.

Cynthia Harbor: In my experience, I didn’t have the luxury of faking it. Anything, you know, in an environment where people are already questioning why you’re there, or why you’re at the table, or why you’re the one leaving something, I couldn’t afford to fake it. Instead, I had to get real intentional about what I was doing, and I made mistakes, lots of mistakes, but I tried my best to embody a successful feeling and do my best, and I stand firmly in my truth that intentionality beats imposter syndrome any day. So big, big facts, you are going to encounter roadblocks and gatekeepers every step of the way, but you can navigate this by becoming a SME – a subject matter expert.

Cynthia Harbor: Let’s call a thing a thing. There are several definitions of gatekeeping, but let’s go with this one first. Gatekeeping is the activity of controlling and usually limiting general access to something that’s pretty benign, right? But we often associate it with a negative connotation, and I believe if you look for the negative, you’ll find the negative.

Cynthia Harbor: But gatekeeping has also been used for good – think about it! In the height of the civil rights era, grass-root organizations and the church served as gatekeepers from politicians and developers and others that try to encroach on the African American community. In non-English speaking homes, the one person that speaks American standard English will often serve as a gatekeeper for the family. In those two examples, the gatekeeper was actually protecting something of great value, so all gatekeeping is not bad.

Cynthia Harbor: I’ve seen other definitions. Another one that I’ve found is to limit another party’s participation in a collective identity or activity, usually due to undue pains, resentment, or even overprotectiveness. The reality is gatekeepers have biases, unconscious or otherwise they exist. I have seen it. Some may only wanna interact with people who look like them, have the same religious beliefs as them, have a specific gender or identity. Some can only take directions from a specific gender. Someone who is from where they’re from only want to interact with people with certain pedigrees. They’re not willing to learn or work with people who are neurodivergent, or any combination thereof.

Cynthia Harbor: And a gatekeeper can be a recruiter, a leader member of an organization, a manager, a director, an executive, an administrative personnel, anyone that serves as a gateway or a door to that thing that you want or you should be a part of.

Cynthia Harbor: Now, just imagine if any one of these people that I mentioned has biases. It’s hard to be successful in an environment or with people that have allowed unconscious or, or biases to dictate their decision-making and how they conduct business. Let’s call it what it is.

Cynthia Harbor: Bias gatekeeping can lead to discrimination, thereby making it difficult for women and people of color to access these tech and management roles. I’m not saying that these people, you know, who are serving as these gatekeepers are against you. I’m saying that they may not necessarily be for you because here’s the facts. 57% of women working in tech have experienced gender discrimination in the workplace compared to just 10% of men. Black respondents according to this survey, were more likely to experience racial discrimination in the tech sector compared to any other group. And then gender and race, were also known to affect respondent’s experience of burnout in the workplace.

Cynthia Harbor: When folks tell you that they’re tired, believe them <laugh>. Here’s what you have to remember, because we get it confused. We have to forgive ourselves for viewing their biases and lack of acknowledgement as a challenge for us to convince them that we’re worthy of their time and attention. We do not negotiate our value. Okay? So here’s, that’s what they often don’t tell you. We’re often told not to sweat the small stuff.

Cynthia Harbor: And generally, I do agree, but in an industry where attention to details really matters, you may not wanna sweat the small stuff, but you certainly need to pay attention to them because the small stuff prepares you for big things. Micro-aggressions, they’re called micro for a reason. Microaggressions the insensitive statements, the questions or assumptions aimed at traditionally margin. Marginalized identity groups can happen to anyone of any background at any professional level.

Cynthia Harbor: Women can hurl microaggressions at women, men can hurl microaggressions at men and vice versa and so on. For women and people of color, we know what this looks like and feels like, but just in case here are a few examples. So being slighted left outta meetings or left off email distribution and then added later in the act of passive-aggressiveness, or being questioned by the tone police. Black and Latinas are especially want to deal with this – the tone police, how we say things the speaking over you as you’re talking – the disruption the doubting and questioning of you in workspaces, whether it’s on Slack or Teams or in conference call, not with the intent to understand, but with the intent to denigrate or approve a point or counter you in some way. The over-explaining or the man-splaining after you repeatedly said that you understand. And then the final one, which is traditionally, you hear this all the time, oh, you speak so well, or he’s very articulate, or she’s very articulate.

Cynthia Harbor: Look, I love to hike the trail near my home. It is so serene. You know, the rustle of the leaves, the hush of the wind, the babbling brook, it is so peaceful, but the truth is, it’s the woods. And while I do appreciate the beauty that’s around me, I still recognize that it’s the woods.

Cynthia Harbor: You’ve got to be able to read the room. There’s a level of emotional intelligence that’s absolutely necessary. Daniel Goldman wrote in his book, emotional Intelligence. He said, if your emotional abilities aren’t in hand, if you don’t have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can’t have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far. Now, does emotional intelligence neutralize micro-aggressions? No, because you cannot control how other people act, but what emotional intelligence does, it makes you better.

Cynthia Harbor: It makes you more self-aware. Let’s continue to be a sme. The first is as, so let’s set some realistic expectations. Now that you’re able to read the room, you can go forth and then set realistic expectations for yourself.

Cynthia Harbor: Here’s one of my tips. In project management, the stakeholder analysis is the GOAT of tools. A stakeholder analysis is the process of identifying people before the project begins. Grouping them according to their level of interest participation and determining how best to involve and communicate Each of these stakeholder groups throughout <laugh>, there are usually four steps in creating a stakeholder analysis. The first is identifying the stakeholder. You gotta know who you’re talking to, you clarify the interest. You gotta understand why they’re there. You agree on the process of engagement between the stakeholders so you know how to approach them.

Cynthia Harbor: And then the final thing is managing the relationship with the stakeholders. You know, otherwise that means that you’re not being disingenuous because you’re reaching out to them. If you can understand this, if you could understand their why their “WIIFM” ( what’s in it for me), you could then calibrate your ask. Thereby not setting yourself up for letdown. You now know who you’re dealing with, or if you don’t, if this is like a code contact and you don’t know the person that you need to reach out to, then you appeal to the greater good. You speak to your integrity, honesty, character. These are the building blocks upon which expectations are set, that is your foundation.

Cynthia Harbor: Next is make your intentions known. Remember previousl,y I mentioned integrity, honesty, character, and how, you know, they’re the building blocks. If those things are in place and then your words and your actions that they align, you know, you’re absolutely making your intentions known. Intentions are the heart of what we call characters, the value, the norms, goals and priorities that drive someone’s actions and choices. Now I took that from the Harvard Business Review.

Cynthia Harbor: You have to be able to speak about your intentions, what’s important to you, what’s the goal that you seek, the value and the motives that guide your actions and decisions. If I see that there is an alignment with what you say and what you do access granted, you are who you say you are. Oftentimes we believe that taking the direct route is a given, but sometimes we get help in the least likely of places.

Cynthia Harbor: The person to help you may not always be the person that has the authority. Now, they may not be in charge, but at one point in my career, I was trying to access quite a few things, but I knew I couldn’t get there alone. And I’ll tell you, I’ve had quite a few people in my life that have provided guidance, mentorship, sponsorship. Just be true advocates for me. And I know I could not have gotten there if they weren’t rooting for me and I had to make my intentions clear.

Cynthia Harbor: I’ve had several advocates who were essentially gatekeepers in my life, and several of them were men. One was a curmudgeon old newspaper editor that I worked for one summer as an intern. I was told that if I wanted a job, I had to convince him. I was terrified, but my desire to be in journalism was bigger than my fear. And I went for it and I landed the internship. It was one of the best summers in my life.

Cynthia Harbor: Another time when I was transferring graduate schools. Who transfers in the middle of graduate schools? It’s just a two year program. But I felt that I wasn’t getting what I needed from the school I attended at the time, but I just didn’t know what my options were. And I met a black man at a conference who told me to transfer. I’m thinking, I’ve got to stay confined to this box, this two year box, and just sort of grin and bear it, and he put the thought in my mind that no roll out <laugh> and as a matter of fact, apply to my alma mater, University of Iowa.

Cynthia Harbor: Help comes in the least likely a place and I would say that over the past decade, my biggest advocates has been a white man and a black woman. And they see me, they know me, they know my intentions, I see them, I know their intentions, and I’ve had people to pour into me over the years. Growing up Orly Lee taught me the importance of community service. And I’m gonna say her name in honor, women’s History Month Ernestine Joneses, Loretta Jones, Antoinette Gardner, Linda Carter, my auntie. These women have loved and poured into me. And since I was 10 years old, I’ve had a mentor. My sixth grade English teacher, Dotty Green, who modeled integrity and has taught me discernment. And over the past 30 plus years that Dotty’s been in my life, she has shown me that not all doors are for me.

Cynthia Harbor: Not all doors are for you, right? And I’m okay with that, so door open, you know, access granted or door closed, access denied. At the end of the day, I’m okay with that. You know why? Because I know who I am. I am a walking, talking manifestation of God’s light and love. And no door could ever change that. It didn’t give it to me, and it can’t take it away from me. Do you know who you are? Okay, so Stephen Covey, in his book, the Speed of Trust talks about consistency and competence being the two important aspects of gaining trust, consistency, competency. Just around that. Just imagine you’ve gotta beat that drum consistency and competency. And I’m gonna wrap up.

Cynthia Harbor: This is my last point I wanna make. Consistency and competency basically enables trust. How do you navigate gatekeeping culture? One, you have to know who you are. Two, you have to show them who you are. One, we have to set realistic expectations. You have to do your homework, right? Boom. Consistency, competency, consistency, competency. Two, make your intentions known. Why are you here? Three, explore multiple points of entry. Remember, the person at the top may not necessarily be the person that grants you access, okay? We have to recognize that emotional intelligence plays a critical role. You’ve gotta be aware.

Cynthia Harbor: Remember, don’t sweat the small stuff, but pay attention to them. Don’t negotiate your value. We don’t negotiate our value for anyone. And remember to be intentional and not an imposter because intentionality and imposter syndrome cannot coexist. And you have to show them who you are, right? Because at any moment you can shift from waiting on it to walking in it.

Angie Chang: Thank you. Thank you, Cynthia. I love the slides so much. You have a website, LinkedIn. I’m sure you’ll be around this conference maybe to talk to people. We’re gonna move to our next sessions cuz we’re a little one minute over. Thank you so much, Cynthia.

Cynthia Harbor: Thank you Angie. Thanks for having me.

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Sukrutha Bhadouria: I am now here to introduce Bhawna and Shalini from Proofpoint. Bhawna is a senior engineering program manager at Proofpoint. Shalini is a group product manager at Proofpoint. We will now be hearing from both these ladies on their unique journeys to cybersecurity and how you too can begin a career in cybersecurity. Welcome, Bhawna and Shalini.

Bhawna Dua: Thank you Sukrutha for the introduction, and thank you folks for joining our talk, demystifying cybersecurity. Today, me and my counterpart, Shalini, would like to shed some light on the somewhat mysterious field of cybersecurity and highlight why it is a good career choice for the times that we live in. In the last few years, we’ve been hearing a lot about these security breaches and hacks. Shalini, why do you think these matters so much, especially to us as individuals?

Shalini Sundaram: Yeah, that’s a great question, partner. We’ve actually seen tremendous progress in the field of cloud computing and IOT in the last few years, right? And what that means for us is really a life of luxury, right? We can answer our doorbells sitting in the kitchen. We can warm up our car seats before we go for a drive. We can have day-to-day conversations with our friends and our relatives across the globe. And my personal favorite is we can actually store and retrieve our most fondest memories right in the fraction of the second. But while the world has become a more connected and a more convenient place for us all to live in, we are seeing that it’s now turned into a gold mine for attackers, right?

Shalini Sundaram: We’ve seen attacks ranging from small pranks all the way to more serious risks where car hackers hijack millions of vehicles and they can control where you drive. We’ve all heard about the Facebook hack, right? All of our personal details were exposed to the world. But what’s very disturbing to me is that some of our most precious moments, like our babies’ first steps, even those are now under attack. But Bhawna, it’s not just us as individuals who are getting impacted by this. We also see enterprises are facing the brunt of this. Don’t you think that the cyber crimes have been increasing?

Bhawna Dua: Absolutely. You are right. Shalani. The rise in cyber crimes itself has been exponential resulting in an equivalent increase in the cost. In 2015, the cost of cyber crimes was around 3 trillion. It doubled itself by 2021 to 6 trillion, and now it is projected that by 2025, it is going to be around 10.5 trillion. Now, these costs include things like theft of intellectual property, personal and financial data, as well as the cost of fraud and reputational harm, just to name a few. As you can anticipate, the demand for cybersecurity professionals is rapidly increasing, and it is projected that by 2025, there will be 3.5 million fewer cybersecurity professionals than the actual number of available jobs. Shalini, how about we give our audience a little bit of insight into a couple of these hacks or attacks and how things unfolded? You have an interesting example to share with us today about software supply chain compromise, right?

Shalini Sundaram: Yeah, that’s right, Bhawna. The SolarWinds hack – this actually happened in 2020, right? The security community community is still talking about it because if you look at most attacks, they go after one organization. What these attackers did is they went after one company that whose, whose products are being used by thousands of organizations, right? The attackers introduced malicious code into one of the software updates, and 18,000 organizations ended up downloading it. 20% of those institutions included federal ones, right? The Department of Homeland Security, Department of Energy, and it took them over a year to actually discover the attack. As you can see, this was a pretty sophisticated attack.

Shalini Sundaram: Let’s go a little bit behind the scenes to see how the attackers did this. The actors who were behind this was a Russian group called Cozy Bear, and the first thing that they did is they got onto the code base of SolarWinds. They introduced malicious code into one of the software libraries that was being used as part of the update. And this malicious update went out to thousands of organizations. SolarWinds in the meanwhile, was absolutely oblivious to all of this stuff because they didn’t have any security tools that were monitoring their code base for malware. Now, after the updates got pushed out, it’s not like the attackers a acted immediately, right? They took their own time and they were not after these small financial gains. So what they did was they actually monitored all the systems and they were looking for software products, right? They were figuring out which versions were running so that they can identify vulnerabilities in them. Similarly, they were trying to figure out which security products were running so that they can figure out how to evade them.

Shalini Sundaram: Using all these attacker technique, they maintain a very low footprint and they ended up uploading a lot of confidential data, right? And some of that data also included details about the sanctions that the US had posed against Russia. The big takeaway here, right, is that attackers are getting more and more sophisticated and the scale of impact that they have is increasing. But we also saw another attack where these threat actors, they were bold enough to go after critical security infrastructure. Could you give us a little bit insight about that?

Bhawna Dua: Yes, sure. Thanks, char. This was the Saudi Aramco attack, and it was very interesting in the sense that it highlights the threat to our critical infrastructure. To give a little bit of background, the target of this attack was an oil and gas company in Saudi Arabia, in which this huge oil company, Aramco had a big stake.

Bhawna Dua: Now, the attackers targeted an industrial control system using what we call a multi-stage malware. This malware was injected using either a phishing email or a physical USB stick into the company’s network. Now, what was this malware capable of? It could spin the rotating parts of the control system and make it unstable so that eventually the machine would break. And if that machine or equipment breaks, it actually means a loss of life. Now, the reason this attack did not fully materialize was due to a slight misconfiguration on the part of the attackers.

Bhawna Dua: This error actually caused the fail safe mode of the equipment to trigger. And as soon as that anomaly was detected, the whole equipment shut down. Now, obviously that meant a loss of productivity, but it did not at that point mean a loss of life. Now, why does it matter so much? Because this same control system that was targeted is used in thousands of plants across the United States, thus highlighting a major threat to our critical infrastructure. Further analysis revealed that the complete file library of this malware was constructed using five different programming languages, as well as it took more than a year to build the entire malware. So you can imagine to build something of this scale and sophistication needs a huge amount of resources, which obviously points a finger to some nation state.

Bhawna Dua: Now what’s the main lesson here that we need to do much more to protect our critical infrastructure? So Shalini, let’s assume that a few folks from our audience are actually thinking to transition to cybersecurity and help solve some of these very, very difficult problems and prevent some of these crazy attacks. How would we talk a little bit about our career journeys and how we landed in cybersecurity? Let’s hear about your career part first.

Shalini Sundaram: Yeah, sure, that sounds good. My first exposure to cybersecurity was when I took a couple of courses in grad school. I got introduced to cybersecurity when I was part of my computer science program. But what was really interesting is we had a hands-on lab where we were asked to attack each other’s systems. And that was really exciting and I loved it, right? That was the moment I decided, okay, I’m definitely gonna get into cybersecurity.

Shalini Sundaram: One of the early moves that I did was I jumped into a cybersecurity startup. And being in a startup, I had the luxury to wear multiple hats. One day I would be sitting next to the security researcher, right? And we would figure out how to set up the infrastructure so that we can attract attackers and actually study their behavior, right? The next day I would also spend time with the business development team and talk to various security companies trying to understand their use cases and figuring out how we could integrate better with each other.

Shalini Sundaram: One of the things that I remember from my experience at this company was it was my very first cybersecurity conference. And at the on, on there was, this was in 2015, and there were about 400 security companies, right? But then the very next year in 2016, it doubled to 800. I could really see that the security industry was expanding rapidly. And in the next few years, I saw that it was in just that the security industry alone was expanding, but it was also making an impact on the other domains as well. For example, I was working on this networking product, right?

Shalini Sundaram: And it was leveraging a latest networking technology called software defined networking, right? And we were actually able to convince customers that even though this technology was super helpful and growing at the rate of 40% year over year, it still had some major security flaws and they couldn’t deploy it without that.

Shalini Sundaram: All of a sudden we saw the whole security industry and the networking industry kind of collide, right? So we saw the networking guys try to implement security features. And then from our side, we were trying to implement networking features. And we actually ended up hiring quite a few networking professionals to help understand that side of things. And in my current role now, right, I been exposed to multiple other domains, right? Whether it’s endpoint or whether it’s the more recent ones like cloud.

Shalini Sundaram: But what really has left an impression on me is my role as a product manager has taught me that I have to work with so many different individuals in order to build a good security product. For example, Bhawna, when, when things are when attackers change their techniques, right? Like the ones that we saw with solar, wind we have to respond immediately, right? We have to work with people like you so that we can ship our software quickly. Similarly, I have to work very closely with the user experience team so that we are able to develop products that are more intuitive to u to the, to the customer, and they’re not wasting time figuring out how the product works, right? I also have to work with sales and marketing so that they understand the value of our product so that in turn the CISOs, they can explain to their board and their CEO why they need to spend more on cybersecurity, right?

Shalini Sundaram: I guess I would say over the last few years, or like the last 15 years in cybersecurity, I’ve kinda become a little bit wise. And I feel that all you really need to be honest, is a good heart to make the right kinda impact in cybersecurity and, and Bhawna, I think this was a very traditional path for me, right? I came from the computer science program and I jumped across various cybersecurity industries, but you were from a completely different background and you ended up in cybersecurity and it was a bit of a non-traditional path. Could you give us a little bit about what you went through?

Bhawna Dua: Sure thing. Shalini, thank you for sharing your journey. Very inspiring. Well, absolutely. My background is in electrical engineering, and that’s where actually I spent the first nine years of my career, I was working at Schneider Electric in an electrical engineering capacity. And my life at that point was, you know, about these equipments like generators, transformers, uninterruptable, power supplies, or you know, things, all the things that you find in a data center. Now, while I was there, I decided to get my m MBA and started thinking about making a change. Basically, what is it that I want to do in my career next? Now this was around 20 13, 20 14, and it was a very dynamic time. And the reason I say that, because digitization was really picking steam, I took a few classes on disruptive technologies and digitization and did some extensive research in these areas.

Bhawna Dua: The three technical innovations of that time that really stood out to me were one, internet of things (IOT). We had now these billions of devices that were collecting tons of data. Second big data itself, the new data generated every year by these devices was growing by trillions of gigabytes and third cloud computing that reflected the movement of this huge amount of data as well as applications to the cloud. Now, during my research, one thing that I was discovered was that all these areas are profoundly impacted by one thing, cybersecurity. Imagine one of your IOT devices like your Ring camera or your Ring doorbell or your digitized fridge is not protected properly, and the hackers use that to get into your home network and access all the information. Imagine the kind of information we store in the cloud. It could be financial records, health data, personal information.

Bhawna Dua: If that data falls into wrong hands, it can be used for all kinds of nefarious purposes. So for me, that was enough motivation. I felt it is an opportunity to make a real difference as well as do good at the same time. Now, the key was how do I make this transition from electrical engineering into the cyber world? During my time at Schneider, one thing that I had done was build a strong base in project and program management and data analytics. And these skills are very transferrable. I thought, how about I leverage these skills along with my MBA and look for a role in cybersecurity that values what I bring to the table, but at the same time gives me an opportunity to learn about a new area? Simultaneously, I started reading a lot on cybersecurity to increase my basic understanding. I did take me some time and a few rejections to really fine tune my message and eventually land a role as a business operation analyst in a onsumer business unit.

Bhawna Dua: Now, at this point, I was really surrounded by cybersecurity professionals and started building some practical understanding in this area. A year later, I was able to transfer into a proper program manager role supporting the development and launch of products in the areas of consumer security and identity protection. Then in 2021, I decided to make a pivot because I wanted to learn a bit more about the enterprise side of cybersecurity. I joined Proofpoint and in my current role, I am supporting development of email security products and gaining some good knowledge and understanding of this domain.

Bhawna Dua: Folks, my main message is if you are thinking of making a leap, put in the hard work, identify your transferable skills, and take a calculator risk and believe that everything will work out in the end. So those were basically our journeys. Now let’s say if you are thinking of making this transition sh and I have a few next steps identified for you.

Bhawna Dua: The first one is definitely to increase your knowledge, and you can do that either by taking online or hybrid courses using one of these platforms that we have identified. If you’re looking to get into more technical stuff, then some of the universities, the very good ones, offer these six month boot camps like UCI, UC Berkeley, and to keep your knowledge up to date on an ogoing basis, Shalini and I and a lot of other cybersecurity professionals leverage podcasts. We have listed some of the good ones here. Discarded is our own Proofpoint podcast, and there are many more, so by all means, please do your research and you will find a lot of resources that are available to increase your knowledge.

Shalini Sundaram: This is a great list, Bhawna, and CISO series is my personal favorite. Well, if you found this interesting, you can read a little bit more about the other cybersecurity companies and maybe get started on your security career! Thank you so much for listening, everyone.

Bhawna Dua: Thank you ladies. This was amazing. Yeah, thank you guys. And in case you have any thank you

Shalini Sundaram: Questions?

Bhawna Dua: In case you have any questions, please feel free to reach out and Shalini and I will try to help you with whatever information we have. Thank you.

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Angie Chang: She is a senior solutions engineer at HashiCorp. Is that how you say it?

Kelly Kitagawa: HashiCorp.

Angie Chang: Previously, she was at Splunk as a sales engineer and before that she was an IT project manager and Accenture consultant. She is here to unwind the loaded question “Are you technical enough?” And we are here for it! Welcome, Kelly.

Kelly Kitagawa: Thank you Angie. I am so honored to be with you all today and feel so grateful that you all are giving me the next 20 minutes of your time. Let’s go ahead and dive in. So let’s start with a story. I wanna go back in time to the year 2010 where there was a 21 year old woman who thought that she would never be able to graduate from engineering school. But on that day of her graduation, she still felt walking down that aisle that someone was gonna pull her out and say, you still have to take one more class, or you failed that class so you can’t graduate. And nevertheless, she graduated with less than 5% of graduating class being women. She then decided after engineering school to go into tech consulting and work for a large firm cuz she didn’t know what she wanted to do.

Kelly Kitagawa: Fast forward to the year 2016 and she decides that she wants to go back to her technical roots, but she doesn’t feel like she’s technical enough for the job. Somehow. Nevertheless, she continues and manages to convince someone to take a risk on her without a sales engineering experience and to give her the job.

Kelly Kitagawa: Now for those of you who don’t know what a sales engineer is or solutions engineer, basically what I do is I talk to technical people all day, every day and I help them solve their technical challenges with my particular product or learn about new technologies that are coming down the pipe that I’ve never heard of.

Kelly Kitagawa: But I am constantly on the hot seat presenting to customers and especially talking about technologies that I don’t have a large background in years and years of experience in. I have to learn really quickly on the job about that specific topic and go research it and then be able to present until the next day. Then this is when the feelings of not being technical enough really started to creep in hard. And then for this person this unnamed woman she starts getting more confident in herself and she gets voluntold to speak at her company’s keynote in front of 10,000 people on new product features.

Kelly Kitagawa: Fast forward to present day today in 2023, I am now a senior sales engineer and I work with our largest customers in the world to help solve some of their biggest technical challenges. My name is Kelly Kitagawa and I’m gonna share with you how I’ve overcome my biggest insecurity throughout my career, not feeling technical. In the next 20 minutes, I’ll discuss what I’ve learned in almost 15 years of being in tech, years of therapy, countless imposter syndrome workshops, TED Talks, mentors, in the hopes of helping any of you who may have shared those icky feelings before. Here’s how we’re gonna do it.

Kelly Kitagawa: We’ll start with the agenda here on what technical means. We’ll talk about what your limiting beliefs are and how to rewire them. Create an education plan and reframe your story. And apply this talk is for anyone, like I said, who may have said the same things to yourself – “I’m not technical enough” or “I don’t feel as technical as others”, and I want you to know that you have everything inside you that you need. I want you to walk away with something actionable today because presentations are so great and inspirational like so many of the amazing speakers at Girl Geek X today.

Kelly Kitagawa: But the real benefit of my talk you will get when you try some of these exercises out yourself at home. And I invite you to invest the time in yourself so that you feel worth it and that you are worth investing in yourself. Let’s start with what does technical even mean? I’d love to ask you all in the chat to say what, what is your word? Association with technical. Please feel free to put something in the chat, like what does technical mean to you? I’d love to hear any thoughts like what comes to mind for you when you hear the word technical math? Absolutely. Is it coding geek? Yes. What else? Like what? Engineering, coding, math. And so I went through this APIs, absolutely, introductional.

Kelly Kitagawa: I went through this exercise at my company which is a DevOps company and I interviewed and polled a bunch of people, very technical people, of what technical means to them. And these were some of the responses that I got – Having a mindset, willing to dig in, building mental pictures, figuring out how systems interconnect. Also having a strong attention to detail. Architecture. And my favorite one that one of my most senior leaders in my company said is really having a desire to learn, and the desire must be so great that you overcome the obstacles to understanding something difficult.

Kelly Kitagawa: What is the common pattern between all of this? The common pattern is that everyone has their own version of what technical means to them. It is such a washed term. Depends on what product you’re talking about. It depends on which company you’re at. Every role, even at the same company will have a completely different version of what technical means. Every person that you talk to has their own version and association with it. It is just a label. It is a label meant to gate keep you from applying to jobs and feeling less worthy than others. It is just a label. Do not let it have power over you. And a part of that, of letting go of that power is really thinking about a fixed mindset and a growth mindset.

Kelly Kitagawa: When I went to engineering school, I had a very fixed mindset. The fixed mindset showed up for me is I’ll never be as smart as that person. They were born. Smart coding just comes so easy to them. They’ve probably, everything comes easy to them on technical subjects, they’ve probably always felt comfortable. And the growth mindset says you’re a lifelong learner.

Kelly Kitagawa: The growth mindset says, I may not know it now, but I can learn it. The growth mindset says I like to try new things and that challenges help me grow. The growth mindset says uncomfortable equals growth, scary equals growth and failure is an opportunity to grow. This comes to exercise number one, which is putting these down on paper helps you to really see clearly on what your limiting beliefs are.

Kelly Kitagawa: My limiting belief was that I’m not technical enough. And so what the exercise I wanting to do is get a piece of paper, spend 10 minutes, write down what the automatic thoughts that your imposter syndrome, your shame monster says.

Kelly Kitagawa: Write it down and put all of them down there on the left hand side, right? Like, I don’t think I’m technical enough to apply for this job. I’ll never be as technical as them. Or if I do this presentation, I will lose all credibility and they won’t hire me. And then what I want you to do is write a reasonable response to that.

Kelly Kitagawa: I want you to pretend that you’re talking to your best friend, your mentor, your mom, whomever that would actually respond to that. And they would hear, I’m not technical, but your best friend would be like, actually didn’t you do a six month coding bootcamp and you learned to be a full stack dev engineer? Or didn’t you pass the highest architect certification? Or didn’t you just give a huge presentation on technical topics?

Kelly Kitagawa: Or it might even look like no one is born with knowledge and skills are not innate. They are developed over hours of practice and I may not know it now, but I can learn it or I’m grateful for this opportunity and if it doesn’t work out, at least I’ve learned something new and I can say I was courageous enough to try.

Kelly Kitagawa: I need you all to go really deep and think about what would make you feel more technical. Be specific, talk about it. Your feelings are not always facts. Gosh, we know that. But when you really look at and examine your thoughts and think about reasonable responses to them, your feelings will become brighter about it. But you really need to take the time to think very specifically and write it down on what it is you’re limiting beliefs are that are holding you back. And once you write down reasonable responses and you do this daily on a practice when imposter syndrome shows up for you in these certain settings, for me it was always going into customer meetings or presenting to my colleagues, analyze it.

Kelly Kitagawa: When does it show up for you? What would make you feel less technical? And change your relationship to this over time. The feelings of my imposter syndrome do not go away automatically. Instead, my relationship with those thought changes.Iit’s not about shoving it down and never feeling it. It’s really about being more at ease with these feelings and rewiring your brain.

Kelly Kitagawa: There are like probably four or five really good TED talks that I put in resources about rewiring your thoughts. It is true, it works and it’s powerful. And being able to have reasonable responses in your mind, will make this become powerful for you.

Kelly Kitagawa: I’ll ask you with the question, what would be the positive consequences of having a realistic and appreciative opinion of yourself? What if you spent all of that energy that you spent telling yourself you’re not enough, you’re not technical enough? What if you spent all of that energy into positive pieces about you? Like I can do it, I can learn it. It’s okay. How would that show up for you in your life if you talk to yourself like that.

Kelly Kitagawa: This goes on to the next part, of being super specific. When you say you’re not technical enough, what you really mean and is, I need to learn more about Kubernetes and clutter cluster architecture. It is so vague for you to say ‘you are not technical enough.’ Stop saying you are not technical enough. Stop saying that you are ‘not technical.’ Instead be specific, and be really clear on what would make you feel more technical and say, ‘I wanna learn more about coding and Go,’ rather than saying ‘I’m not technical.’

Kelly Kitagawa: Stop saying that and ask yourself, what will it take to make you feel more technical? Think about it and invest the time and then write it down and make an education plan. This is three columns that I made in my education plan in a spreadsheet and I have the task I wanna deploy. In order for me to feel more technical with HashiCorp products, I wrote down the tasks – like I wanna be able to deploy Vault on Kubernetes. I wanna use Terraform to manage vault, and I want to pass my AWS Architect exam. And I put the how of I made to do that and the date that I wanna complete it by. And then for me, accountability is really hard.

Kelly Kitagawa: What I did is I found a technical mentor, and I hold a recurring meeting with them every two or three weeks, and I work and it basically builds in, for me, forcing myself to have to do these exercises, and really pushing myself, so that I can take that shame monster and throw to the trash, and realize it actually I just did it. I did deploy bot on Kubernetes. So guess what? Turns out I am pretty technical and you are cuz guess what? The growth mindset says you are a lifelong learner and that you may not know it now, but you can learn it and you can learn anything.

Kelly Kitagawa: Another one that I’m hear a lot, especially for people in non-technical roles is ‘I’m not technical.’ What instead I would like you to say is ‘I’m not familiar with that specific integration.’ Again, stop saying you’re not technical and be really specific about what it is that you wanna learn or what it is that will make you feel less icky about it. Is it really just around integrations or architecture? Take the time to really think about it. And then this is the part of reframing your story. We’ve worked on the internal thoughts, the limiting beliefs, your education plan, but now it’s time to get you ready for the interview. Or for talking to someone about what you’d bring to the table. The thing about interviews, this is a very limiting belief, is people are born good interviewers. The facts are that the people who are best in interviews are the ones that are the most prepared.

Kelly Kitagawa: One of the things that I’ve found to be really helpful for me is, I have a giant document that is reusable and I have a bank of my stories, and so what these stories comprise of are experiences that brought me here, there are experiences like what I’m most proud of in my career that relate to this job, but again, having the big bank of all of these experiences, things that you’re most proud of, and then in my interview, I printed out in front of me, and then I talk about it, and I just have them ready to go, so you don’t like, on the back foot have to remember all of these stories, but I think that the most interesting stories are the ones where you didn’t know something and you had to learn it and overcome it.

Kelly Kitagawa: Make sure you have at least two of those in your interviews and have them ready to go to talk about at any time, especially if you’re career pivoting into a new role that you don’t have experience in in that area. Like so as an example, if when I was applying for a solutions engineer, I didn’t have solutions engineering experience. What I did talk about is here’s other areas where I didn’t know something and I was able to overcome it. One of the best indicators of success is past success. Remember that. Think about all of the other areas that may not be that exact thing, but there are other areas where you’ve had past success to show your grit, your resiliency.

Kelly Kitagawa: It is all about how you frame these stories to show your potential. Stop thinking about what your current background is and start thinking about the potential that you have and sell them on your potential. Don’t sell them on your past experience. Sell them on your potential and what you could bring to the company that they don’t have already.

Kelly Kitagawa: One of the things that I experienced many times, especially being in a interviewing for a job where I didn’t have experience in that role, the best thing that I learned to say is, ‘I have something that you don’t have.’ I have a background that you don’t already have on your team. I have something from a security background. Yes, this is the infrastructure space, but guess what I have experience in it and security. Do you have other people on your team, you know, that have that kind of experience? Frame how much value you can add, not how you would fit in. Think about what you will add.

Kelly Kitagawa: I always say this, especially around culture. I do not wanna go to a company where I fit into the culture. I wanna go to a company where I add to the culture. And making sure that your hiring manager sees what you can add to the team that they do not already have – it is so powerful. Remember, sell them on your potential and what you could bring to the team that they don’t have already – different experiences that you’re bringing to the table. All of these slides are available to you. If you want to look at these for reference, because you’re gonna do the exercises at home, hopefully, and these, I just put on the slide of past stories from my big bank, my document, so you all can look at them later.

Kelly Kitagawa: Making sure that you are able to very clearly say what you uniquely bring. And this is the part about what you could add to the team that they don’t already have. Have these stories, be able to articulate very clearly why you want this job, and talk about your proud moments. Like I said, one of the best indicators for success is past success. Talk about the past successes that you’ve had and sell them all right.

Kelly Kitagawa: Now I wanna take some time to talk about this one because I mentor a lot of women and particularly women of color and I get this so often, which is, oh, I don’t think I’m tech enough to apply for that job. And people are so good at self-deception <laugh>, they’re so good at telling themselves that, ‘oh it’ll probably too hard’ or ‘I don’t wanna make myself uncomfortable.’

Kelly Kitagawa: But again, what would be the positive consequences of having this amazing, amazing picture and confidence of like a white male, cis heterosexual man have = that confidence going into these interviews and think about what it would be like for them? Do they have those same thoughts? So, especially when you apply for a job, I just talked about this with my sister who wanted to apply. She’s like, ‘oh, I don’t, I don’t think it would be good for me. I don’t think I’ll be technical enough for this.’ And I said, ‘You don’t even have an offer. You’re already saying no to the job and you don’t even have an offer. Make the decision that you take the job if you get an offer. And then at that time, then you can decide if you need to take it or not. Let the experts decide if you’re the right person for the job. The people that are in the hiring interviews with you, the people that are interviewing you. Let them decide if you’re the right person for the job, not your inner critic.’

Kelly Kitagawa: Do not take yourselves out of the running because your inner critic says you wouldn’t be good enough for it. Let other people decide that. Do not let those limiting beliefs hold you back from applying. Be brave and be courageous and apply anyway.

Kelly Kitagawa: For my sales engineering job, I did not think I was gonna get the job in most of the jobs that I’ve gotten, again, because I’m working on that inner critic that I’ve always had, especially on technical jobs. But I just said, you know, I’m gonna apply anyway and see what I can learn and guess what, I got the job. So it’s just going in with the right mindset. It’s kind of like, gosh, when you go on online dates and you have the first date, you’re like, oh, I think this person’s gonna be my husband.

Kelly Kitagawa: And it’s like whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Take it easy. You know, you wanna say, I have no expectation going into this. I just hope it’s a new cool person that I’ll meet at a pool bar. Right? You cannot put so much expectation and be so attached to outcomes when you haven’t even tried. Put yourself out there, be comfortable. And like I said, let experts decide if you’re the right person for the job. Now you’re inner critic. You can decide if you want that job, if you get an offer.

Kelly Kitagawa: What are my main takeaways? Technical is just a label. Don’t let it have fear over you. Stop saying you aren’t technical cuz you are. You have everything that you need in front of you. And remember the growth mindset. If you aren’t specific or if you don’t feel like you have that specific technical expertise on this specific thing, guess what the growth mindset says that you can learn anything.

Kelly Kitagawa: Write down your limiting beliefs, rewire your thoughts, have compassion for yourself, and then create an education plan and make it actionable for you. And lastly, reframe your story and apply for the job. Want it more than you fear it. Let discomfort and growth be where you learn the most and invest the time in yourself.

Kelly Kitagawa: And my last slide is really about this beautiful quote that your private voice is what determines the quality of your life. And the stories we tell ourselves are our re reality. Be courage, courageous, and tell yourself that you’re worth it and that you’re worth investing in yourself.

Kelly Kitagawa: Thank you so much. Find me on LinkedIn, email me if you have questions. Please take the slides and do the exercises at home. And I also have the resources that I like to use a lot like Ted Talks, workbooks, articles. But thank you so much for being here with me today and I hope you have a great rest of your conference.

Angie Chang: Thank you, Kelly. I had, I took notes, so many notes. Thank you so much for our all of your pro tips. We’re gonna move moving to our next session, so we’re gonna say bye. But hopefully see you in this online conference. Thank you again, Kelly.

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Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hi everyone. We have Shanea here. Hi!

Shanea Leven: Hi. Hey!

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hope you all are having a wonderful time in the conference so far. We are going to continue on with our journey of lifting as we climb up. Next we have Shanea, who’s the CEO and founder at CodeSee, a developer tool that helps developers and teams better onboard, refactor, and understand code bases.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Today, she will be leading a developer workshop for those of you who want to stand out by creating a visual map of your code piece to help you plan, automate, and review your next feature as well as refactor or code review, whatever it is that you just want to re have a special pair of eyes on. Welcome, Shanea!

Shanea Leven: Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited today. Visualizing things and helping people understand like how they go through code changes and walking people through their code changes is a really great way to kind of stand out in this job market. Also this workshop is gonna have some tips. We only have 20 minutes together. A couple things before we start – if you wanna head over to CodeSee.io to make an account with us, it’s totally for free. You can go ahead and do that, and I’ll remind people as they kind of trickle in during the workshop.

Shanea Leven: If you are creating a visualization of any of your code changes, we will also give you a certificate to put in on your LinkedIn profiles or on socials or on your GitHub that you can link to that you can add that as a resume builder as well. We do this all the time. If there’s any support that you’ll need, you can let us know.

Shanea Leven: We have a Discord channel if in case you want to be around other folks that are adding things to open source or how to contribute to open source or any areas where you need some support for visualizing things, you can always go to OpenSourceHub.io. That’s our open source community. All things open source. I’ll say that in another couple minutes as people trickle in. Wanting to make sure that you all see that you’ll get a certificate. If you in if you email Ana@CodeSee.io, think she’s in the, in the chat as well she’ll be able to make sure that you get a certificate and that we can highlight you all.

Shanea Leven: Some tips while I get started in this workshop. As you all are kind of creating your accounts you wanna make sure that to stand out in the job market, the whole basis of this is to stand out in two ways. The first way that you need to stand out is to optimize your resume for algorithms. Turns like not sure if folks know this, but a lot of people use applicant tracking systems. They use a lot of AI and ML to be able to find the different keywords to surface your resume up. Just like a Google search engine or marketing search engine optimization applicant tracking systems use a lot of algorithms to help the recruiter make their jobs more efficient.

Shanea Leven: In order to optimize your resume to make sure that you are at the top of the stack, you wanna make sure that your resume and and your history and all of your projects are optimized for applicant tracking systems or algorithms within those applicant tracking systems. And then you also, at the same time, you also wanna optimize and think about recruiters. Once you get past that first initial screen of an algorithm, like your p zeros to optimize for algorithms to get to a person, you then wanna stand out to that person and a visual walkthrough in case that recruiter isn’t technical, which is probably 95% of technical recruiters aren’t technical themselves. You wanna be able to walk somebody through in order to stand out.

Shanea Leven: How to walk somebody through how to understand your code changes, why your code changes are significant, what can you really do, and a visual walkthrough on top of your code is a great way to do that. That’s kind of what we’re gonna talk about today. When you first optimize for algorithms, you want to add as many keywords as you possibly can, as you have the ability to, to get through that.

Shanea Leven: ATS is the first tip. It, trying to make sure that, one, it makes sense, but two, making sure that if you can add different languages at different buzzwords, if you are trying to add more technologies, trying to get as many of those things on your resume as possible to kind of help you optimize for that, it’s basically very keyword driven. This is the way to go, you wanna list out as many technical skills as you can in very clear headings and settings like this.

Shanea Leven: Here are couple of examples of how to optimize for algorithms. If you wanna say, you know, your technical skills, map out any programming languages in separated by frameworks and databases, any kind of cloud computing, any tools making sure that they are com separated so that the algorithms can basically easily delineate. You don’t wanna use like semicolons, you don’t wanna use any of that. Cloud comma separated is probably the easiest way.

Shanea Leven: For professional experience, you also want to make sure that that is keyword optimized. Making sure that, you know, work that is software development projects using the framework that you have listed down below – ‘developed and maintained, you know, microservices, collaborated to you know, design and implement solutions requirements’ – adding those types of keywords kind of separated out in very clear, bulleted form so it’s snippets of code and not necessarily like long exhaustive paragraphs, optimize for algorithms, it’s very, very helpful to be able to do that.

Shanea Leven: Here’s a reverse tip. What you wanna do to get to this point, you’re probably asking like, what keywords do I add, <laugh>. You can essentially reverse engineer the keywords that you should have as a starting point. Go to LinkedIn, grab 50 job descriptions that you are hoping to apply for, line them up in like a spreadsheet and grab the skills and the keywords directly from the job descriptions, and that should give you a very good comprehensive list of how to optimize from there.

Shanea Leven: A pro tip is once you have that list, then you can actually go to other people’s profiles, like on LinkedIn and see how they describe their projects and how they how they talk about their resume, and you can basically kind of cut and paste things that might sound good to optimize the keywords, and then you wanna test that strategy out. Apply to as many things as possible. You might have heard probably in the conference today that you wanna apply to things even if you don’t necessarily qualify. Cause the more things you have in keywords, the more things that you can optimize for as well.

Shanea Leven: That’s just a pro tip. I’ve personally have tried this strategy with roles that I’ve applied for, so this is a tip that I highly, highly recommend. And once you have optimized for the algorithms, you also want to optimize for the people. Again, as I mentioned showing off your skills in a digestible way for a non-technical person at first will help you stand out to get past those gatekeepers with more technical roles. You wanna have a section on your resume that says visual examples of your skills. Most people have most people try this out because it is a unique thing to see. They’re like, oh, I can someone, I can show this off visually. Typically recruiters, when there are unique things particularly skills that they can look at and see examples of it is very helpful for them.

Shanea Leven: What sometimes what recruiters do, sometimes what good recruiters do is they’ll use a software like Gem which basically aggregates links for you when they’re for, for the recruiter to go to your GitHub, to go through your Twitter, to go through like your other social media profiles to try to reach out to you to make it easier to do that. There are already tools that kind of aggregate all of your things together, and by having a visual example of how you put your effort together for them, it actually helps make their lives a lot easier. The more you can do for the recruiter, the easier it will be to make it through that check mark that they’re looking for.

Shanea Leven: Here is as an example of what you see once you go to CodeSee, I’ll pause here. If you haven’t already feel free to go to CodeSee.io and make an account to be able to create visual walkthroughs like this.

Shanea Leven: We also have our open source hub community all about visually adding visualizations to your pull requests, walking people through contributing to open source so that you can use those contributions as examples for your resume. Typically open source contributions are a really easy check mark to show off your experience to recruiters and to show contributions. And the way to optimize that is to visually walk people through those code changes. Feel free to, you won’t be alone in doing this if you join OpenSourceHub.io, we have a Discord. There’s lots of folks there that will also be able to be on their onboarding visual walkthrough journey. That’s my PSA. Back to the talk!

Shanea Leven: For visual tours on your code changes, being able to walk people through why something is complicated, how to understand what they’re looking at is what you want to be able to do. CodeSee allows you to make this visualization. And if in the event the recruiter is technical or if they forward that code change over to the hiring manager, they can use this visualization to very quickly and optimally understand what your code change is doing. That’s why a visualization like this will save them time in understanding what you did, but also your added notes and comments will also even supercharge that understanding very quickly and gives you a really good edge that we’ve seen people add to their resume.

Shanea Leven: Just as a highlight, CodeSee is a visual code visualization platform, we do more than that. But this will definitely help you all to make sure that you can walk someone through your code changes and help you stand out both for algorithms and for people.

Shanea Leven: We do have some ways of walking through the comments in this workshop. The three things that you would do in order to do that. Very, very simple. OpenSourceHub.io or our Discord will be able to provide you some support to make sure that you all, all optimizing standing out for your recruiters will be able to help. And I think I’m outta time, is that correct?

Sukrutha Bhadouria: If you need it, feels like you’re also done.

Shanea Leven: Okay. <laugh>, yes.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you Shaneel. This was wonderful. Awesome.

Shanea Leven: And please let us know if if there’s anything that we can do you have access to all of our team and all of the people in the community to be able to help you.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: All right, thank you ladies. Bye. Bye.

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Angie Chang: We are here with Arathi Mani, who’s an engineering manager at Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. She works in the science division. I’m sure she’ll go tell you all about herself. I’m gonna just hand the mic over to her and say, welcome Arathi!

Arathi Mani: Well, thank you so much. I’m really excited to, to be here today. My name is Arathi. I am an engineering manager at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Foundation, and I’m excited to talk to you today a little bit about how we build multidisciplinary teams at CZI. Before I start, I just wanted to say please pop your questions, comments into the chat, into the Q&A. I’d love to kind of get that feedback. I won’t be able to quite see the questions with the wave my setup is, but I’m going to try to end a little bit early and then get to all of the questions at the end. Please, love an interactive session. I’m kind of sad that I can’t see all of you, so please go ahead and, you know, use the chat, use the Q&A.

Arathi Mani: All right. A little bit about myself and my team. I’ve been at CZI for a little over four years. I started out as a software engineer and then transitioned into engineering management, and I lead the single cell engineering team. I’ll try to make sure I get to all of the jargon, but at a very high level, single cell biology is the study and analysis of genomics, which is comes from DNA proteomics, which comes from proteins and transcriptomics, which comes from RNA at the individual cell level. And right now our focus is primarily on transcriptomics, which is the study of RNA.

Arathi Mani: Before coming to CZI, I didn’t know a lick of biology. My background is in computer science through and through. And so, you know, anytime I talk about science today, I really have to thank my, my team for being patient with me with teaching me so much about cellular biology. I just wanted to share a few photos of my team. We actually just came back from a week in San Francisco. Our team is actually primarily remote, half on the west coast, half on the east coast. And it comprised of many, many different disciplines. We have folks who have a PhD in molecular biology, people who have a background in physics, folks like me who come from a computer science background, and we come together to try and build and bring together science and technology in a way that really accelerates science forward. I’m going to talk a little bit about our mission and vision, just as a backdrop to have as a to have as a backdrop for all the conversations forward. CZI’s science mission is to cure, manage, and prevent all disease by the end of the century.

Arathi Mani: We are very ambitious. One of the things I love about CZI is we’re doing something a little bit unusual by pairing together science and technology. A lot of groups in the science world are primarily kind of academic labs, or they might be part of the biotech industry which, which tend to be for profit. And the cool thing about where I work about the CZI Foundation is that we are a non-profit foundation. All of the software that we build is really focused on trying to accelerate the cutting edge work that a lot of the academic labs are doing, where technology can really help make that go faster, make their workflows go faster, and we build everything as open source software. We don’t sell it or anything like that. Iit makes for a really unique organization with a diverse set of folks who are trying to all kind of push this vision forward.

Arathi Mani: The single cell mission is to create knowledge about what are the mechanisms at the individual cell level that cause human disease. And then by making that knowledge accessible and available for all scientists to then accelerate the generative generation of curative treatments. Our vision is to create a reference of human biology. Our goal is to try and sequence all of the different cell types in the human body and make that data accessible for anyone to use. And then also pair it with visualization tools to enable, you know, biologists and physicians who may not know how to work with big data to be able to quickly get insights out of different cell types and to understand the cause of each disease. We have a very kind of big mission and vision, very much rooted in the science.

Arathi Mani: We do have a multidisciplinary team to try and push this forward. I’m actually going to just jump to the punchline of this entire presentation because I want you to have this this notion in your head as you’re listening to me speak. But I think the key thing about what makes for a successful multidisciplinary team is all about empathy. It’s this idea that if you try to understand where other people are coming from, to try to understand their culture, to understand their background a little bit and walk a mile in their shoes if every person on your team does that, it’s what creates cohesion. It’s what creates a better environment from which you can have discussions and make decisions and really push push something forward and create something that is, you know, bigger than the sum of its parts.

Arathi Mani: I hope you keep this in mind as I continue to talk throughout this presentation. I wanna talk a little bit about the challenges first. I know that not everyone here is working in a very science focused domain. But I do think probably all of you all have been working with at least one individual that comes from a different background than you. It could be as simple as just engineering and product management or engineering and design or, you know, any kind of combination. I hope you kind of get a little bit out of this presentation, even if the scope of the multidisciplinary work isn’t as broad as it is at CZI in order to achieve our mission for every single project we may have individual that come from upwards of five specialties.

Arathi Mani: They could come from engineering, product management, user experience research, product design, computational biology product analytics, so many different specialties that are all involved into making one project successful I kind of see three different challenges that can manifest. One is that each specialty can come from can have a different sense of what is important to them. What are their culture and values? And they may not recognize what that other specialties culture or values might be. There might be just like general lack of awareness about what the different, what the differences are.

Arathi Mani: The second thing is around language barriers that can result in miscommunication. As somebody coming from tech, I think I often will accidentally use a lot of tech jargon forgetting that not everyone in the room might necessarily know what I’m talking about. I definitely felt like that when I first joined CZI. And, you know, a word like transcriptomics, I would sit there and be like, I don’t know what that means. You know, it happens very often where you sit in a room and somebody’s speaking and you don’t quite understand exactly what they’ve said because we’re so used to using our own jargon.

Arathi Mani: And then the last little bit is that the responsibilities at the intersection of the specialties can be a little bit murky. When specialties need to collaborate very, very closely together, it can be sometimes a little bit difficult to understand who does what. And I’m gonna spend just a couple of minutes going through a specific example, kind of demonstrating two ways that building this particular tool where we had some of those challenges. I’m gonna switch over to sharing another tab, which I hope you all can see.

Arathi Mani: This is a tool that enables folks to to understand what are the cell types in any tissue, and what are the genes that make that cell type unique?

Arathi Mani: In the spirit of International Women’s Day, let’s pick a very cool tissue – the uterus! You can see here all of the different cell types in the uterus. Uterus is also an incredibly cool muscle. That’s what enables it to expand from the size of a lemon to the size of a watermelon. And I’m gonna add all of the marker genes to the plot.

Arathi Mani: Marker genes are genes that are specifically unique to that particular cell type, which in this case I picked a muscle cell. You can see a plot rendered here, and if you’re a scientist, you can start to understand, ah, these genes are specifically unique.

Arathi Mani: There are certain genes that, that may not be unique or are prevalent in other cell types. Some of the challenges in getting this tool out the door. One thing was figuring out the algorithm to actually compute this.

Arathi Mani: We had a computational biologist who went out into the field, did some literature research to understand what the algorithm should be. Ultimately it was a software engineer who implemented it. There was a kind of a discussion about like, who owns this algorithm moving forward? Who owns the the writing of it, but then the long-term maintenance of it like how does that exactly work? And even trying to figure out who writes the first draft of the algorithm was a point of discussion.

Arathi Mani: Another kind of discussion that happened is, when was this good enough to ship? When was it good enough to, you know, remove the feature flag and make it available for all scientists to use? We had very different perspectives from our computational biology folks saying, oh, we need to kind of validate this against scientific literature to make sure we’re not accidentally you know, making bad science available.

Arathi Mani: We had product managers who are kind of in the middle saying, we should validate it for, you know, certain popular cell types, but don’t need to do it kind of comprehensively for every single one. And then you had engineers who were like, well, the unit test passed the smoke test pass. We’re good to go and let’s ship it. We had a very, very different you know, theories on when this was good enough to ship. All right.

Arathi Mani: Going back to the presentation – so how do we get over this? I think, you know, number one thing is culture building. There are different aspects of culture building. One of the things I really love about CZI is the clarity in our unifying mission and vision. I think having that vision and mission is what sets the groundwork to have productive disagreements, because it kind of gives the team confidence that everyone in the room has the why behind their work.

Arathi Mani: As a leader, if are in the position of being a leader, but even if you are if you’re not, you want to be able to repeat and re-articulate this mission as as often as possible and make sure that everyone really understands it. If you have the same why, that’s your common framework, and you have a, you know, a baseline.

Arathi Mani: Establishing a strategy is the kind of second thing. A strategy should be clear, easy to understand. I think at the start of developing that strategy, you should make sure you have generative conversations where people have a voice and have an input into the strategy. And I think it should happen across all different levels. And then ultimately, when that decision is made on what the strategy is, it’s okay to say like, not everyone not everyone may agree with the approach, but it is important that people disagree and commit. And it kind of goes back to setting that groundwork so that if people understand the why and what our approach is going to be, then you have at least a baseline from which you all can start discussion.

Arathi Mani: And then the last thing is around team values. Establishing and intentionally establishing team values is incredibly important. It helps keep everyone on the same page in terms of how we wanna work and what do we care about the things we build. The conversation about what is good enough to ship was a great conversation to have. And out of that came kind of a set of values from which other projects can use to say, ah, like, this team did it, you know, establish this particular values for this set of values for what is good enough to ship. We can kind of borrow that and move that forward for future projects.

Arathi Mani: The next thing is around expectation management. It is really important to spend the time to kind of define roles and responsibilities. And then in this kind of remote working environment, documenting them is, is really important to kind of alleviate any issues around miscommunication. And then even once you have that at a high level, establishing who does what ahead of a project I is really important. The conversations around who develops the algorithm and who does the maintenance of it was very productive to have, even if we had it a little bit later in that project, once we actually stumbled across that that, that blocker, once you have that and documenting it, people are on the same page that can really help in, in fostering a positive team culture. And then if you’re not sure who should do it, I really think that people should feel empowered to try it themselves and really feel ownership over the, over the project that they’re do, they’re they’re working on.

Arathi Mani: And that kind of goes to the punchline of, once you’ve actually established all of these roles and responsibilities and who’s doing what, then find opportunities to cross the lines and break the rules. You know, be thoughtful about how the way, the way that you do it you know, you should have the conversations with, with folks from other disciplines. But it’s a great way to build empathy and to understand the culture and the perspective of somebody else by kind of stepping over the line a little bit. And for example, in this case, having a software engineer develop an algorithm or implement an algorithm that is from scientific literature. And then the last thing I wanna talk about is communication. And this is kind of, I’m gonna talk about things that are a little bit very much tactical here. One thing that we did at CZI recently is delete all Slack channels that were created for specific specialties and only have Slack channels that are for whole projects or whole teams.

Arathi Mani: The reason that we did that is that I really believe that you can create and really foster cross pollination and the sharing of ideas. We had a Slack channel previously just for computational biology where they were sharing papers, but now it goes into a broader team channel where, you know, folk engineers and product managers and designers all have the opportunity to see what papers, what scientific papers a computational biologist thought were interesting, and make an attempt to read it. And then, you know, in my role as an engineering manager, as I develop goals for my reports, creating incentive structures for individuals to learn about other domains is really important. Making sure that it becomes part of their goals, making sure that they have the time to go and try and read a a paper or go and attend scientific conference.

Arathi Mani: I think making space for that is incredibly important. And again, kind of go, goes back to building that sense of empathy. I’m going to try and quickly wrap up here, but I hope you heard this throughout the presentation, this kind of focus on empathy and trying to build that in many different ways as much as possible throughout your entire team. I think that this really is the key aspect of building a successful multidisciplinary team. With that, thank you so much for, for listening. And I’m gonna switch over to try to see what’s in the q and a and chat and answer some questions. I love, I love the comments here. Very, very cool background in clinical data management and program management. That’s, that’s awesome. Well, thank you all so much. It’s, thank you so much for the the interaction. I’m so sorry that I you know, it’s not to face, it’d be so cool, but yeah. Thank you.

Angie Chang: Thank you, Arathi. That was an excellent talk. All right, we’re gonna break now and go to employer booths! We have Autodesk, Cadence, Dematic, United States Digital Service, and CodeSee in employer booths. If you go back to look at the schedule, you can click on the link to go to a booth, or you can go to the navigation to the top and click on employer booths and just find them there. They’ll be there for the next hour till one PM Pacific. And yeah, thank you so much again. All right, see you at one for the keynote. All right, bye.

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Sukrutha Bhadouria: Amazing. Next session, we see the number of people just increasing and climbing up <laugh> with every nanosecond. I’m not gonna waste any more time. I’m gonna jump right into introducing our next speaker, Alison. Alison is a Senior Staff Software Engineer at DoorDash and founder at Atas Fun, currently at DoorDash Labs. She’s the technical lead of simulation and evaluation and is working to improve autonomy. Alison will be speaking about how she created three different games of different genres and was covered by engagement while on her sabbatical. My goodness. Welcome, Alison. Take it away.

Allison Liemhetcharat: Thanks. Welcome to my talk today. I’m gonna talk about the games that I created during my sabbatical and kind of the, the lessons learned from that. I’d like to start my top with the key takeaways. Here are kind of the takeaways. First is that taking a sabbatical really helps tremendously with burnout. I was very, very lucky to be able to take a sabbatical, and it really helped me a lot there. The other thing is that I learned that developing games can be really, really fun but it can also be a lot of work. And lastly, community building is hard, but it’s important and ultimately very rewarding. First I’ve got to give a quick introduction to myself. So who am I? This is kind of how I usually describe myself.

Allison Liemhetcharat: I’m a proud mom. I’m a roboticist. I’m a software engineer. My education is my background is in robotics. I had a PhD from CMU there, and I’ve been doing software engineering for a number of years now. And if you look at my LinkedIn, you kind of have a look at my career path. Iit looks like a straight line. I think if you look at people’s resumes in general, this is kind of how it looks for people with careers just have one step after another. But, you know, is it really a straight line? I think you know, kind of like what Ola says, I think this, this will all make sense when I’m older.

Allison Liemhetcharat: And the way, the way I think about it is you know, in our life, whether it’s a career or like in general, there’s a lot of twists and turns. But ultimately, it’s how do we want to tell the story? How do we want to plot the line with all the data points all over the place? In the previous slide, you saw a straight line. If you’re interested, I can tell you all the twists and turns in there. But ultimately I just want to say, you know, if, if you feel that you don’t know what direction you’re going, if you feel like it has a lot of twists and turns, I think that happens to everyone. But so, essentially, why did I end up taking a sabbatical? I think one, one of the big reasons I did a sabbatical is that I hadn’t really taken a real gap from work since before my PhD.

Allison Liemhetcharat: The way it happened was that after, after I did my PhD, I started my next, and then after that I’ll take, you know, I start my next one and so on. Maybe there was like a week or two in between, but not an actual like, gap to take, to take a real break. So that was one, one of the big reasons I felt like, you know, I really wanted to kind of take a gap. The other thing was COVID-19, so I’m sure everyone was affected by COVID-19. There’s a lot of burnout because of it. This also affected myself and my family a lot. One of the kind of interesting things that happened was I flew back to Singapore. This was early 2020 before, before the vaccines and all that. And at the airport they were doing tests, and I happened to have a fever.

Allison Liemhetcharat: They put me in an ambulance. That’s kind of the picture is, you know, top right there. And then they, they drove me straight to the hospital for like, covid testing and everything. It turned out it was negative, but it was quite an adventure. I actually wrote a Medium article about, about the whole process. But, you know, COVID-19 was, was a big thing, a lot of stress, so I needed to kind of take a break from it. The other thing was that I was working for a number of years, and the company itself had just been acquired by GoPuff. So I worked at GoPuff for a number of months. We did, you know, handover and all of that, and I kind of felt that now it was a good time to take a break.

Allison Liemhetcharat: That was part of the reason why in terms of sabbatical, it was kind of a good, good spot. I wanted to have more bandwidth for my wife and my daughter. Working, you know, you, you have a little bit of time at the end of the day and our weekends, but not, not that much mental bandwidth. I really wanted to have, have more time for them. And lastly, I’ve always wanted to create games, especially with, with my daughter. She’s, she’s 10 now. And this is, I have a video here that I’m going to show. This is a game that I actually worked on when I was working at, right away. So this is like, I did this in my free time. Then it’s kind of a game a little bit inspired by like Animal Crossing: Harvest Moon and things like that where essentially you, you, you play, you play a character, you can gain relationships, you can do things like harvest minerals built things and all that.

Allison Liemhetcharat: This was kind of the scope of the game that we, we wanted to do. But it turned out that, you know, as, as is the case with a lot of like first time game developers, this is what I learned after the fact. We actually create, create games that have two large of a scope. This was Mystery Queen is kind of the game that I still want to do one day. And my daughter keeps asking me when we’re going to continue working on it. But essentially the scope of the game initially was too big. We never quite finished it, at least, at least right now. So, so then I was like, okay, I’m gonna take a sabbatical, I’m going to, going to do a whole bunch of stuff. But before I started my sabbatical, I had a bunch of thoughts in my mind, right?

Allison Liemhetcharat: One of the big thoughts was, you know, am I going to get bored? Right? What, what I was worried about is, okay, if I, if I gonna take a year, will I get two bored? Will I get easy to work? Cuz I’ve heard stories where people are like, you know, after a while they’re like, oh no, I don’t know what to do. Maybe I should just go back to work, and things like that. That was something that I wanted to figure out if that would happen to me. The other thing was, would I get too anxious about not earning income? Remember I said like, since, you know, before my PhD I’ve been working without, without a big gap. This was the first time that I’m going to have like a, a big gap and I’ll thinking, you know, is it going to cost any anxiety there?

Allison Liemhetcharat: And lastly a very important question is, if I take this sabbatical, like would I be able to find a job afterwards? I think it, it, I was lucky that I did this sabbatical before all the tech layoffs. At the time the market was still pretty hot, so this turned out to be oka, <laugh>. But, so that was how I thought my sabbatical was, and this is how it actually started. So I mentioned that there was a lot of burnout, right? After, when I started my sabbatical, I actually had a lot of sessions with my therapist and we walk through a whole bunch of work issues.

Allison Liemhetcharat: I want to say, mental health is very, very important. Make sure you prioritize it. And on the right of this slide is a poster that I saw, I think this was taken in Singapore, and I think this is one of the best posters I’ve seen about mental health. And it’s really, really good.

Allison Liemhetcharat: When I talked through a lot of the issues with my therapist, I think one of the big one of the big pieces of advice she gave me, with regards to my sabbatical, was to actually write a letter to myself, about why I took the sabbatical. And you know, when, when she told me to do it, I was like, why bother to do this? I know why I’m doing it. But in hindsight, it was great advice because during the course of my sabbatical, I actually asked myself multiple times things, why did I take the sabbatical?

Allison Liemhetcharat: Maybe I should have just continued working things like that. And then I would read the letter to myself and like, yep, you know taking a sabbatical was the right thing to do. You know, if you ever take a sabbatical, I said, I’d highly suggest writing a letter to yourself.

Allison Liemhetcharat: The other piece of advice that she gave me was to actually have a bunch of savings, move it, check more money from savings to checking monthly to simulate a salary coming in. Even if all you do is after that, after it comes in, you can move back to savings. And when, when she told me this again, I was like, why? You know, ultimately I’m just moving money from one account to another account. And then back again, like, why, why bother? Right?

Allison Liemhetcharat: She told me that it makes a difference mentally to feel that you’re still getting some sort of income. And it does work, surprisingly. This is something that you can consider doing it if you ever want to consider doing a sabbatical. But overall, what I want to say is mental health is really, really important. So you do prioritize that. Okay? Onto the games that I created. I mentioned Mystery Queen just now where it was a game that ended up scoping a bit too large.

Allison Liemhetcharat: I wanted to create my first kind of actual game, kind of a full fledged like game. And I called it, You Are What You Eat. And the idea is that I wanted to do something simple. Something with a very, very small scope that, so I chose to have a game with a single input and is inspired by Ninja, where it was a mobile game that I played on my phone. The concept of the game is pretty straightforward. You can just hit the screen and the jump, sometimes you get a little bit of abilities with this. But the scope of the game was small enough that I could finish the game play through it, improve it, and all of that to finally close the loop of creating, creating a whole game, right?

Allison Liemhetcharat: This was my first full, actual game, and at the time, I also bought myself a Lioness. And if you, if you’re not familiar with the Lioness, it’s a smart vibrator with AI and biofeedback. When I saw the ad for this, the keywords really struck to me, right? Because it’s smart AI and biofeedback. I was like, oh my gosh, this is a robot <laugh>. I got myself one, it’s wonderful for what it does. And what’s, what’s also really nice is that it uses Bluetooth to connect to your phone. Then, I reached out to the Lioness team on LinkedIn and they were really, really helpful. They provided me with the API, so that allowed me to actually connect my team with the Lioness.

Allison Liemhetcharat: What this means is that the Lioness itself has sensors and has vibrators, so I could actually control the control the slime with the Lioness. Here’s a little video of how that works, right? Whenever the slime eats something, the Lioness itself would vibrate. There are different kinds of vibrations. And also, when you squeeze it right, you can control the slime to jump,

Allison Liemhetcharat: Right? If you hear the video a little bit, you can kind of hear the vibrations happening. There are different kinds of vibrations to indicate what’s happening in the game. I realized that from the original game to the Lioness version, you actually had to tweak it to be a little bit slower, because tapping the screen is.. you can do that a lot faster compared to compared to squeezing it. That was how I incorporated the Lioness into You Are What You Eat. That was kind of like the first first game that was was wrapped up with two different versions.

Allison Liemhetcharat: The second game that I wanted to create was called Set Simulator. This was around November 2021. GitHub does a Game Jam I think every year. It’s a month long Game Jam, where essentially at the start of the Game Jam, they gave you a team and for 2021 the team was Bucks. And you, during this one month, you’re supposed to create a game. And then I wanted to create a game with limited scope. So I created You Are What You Eat, which was a small game. And I was like, okay, now that I’ve done that, let’s make a game that’s a little bit bigger. I was like, okay, one month is a lot of def time, so that will allow me to create a a pretty decent game.

Allison Liemhetcharat: How did I pick the game? Essentially I love simulation. If you look at my, like, what I’ve done professionally, I’ve done a whole bunch of simulation and it was near Christmas. I said, okay, let’s put the two things together and create center simulator. And kind of the idea of the game is that Santa Claus is sick during COVID 19. He’s asking for help to help to distribute gifts for Christmas. And in order to do that you can hire different bucks to help you.

Allison Liemhetcharat: There are two different roles. You have preppers that wrap the presents,and movers that deliver the gifts. Each buck has its own statistics in terms of how fast it moves and its capacities. And when you actually hit sorry, when you actually hit play, you can see that the bots kind of move around, move around the world to distribute the gifts. And what’s actually interesting about that it actually uses the OSM Open Street maps for the bots to follow the roads, except the bees that fly directly there.

Allison Liemhetcharat: They have different capabilities as well, so by choosing like which kind of bots you want to hire and all that, you can actually affect your final steps, which they show. The game is kind of an optimization type game if you’re into that kind of things. And it allows you to kind of figure out what is the optimal set of bots that you should hire for, for distributionof presents on Christmas.

Allison Liemhetcharat: And this was Santa Simulator. I created that and this was kind of what my day-to-day looked like during that one month game gym, right? And if, if you look at the, the, the schedule that I have, you’ll start to think, Hmm, this looks like a little bit like a full-time job. And it is, I would say maybe a little bit worse than a full-time job because I was working on Santa Simulator like during like office hours and also at night.

Allison Liemhetcharat: This was, it turned out a little bit worse than, than I taught. My lesson lessons learned from doing Santa Simulator is that a Game Jam is a wonderful experience with a great community. There are a lot of people that are really, really nice. They’re really helpful. We shared our progress. We talked about what we did things like that. It was wonderful.

Allison Liemhetcharat: I really enjoyed the process and the community, but I’ve learned that it’s possible, it’s very, very possible to work too hard even during a sabbatical. And one of the questions I asked myself multiple times during this month was like, why, why does this feel like a full-time job or worse? And, you know, I didn’t really want to, I took a sabbatical to get a break, not to find myself in, in the full-time job, right?

Allison Liemhetcharat: Ultimately I was proud of what I accomplished, but also very, very, very tired. Then what I needed to do was to actually take a break during my sabbatical, which is kind of funny in hindsight. It happened that my mom came to visit the States for three months cuz I was on my sabbatical and I said, you know, it’s a perfect time to come visit. We decided to go on a long road trip so you can kind of have a look at our path that we did for winter break. My daughter was off school, so we did this for long road trip. That was wonderful. I also took the time to play some video games that had on my list for for ages. I played like Horizon Zero Down Wonderful Game and a bunch of other games as well.

Allison Liemhetcharat: This break during my sabbatical was wonderful. I enjoyed it and it felt like an actual holiday at this point, right? Back to the takeaway. I’ve talked about those two and now, we’ll, we’ll talk about the, the last point about community building. I mentioned You Are What You Eat earlier, I created the game, but at that point around when I started on Santa Simulator, I finished the game, but I hadn’t actually launched it yet. And the reason why I didn’t like actually launch it was that launching a game on the mobile app stores was a little tricky. I wanted to set up LLC and, and all the kind of stuff, and there’s a lot of process involved.

Allison Liemhetcharat: In October, 2021, Liz who is the CEO of Lioness, actually reached out to her journalist contacts about the game, and I was interviewed by Cherlynn Low at Engadget in December. This was, this was a great experience. You know, she talked, she asked me about what the game was about you know, how, how do you get in touch with it? How do you play and, and things like that. If you’re interested, you can have a look at the article, it was published in January 2022.

Allison Liemhetcharat: And once she published this video, my YouTube video, the one that you saw just now, the views actually spiked up by 10,000. I’m not a like social media person, so 10,000 views to me is, is a, a ton <laugh>. Usually my videos that I post on YouTube get like, if I get a hundred views, I’m pretty happy. So 10,000 was awesome and till today it hit like 19,000. That’s pretty cool. The article itself created a whole lot of interest in the game and all that. To me, that was wonderful. And once the the game was on the app stores and people started downloading it, I had people reach out to me with like what they thought about the game and things like that. It was a wonderful experience.

Allison Liemhetcharat: And then now that I’ve done two games, I was like, okay, there’s still, there’s still time in my sabbatical. Let’s, let’s do a third game, right? One of the key things I wanted to, to do was to actually unconsciously decide not to overwork <laugh>. Santa Simulator was where I worked too hard. This time I was saying, okay, let’s do game number three but make sure that, you know, I actually spend more time with my wife and my daughter. What I did was I started following some really nice to streamers, so shout out to Treecle and Cptn_Sumi. I have their, their portraits over there. The two of them are really, really nice people and they have very, very nice communities.

Allison Liemhetcharat: Twitch was a really, really fun way for me to develop Feisty Fauna. I could do it at a leisure pace, I could get to know the community and, and so on. And both Treecle and Cptn_Sumi have been great at promoting the game.

Allison Liemhetcharat: If you’re wondering what Feisty Fauna is, it’s kind of a casual road light, like a Vampire Survivors, but like a very, very cute version. This is like the trailer that I have. If you’re interested, the game is on Steam, the demo is available for download, so you can give it a try.

Allison Liemhetcharat: And one cool fact about about the video that I just saw is that my daughter, who’s been involved in doing all the games that I showed you. She did a whole bunch of sound effects for this game as well. For example, when the Fox jumping, that’s my daughter, the Cats meowing and all, that is also my daughter. I usually I call her the creative director for the games because she’s the one that comes up with most of the cool ideas that we have in the game itself. And she’s great at finding bugs. I’ll create a version and I’ll be like, okay, you know, come play the game.

Allison Liemhetcharat: She’ll try it, and then she’ll, she’ll immediately find a bunch of bugs for me to fix. She’s really great at that, so I created Feisty for now, or at least part of it, and I wanted to be able to publicize this. And what I did initially was to use Twitter to post about the progress of Fif Fauna. The main audience was fellow game developers, which is a great community. But not quite the target audience. I heard that TikTok was a great place to do publicity. I posted a bunch of videos, not, I know, haven’t had like a great hit yet. Maybe I haven’t got the formula right or something.

Allison Liemhetcharat: Twitch has been wonderful. I talked about the streamers and the other players and a bunch of people who’ve played it have been, have been really, really very engaged. They reach out to me with the comments and let me know how they feel about the game, and all of that. And one of the things I added was to actually add Twitch integration to the game. This allows like streamers to play the game and their viewers to play along. In the next video you’ll see a whole bunch of creatures on the screen. All of them have name plates above their heads, and those are players that that joined in. This is kind of a short clip about that. This is bullet house, like Vampire Survivor, that sort of thing. This is like that. And I would not normally play these sorts of games, but this is a ridiculously cute version. It is so full of cuteness, it almost hurts how cute it is. Look, look at it. 

Allison Liemhetcharat: Alright, so, so that’s, that’s trickle off playing, playing on stream. And you know, she’s been wonderful and it, it is really fun to watch her players actually get engaged with the game as well. The other thing was to participate in steam festivals. Like I created a Halloween level for the Steam scare fest, and that was also a great way to publicize the game. There was like most of my sabbatical and in summer that’s kind of where I paused work on fight and started talking to companies to find my next role. And eventually I joined DoorDash Labs. If interested, join us, we are hiring my team and as well as other teams. Reach out if you’re interested. What I found is that, now that I’m working at a full-time job again doing, working on the game in my free time is actually really, really hard.

Allison Liemhetcharat: Progress has been slow, but, but very, very rewarding. Overall, here are the kind of the lessons learned from my sabbatical. You know, I started wondering whether I would get bought. It turns out that, you know, I realized I wouldn’t get bought. In fact, I might get even, I might even get too busy. And the next lesson is don’t get too busy <laugh>, cuz then, you know, it’s not quite a break if, if that happens. And family time is precious, kids grow up very, very quickly.

Allison Liemhetcharat: Iif you have kids and try to involve them in your interests if possible. These are pictures of my daughter over the years. We had her like play with robots from, from a young age. I have a video that I’m going to show where if you’re familiar with like machine learning and reinforcement learning, this is where you try to give rewards when something or someone does the right thing, positive reinforcement. As background, my daughter came from daycare one day and she, wherever we asked her anything about colors, she would say green. And we were like, okay, she’s learned to associate the word green with the word color with green. We need to teach her other colors. This is what we did.

Person In The Video: What color is the mango? Yellow? What color is the mango? What color is the Ingle? Yellow? What color is this? Is this green <laugh>?

Allison Liemhetcharat: Right? By doing that, my daughter learned to say yellow. It turns out that over training is also possible in human. After the exercise, she associated the word color with yellow. We had to do a whole bunch of other examples to say like, there are other colors in the world too. With that I’m ending my talk.

Allison Liemhetcharat: Thank you for listening. Here are some of my links. The first one is my personal web pitch. And the second one, Atas Fun, is where I have links to, to the different games. Thank you.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you so much. My goodness personally, your daughter is so cute. And secondly, you have so many comments, people praising your game and obviously your talk in, in, in general. Thank you for your time. This was wonderful.

Allison Liemhetcharat: Thank you.

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• Check out open jobs at our trusted partner companies.
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Like what you see here? Our mission-aligned Girl Geek X partners are hiring!

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

Angie Chang: We have our keynote speaker, Elena Ringseis, who will be talking to us about design ops, and she’s a leader in the field, and I’m gonna just hand her the mic so she can tell us all about it. Welcome, Elena.

Elena Ringseis: Hi, everybody. My name is Elena Ringseis, and I’m happy to share that it is my very first time speaking at a conference right now, so I’m super excited. And I’m also really grateful to all of you for being here, so hopefully you can see my slides. I wanna today I’m gonna talk about creating a strong team culture in a hybrid environment. But before I start, I wanna say a little bit about what I do. It’s design operations. It’s program management for UX design and research. And it’s really focused on creating process and systems that allow designers and researchers to focus on their work and not worry about how to, how to get things done, or how to get from point A to point B. And today I’m gonna share five examples of building community on a team.

Elena Ringseis: The point is for you guys to steal these ideas and use them on your own teams. To that end, I’ve, I’ve created a five star rating system, and at the end of each little story I give, give my take on whether it was worth, whether the impact it had was worth the effort that it took. Look for that at the end of each, at the end of each little section. Let me start with some context. At the end, towards the end of 2021, my org was facing similar challenges to probably what a lot of you were facing on your teams, which was that we had been a distributed team then we were fully remote, and then now we were navigating how to be hybrid. And all of the nuances that that entailed. There had also been lots of changes in leadership at our org level and at the company level.

Elena Ringseis: We also had a variety of types of relationships. Some of us had worked together in pre pandemic, some had joined during the remote years, so there was just a wide variety of how we, how we knew each other. We took our biannual company culture survey in October and then received our org scores. And what we found was that we were siloed and we, people were not feeling like their contributions were recognized or appreciated. We were just like it, 65 people. We weren’t a cohesive team. And this was especially true for folks who had been with the company for only one or two years, which maps back to 2020 and 2021, which were super hard <laugh>. The design ops team, which consisted of me, another program manager, and our manager, the director of design operations, decided to do a listening tour.

Elena Ringseis: And this was to give us more more of the why behind the scores. We have the scores, but we needed to understand what the sentiment was what what was behind those numbers so that we could make sure that what we were doing from an ops perspective was spent in the right areas. What did it look like? It was not complicated. Two and a half weeks. We intentionally invited people that had been with the org for one to two years, but we also made sure there was folks invited from a broad range of tenure. We used small groups and did six sessions. And an important piece here is that we did separate sessions for individual contributors and managers. We really wanted to create a space that was safe, that people could speak openly and, and blatantly if needed.

Elena Ringseis: We wanted to recognize that that can’t happen if your managers there. So, and for managers, they needed to just be with other managers because they have a unique place in the org and they need their own space as well. It was re really well received, and we even got feedback that just by having the listening tour, it made people feel better about being with the company and made them feel seen and heard. And so we hadn’t even done anything with the findings and we had already helped. That felt really good. Speaking of findings, our analysis found four different seams. How work gets done, how people grow, a sense of ownership of their work, and how people interact with each other. These four themes influence the operations roadmap for the year. But today I’m just gonna talk about the relationships theme.

Elena Ringseis: I created a couple of guiding principles for myself when thinking about like, what was I gonna be doing to focus on that relationship bucket build community across teams, celebrate great work already being done, and inspire new relationships. These were my objectives and guiding light through the year. Let’s look at this timeline. This is what the year looked like for the examples I’m gonna share today. We started the year with the listening tour in March. We awarded our first design award in April. I launched the Operations Digest in July. I launched the Shining Examples Library, and in September we had our first design party day. So let’s get started.

Elena Ringseis: Let’s start with the design award. This, this connects directly back to that listening tour theme of relationships. We heard that people needed to be recognized and appreciated. And so I created an award program that was fairly straightforward, a monthly award. Anyone can nominate anyone. It didn’t matter what role you played in the org. The recipient received the award at our monthly All hands and it celebrated our company values as well as a, a sixth value that we added ourselves, which is empathy. Empathy is what UX design and research bring to our products, and it’s also what that org brings to a company. We felt like it was really appropriate to celebrate empathy. The other piece of this is that anybody nominated got like a kudos email to their manager and their skip level managers and directors. It had the text of the nomination in it, that way there was like no question that we were providing visibility of what that person contributed.

Elena Ringseis: It was a success. We had 70% participation in the first nine months more at this point, it’s been going for a year over 131 nominations to date, 47 unique nominees, 11 average nominations a month. And we’ve awarded about $12,000 in cash bonuses to speak about that one point a little bit more. Initially, we offered like a very modest amount of money to donate to the charity of your choice, because it was something that we could do from our own budget. Within like two months, our VP was so impressed with the, with the award program that he shared it with hr, who also felt like it was like embodied what the company wanted folks to be doing. And we were leveled up to be able to offer a really significant cash, cash bonus, which just felt, felt great.

Elena Ringseis: We were so glad to be putting some weight behind recognizing people for what they were doing. It of course, increased visibility of individual contributions to leadership and to, you know, across their, their peers as well. It also gave us something to celebrate as a whole org. It really gave us tangible wins that we could be proud of, even if it was somebody that we didn’t work with day to day. And the last point is good vibes. It feels really good to write something genuine that you appreciate about your coworker. It feels good to read those things about yourself. It really shifted the morale and the general feeling of the team right away. Was it worth it? I’m gonna give it four stars because it was, it’s a medium effort. It’s ongoing recurs every month, so there’s logistics that need to be taken care of on a regular cadence, but it was a big impact.

Elena Ringseis: It really, really, again, like lifted up the vibe on the team Operations Digest. Let’s talk about this next. Initially incidentally, this one wasn’t even meant to address the relationship theme from the listening tour. Just felt like an easy way to keep people informed. But what I found was that it was a really important piece of the, of the puzzle for our team culture. What it was, was a twice weekly slack post to like our all design channel, and it highlighted stuff that was happening in our org and, you know, key company announcements and activities.

Elena Ringseis: I also launched a shared Google calendar so you could subscribe to the calendar and get everything on your calendar that was in the update. But what I found after a couple months was that it, it really again, contributed to that sense of belonging to something larger than your immediate team. It encouraged new connections, like people reacting or commenting on those posts, interacting with people that they don’t talk to each day. It brought, it brought visibility to what was going on in our org and to show that it’s more than just the meetings on your calendar.

Elena Ringseis: You are part of a vibrant organization and company where there’s a lot going on. You know, like all of the great programs that ERGs host wellness programs put on through, you know, our people partners. So really just bringing awareness to that life and vibrancy that was already there to help people feel like they were part of more than just their team. And then this one is my favorite. It amplified these extra activities that ICs were doing. So a lot of people were, for example, hosting a monthly gathering about data visualization or a deep dive into a certain product. And this is a time an individual is acting as an SME and taking leadership and, and taking initiative. And so this gave visibility to leadership that those individuals were really taking that, that extra step. Was it worth it? Yes, definitely. It was a Slack post, so it was fun to pick out emojis and it was not a heavy lift at all.

Elena Ringseis: Okay. Shining Examples Library. This was a way to not just recognize individuals, but also teams for innovation and for problem solving. It came out of like an operations needs assessment that I did. I ended up uncovering all these great resources and tools that individual teams had made. It seemed obvious to collect them all, put them in a showcase on Confluence where everyone could access them, try them out, and adapt them for their own team. One note, it’s called Shining Examples because it’s not called best practices because it was only one team doing each thing. So we thought we’ll share them all, encourage everyone to use each other’s solutions, and then maybe we’ll come up with some best practices that we can standardize for our org.

Elena Ringseis: The result there was, there’s currently over 20 examples in the library. 10 unique views per month is great for any Confluence page, I think. It’s really about amplifying ideas that are working for some to everyone. It’s a benefit of being part of a larger team, so like another way to bring us together part of something greater than our individual teams. It also gave us pride in homegrown solutions. These were resources and tools that were made within the constraints and nuances of our company. They have a, a good chance of succeeding on another team. And so it’s nice to be able to look at home first before you scour the internet for some something to help you with your problem. Was it worth the effort? This one gets three stars in the right situation. I think this is a great idea. I had already uncovered all of those tools through the assessment that I did. I think it could be a much heavier lift if you had to find all of those examples yourself. So that’s what gets three stars, but it really, it still had a big impact.

Elena Ringseis: Okay, we made it to design party day. These are actual photos from the day. It was really, really great. Hopefully some of these folks are even watching this presentation right now. This was an, an investment in our relationships aligning directly back to that relationships theme. It was a full day dedicated to team building. The first part was virtual. We got together, we split everyone into like mixed up teams. We competed in like Olympic style events such as geo guesser or there was like a hex number guessing game, and then teams collected points and, and got gold, silver, bronze at the end. And the second part of the day was local parties. We organized simultaneous local activities for folks that were comfortable getting together in person. Some of the examples were one team did mini-golf. A team did a pottery class.

Elena Ringseis: There was a catered picnic at at the beach and, and one team did go-karting. So it was really across the board. And there were also activities for folks that were remote or, or didn’t want to get together in person. They had their own second part of the day as well, we had 85% in-person participation at the local parties. That was really, really great. We celebrated in five locations. And we had 15 people from within the org help coordinate it. With the virtual part. The every local party had like two individual contributors helping to coordinate it all and figure out budget, et cetera. And then of course, memories upon memories were made that day.

Elena Ringseis: Some of the impact it had was that it gave us a chance, again, to work outside of our immediate teams. Whether, whether you were just participating or you were one of the coordinators, it gave us a chance to meet our coworkers in person for the first time or first time in a long time. And it overall, it strengthened our relationships hands down. Even for the folks that, you know, weren’t able to be in the in-person get togethers, we tried to make sure that there was geographically friendly activities for everyone. It really was an investment in the relationships that we thought it would be. And for those of us that did see each other in person, it was one of the huge perks was that it wasn’t on Zoom.

Elena Ringseis: Was it worth the effort? I gave this four. It was a really heavy lift, but it had a huge impact. There was multiple coordinators, there was budget approval, there was, you know, planning way ahead so that our partners knew we wouldn’t be working that day. But again, it, it had a lasting impact that I think folks really, really valued. Back to the timeline. In October, 2022, we took the survey again and our scores had increased by 28%. This was really encouraging and the vibe on the team, you could tell that it was a much closer knit team.

Elena Ringseis: I think I’m getting close to time. I wanted to share, you know, takeaways for you all. But then I, was thinking, okay, what did I take away from, from being part of those initiatives?

Elena Ringseis: A little listening goes a long way. The listening tour showed that we were invested, made a big impact and was pretty lightweight. Strengthening the relationships doesn’t have to be hard. All of these things kind of came out of what we were already doing. Felt like fitting puzzle pieces together and they, each one didn’t seem like a huge undertaking.

Elena Ringseis: And lastly, community happens in small gestures too. The Operations Digest it, it took me a couple months, but I realized that it was my voice in putting together those updates and my creative emoji choices. Of course, that gave people a gathering space and a place to connect, to use Erica Pisani’s term, it was “glue work”.

Elena Ringseis: These are a couple more practices. I know, Angie, you’re here. Leverage discussion prompts in different ways and try to meet live or in person wherever you can. Take a screenshot of this, connect with me. Let me know how some of these ideas worked on your teams. And then I’m gonna be at the program management table in the lounge right after this. Thank you all so much for being here.

Angie Chang: Thank you, Elena.

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