Angie Chang: We’re going to be having our next speaker join us. Her name is Ali. And she’s a Director of Engineering at Modern Health. She’s passionate about companies with strong social missions and dedicates as much time as possible to DEI efforts. She has led Women’s ERG, served on Belonging Councils, mentored women on achieving their goals and has been a … I’ll let her introduce herself. Welcome, Ali.
Ali Littman: Thank you, Angie. Let me get my slides up. Good morning, everyone. Hope you’re having a great day at ELEVATE already. I’m Ali Littman. I’m a Director of Engineering at Modern Health. And I’m going to be talking to you all today about how to get the promotion that you deserve.
Ali Littman: This topic is very, very, very near and dear to my heart because there are so many hardworking people who might have the tools or might not have the tools in order to ensure the career growth that they deserve. So, I’m very excited to share some of my lessons learned throughout my experience and give you a tour of some things that you can actually try out in your career growth.
Ali Littman: So, brief overview of the agenda. So, I will get a little vulnerable with you all. I encourage you to get vulnerable with me in the chat and share some things that I’ve learned along the way.
Ali Littman: I’ll also give you some really strong tactical advice around how you can take control of your growth. This includes setting expectations around promotion, developing a plan and actually sticking to it, taking control of it and making sure you grow alongside it, and also how to properly self-promote and make your achievements seen.
Ali Littman: And then lastly, just walking through all the different people that might be already in your corner that you can leverage to ensure that they support you on your growth path. All right, so diving into lessons learned. Just to kick things off, I’ll introduce myself a little bit more and tell a bit about my story.
Ali Littman: So, I’m Ali again, Director of Engineering at Modern Health. I just switched over to Modern Health very recently. So previously, I was Director of Engineering at Omada Health. I have a pretty nonstandard background. I started my career doing like a large company, technical project management work. And then, over time, moved into startup technical project management work. And then, from there, grew into engineering leadership. So, very interesting growth path. And I can share some experiences along the way from that journey.
Ali Littman: I think some other things that I identify with that are important to share, I identify as a leader, a mentor and an imposter syndrome coach with a focus on evolving the workplace for women and other underrepresented groups. I’m also a woman and a manager. I have been promoted myself. There’s been times when I haven’t been promoted. And then also, I as a manager have made mistakes. Even as a very growth-oriented manager, I didn’t always get it right either. So, that’s something we’ll focus on a little bit more today.
Ali Littman: So, sharing some of those hard lessons. So, I’m going to share a few personal stories. And in the chat, share some times where you maybe learned the hard lesson as well so other folks can see that you’re not alone and I’m not alone. So, one big lesson, a common fallacy, I thought if I worked hard, I would get rewarded. In this particular case, my manager didn’t have sufficient visibility into my work, I didn’t have sponsors and I didn’t understand the power dynamics in the office, therefore I got less visibility and fewer opportunities.
Ali Littman: Also, I’ve had times where my manager evaluated me on things that had little to do with my output. I was judged based off of frustration shared in one-on-ones rather than the quality of my work. I didn’t know how to intervene and ask for a more fair evaluation. Additionally, I had one moment where I didn’t remind my manager to promote me. They wanted to but they just forgot. I didn’t remind them. And actually, in this case, a male counterpart had to remind my manager that I should probably be promoted and it was squeezed in the last minute.
Ali Littman: So, I’ve definitely learned some hard lessons along the way. This is the shortlist. And as a manager as well, I have made mistakes. This I think is a really important thing to understand. Even a manager who wants to support you and has a great plan around it, they might have a lot on their plate. They might still execute imperfectly. It is so important in all of this that you and your manager are very much on the same page and your team and your growth.
Ali Littman: And then, lastly, I personally have had successes with promotion. I have coached others on how to get success promotions. And even in one case, I was promoted against all odds. I was told that I was unlikely to get the promotion I wanted on the timeline I wanted, but then I met with my manager, made an overt plan with them, executed against it and was actually able to get the promotion that I wanted on the timeline that I wanted.
Ali Littman: So, I’m very excited to share with all of you how you might be able to replicate some of the successes I’ve had from the lessons I’ve learned. Feel free in the chat, too, to share some of your favorite promotion success stories. I’m not the only one who has learned some of these lessons and I think we can all learn from each other on this.
Ali Littman: So, let’s get into those tactics I mentioned. All right, so first thing, setting expectations around promotion. This is one of the most important things that you can do is signal your intentions. So, clearly communicate your growth goals. You see a statement here, “I want to do blank by blank.” So, I think what’s important here is to make sure that you really state your career goals. They shouldn’t be a secret. They shouldn’t be a secret aspiration. They should be something you’re constantly talking with your manager about. Have them be front and center in your one-on-ones.
Ali Littman: I often put them at the very, very, very top. So, they can’t really be ignored. They’re not a secret. They’re always top of mind. So, find that central spot for reference. Make sure it’s clear what you want. And as you’re talking about these things, maybe for the first time with your manager or maybe it’s not the first time, make sure that your conversations are around goals. It should be a very collaborative conversation, understanding how they can support you. I strongly recommend against any setting of any strong expectations or ultimatums. This should be really collaborative and goal-oriented.
Ali Littman: And I think another area to get strong alignment with your manager on, I’ve already do this a few times already, realistic promotion timelines. Setting expectations around the timeline is an important way to put pressure on making sure you get what you want by when you want. And also to show that you’re serious. There might be some standard line that your manager might give you around needing to be performing at a certain level or being with the company for a certain amount of time. These might be real requirements that they need to ensure before they can promote you.
Ali Littman: So, make sure that you have this conversation so you can understand how your manager can pitch this potential promotion to leadership in the future and so you have good expectations around what timing looks like.
Ali Littman: Okay. Next up, this is one of the more important things, aligning with your manager on where you’re at. You and your manager need to agree that you’re operating at the next level. They need to be able to articulate whether you are or whether you’re not. And as they make that pitch for promotion, they need to state the case as to why you already have been doing the job that you want to do.
Ali Littman: In this case, I would strongly recommend doing evaluations against whatever your manager might use to do your performance reviews. So, this might come in the form of a career ladder or leveling framework. We’ll talk a little bit more about that in a few minutes. But I strongly recommend doing a self-evaluation using that tool and sharing the results with your manager. That way, you can have a strong conversation around where you might be aligned in terms of your performance next level or where you’re misaligned.
Ali Littman: There might be cases where you’re saying, “Hey, I’m a fantastic cross-functional collaborator or something like that and here’s why.” Maybe your manager just hasn’t seen those five examples that you have. And maybe they thought you were actually not operating at the next level, but now you can convince them that you actually are. Or maybe there is a legitimate gap that you need to work on. And this is a great point to understand. Here’s exactly what you might need to do in order to demonstrate that you are ready for the next level.
Ali Littman: And then, yeah, so we’re all business superheroes here. We’re all trying to actually solve some important business need in the work that we’re doing. So, I think part of the expectation-setting process includes identifying that business need that you’ll be filling upon promotion. So, this can be a tough one for folks sometimes I think especially in engineering. But if there’s no clear role that needs to be filled or if there are business roadblocks outside of your control but you’re still looking to grow, I would say ask for alternate pathways to growth in the way that you want it.
Ali Littman: Have that documented, this is really important, so you can at least get the right experiences or navigate around the blockers. An example here might be maybe you need to demonstrate that you can manage managers but there’s no new managers in your organization. So maybe you can look into switching teams or mentoring all of the new managers, things like that. You can find alternate pathways to that growth and still make some progress.
Ali Littman: I think on this one, I’ll also say if the company wants to retain you and believes that you’re ready to make an impact at a higher level, they’ll make it work usually. This might not be straightforward but it is possible that the role that you want doesn’t exist, in which case, take stock as to whether this is the right role with the right company. If it’s not, there’s no opportunity for you to actually grow the way that you want.
Ali Littman: And also, things change rapidly. People leave companies. So, just always be on the lookout for the next opportunity you can take advantage of as the business itself is shifting.
Ali Littman: Okay. Now, how to make a growth plan and take control of it? Great. I would say, ask this question early and often, what is getting to the next level entail? What do you need to be doing to make it? This is a really critical question that you need to be able to answer and build a growth plan around with your manager.
Ali Littman: A big piece of this puzzle is understanding if there is a growth ladder or a career ladder, a leveling framework, whatever that might be, some kind of framework where you can evaluate the skills and capabilities that you need to demonstrate at each level so you can understand where you land on that ladder. You need to have a clearer picture of what the roles and responsibilities are and expectations so you can defend the fact that you’re ready for that next challenge.
Ali Littman: I would ensure that you know this ladder inside and out. And ask for evaluations, relative ladder, at least twice a year from your manager. I would recommend doing them right after your performance reviews because often, those do not reference the growth ladders at various organizations. So, it might be a good opportunity to follow up with the feedback you receive to say, “Okay, and what does this mean? How does this translate into the leveling framework?”
Ali Littman: Or after performance reviews, does it make sense? Maybe you got a good sense of where you landed. Doing this in between performance review cycles could be another good call. In a lot of cases especially for folks who work at startups, there might not be a growth ladder.
Ali Littman: So, I would recommend asking for one or making one. This is a tactic I’ve seen use several times and used by myself as well. If a ladder doesn’t exist, go ahead and make one and see if that’s going to be useful to your manager, ask if that’s something you can start. That way, you actually can put input into what goes in there that might be helpful for you. And it can expedite you having something to evaluate your performance relative, too.
Ali Littman: And if you don’t like the ladder, give feedback to management on it. And it might need to change to actually be supportive of folks’ growth of your company. And then, building that growth plan. So, growth plans can take many forms but this is something everyone should have. Maybe you’ll have a very specific growth document. I’d strongly recommend this in the event that you are struggling to get that promotion, you want something more formal. Otherwise, it could be something that’s part of your one-on-one document, Trello boards. I’ve seen it all.
Ali Littman: But in a perfect world, your growth plan should have some of the following elements like, what exactly are those skills that need to be demonstrated in order to show you’re ready for the next level? What actions do you need to take to demonstrate those skills? Maybe it’s a project. But also, how is your manager going to catalyze your ability to demonstrate those skills? It’s not a one-way street here. You need to be connected to some of those opportunities to show off what you got.
Ali Littman: And then lastly, having measurable goals or tactics for assessment and a plan for recurring measurements. So, having these things be as quantifiable as possible is going to be important. But sometimes, you might only get qualitative feedback, in which case, just understanding that the measurement mechanism is that feedback and getting good feedback in certain areas.
Ali Littman: And then lastly, I would refresh this growth plan regularly. Make sure that you take a look at it ideally monthly but refreshing it fully maybe about quarterly would be what I would recommend. And then, I always say the feedback is a gift. And so, be hungry for it. It’s a gift just like cookies. Cookies are my favorite gift. So, yeah, ask for feedback as often as possible. This is a really important part of this growth process. And set expectations with your manager on how often you want that feedback to be reviewed.
Ali Littman: I’d suggest at least monthly. I would also ask your manager to collect feedback from certain people in certain growth areas. So, they might not know or always be talking to all the people that you’re working with very closely, so ask them for more feedback on a recurring basis. And lastly, curate your reviewers. This is a great thing that you have control over. So, who do you want to wow? Who gives you helpful constructive criticism?
Ali Littman: I would say ask for feedback regularly from these people. So, by the time you hit the review cycle, you already have their buy-in and know exactly what they’re going to say. So, this feedback is useful in the reviews but it’s even more useful before the review and long before the promotion cycle comes.
Ali Littman: Now, let’s take a minute to talk about self-promotion. So, one of my favorite other top topics is self-promotion. So, there’s three different levels but I’d recommend really focusing on the core one, no surprise, based off things I’ve been saying, your manager. And then there’s also the department and the company. So, when it comes to your manager, do whatever you can to brag to them. In one-on-ones, proactively share like, “I got this feedback. I achieved this goal. I did this extra thing, I solved this problem.”
Ali Littman: Ask your manager how they want to find out about your achievements and funnel all of them through that pathway. I usually have an FYI section that I have in every single one of my one-on-ones with my manager just to let them know all the great things that I’m doing in case they missed them. I would also say share wins at the department level. This could mean being the one to present a group achievement at an all-hands or sending that launch email.
Ali Littman: I would also suggest being very vocal in public forums. There’s always a set of public forums in an organization where management’s evaluating how people are showing up as leaders and contributing. Understand what those are and be present in those. They might be a guild meeting demos, etcetera. And also, volunteer to lead initiatives that leadership cares about. This will give you some additional departmental visibility.
Ali Littman: With the company, I would suggest to share wins. Find reasons to share your achievements. If they’re impactful, people might legitimately need to know about them. So, see if you can present at a town hall, send an all company email, etcetera. And then lastly, and all this is classic advice but write a killer self-review. This is very important in order to solidify your promotion but it should be what catalyzes it. So, it’s like your self-pitch but you should be self-promoting along the way. And this should be like the summary of all your self-promotion you’ve been doing. All right.
Ali Littman: So, last section here, growth takes a village. So, who do you have in your corner that can amplify your growth and successes? So, here, I strongly recommend finding a sponsor who can promote your work to the right leaders and give you the right opportunities. This can take many forms and often is a matter of sharing your goals with everyone and seeing who gets excited about them.
Ali Littman: Also, understand how your manager maps to executive leadership. This way, you can understand who to wow and what your manager needs to do to get you promoted and identify if there’s any communication breakdowns on how your performance is being evaluated and discussed with the promotion decision-makers. I’d also recommend just telling everyone you work with what you’re aiming for in terms of growth.
Ali Littman: Focus on experiences and feedback and the support you need. And take time to get their feedback, get their support, wow them especially if they’re an executive leadership representative. They’re the ones in the room come promotion time. All right.
Ali Littman: And then lastly, just a reminder, people really want to help you. I think we all forget this sometimes. But studies show asking for help really, really goes a long way and people are very likely to want to help. So, make meaningful connections. Ask for feedback. Ask them to amplify your good work.
Ali Littman: I would say also find a mentor, this is really important, both internally, externally on different topics, whatever you need, get that help, get their perspective. Also consider coaching. I’m a fan of life coaching, this really helped me clarify not necessarily that I wanted to get promoted, but exactly what I wanted out of my time, what I wanted out of work so I could ask for the right experiences that then align with my career growth.
Ali Littman: And lastly, your manager wants you to succeed. So, just my final plug, lean on your manager. They’re in your corner. They might be busy. They might actually not be doing their job or not doing their job well. So, manage them and managing your growth. And they’re going to be there for it. They will.
Ali Littman: So, I know we’re at time. So, we might need to revert to your questions via email so you can reach out to me. Find me on LinkedIn. And I’m happy to answer questions and provide support in your career growth journeys.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you so much, Ali. I was going to say you’ll see some questions on the chat and through the Q&A section, you could even choose to respond there.
Ali Littman: Okay.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: But this was really insightful for me. Even though I’ve been in the industry a long time, I feel like I learned so many new things, as well as got refreshed on all the things I should be doing as well. So, that was really, really helpful even for me. So, thank you so much.
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Sukrutha Bhadouria: I’m super excited and honored to introduce Arquay Harris, who is our keynote speaker for today. Arquay is the VP of Engineering at Webflow. Prior to Webflow, she has held engineering leadership positions at so many different companies like Slack, Google and CBS Interactive. Fun fact, she’s a developer who also has a master’s in design. She loves the manager form and functions, so interesting and impressive. When not working, she can be found cooking, stumbling over guitar and piano chords or watching Seinfeld. Welcome, Arquay.
Arquay Harris: Hello everyone. Nice to see you. I’m so excited to be here today and I’m going to be talking today about decision-making at scale. And first I’m going to give a little bit of an introduction, which will be almost everything that you ever wanted to know about me, not quite everything, but almost everything. And the first thing that I think you should need to know about me is that I have been a Girl Geek supporter from way, way back. And I brought proof, here are my receipts. This is from a very, very early Girl Geek dinner that I went to and it was in 2009. And I’m pretty sure that I went to one before that, but this is as far back as Gmail goes. I tried to find an earlier one, but I couldn’t.
Arquay Harris: And this is almost a full circle moment for me giving this talk today because when I think about that time, when I first met Angie, for example, and I was just a very junior leader and to be here today, keynoting and hopefully inspiring and giving some knowledge to the next generation, it just shows the longstanding impact that Girl Geek has had and how much they’ve represented underrepresented genders and how much they’ve done for the community and tech. And so I’m just really excited to be here keynoting, and I can’t think of better way to spend International Women’s Day. So thank you for having me.
Arquay Harris: So first off, my name is pronounced Arquay. I really wish that I had this very exciting backstory, like I’m named after an African princess or something like that, but really it’s just my parents were obsessed with SEO. It’s true. You can find me anywhere on the web just because they really had foreshadowing. And I have the very, what is now traditional non-traditional background and that I grew up pretty humble background, and I loved mathematics. I was president of the Mu Alpha Theta, the math honor society. I was in math club and I went to college to become a math teacher because I really believe that math and science are the great equalizers. You could math and science your way out of poverty. I love visiting the island nation of Sokoto.
Arquay Harris: And I had an afterschool job where I was introduced to Illustrator and Photoshop, and I loved math, but I noticed I was most engaged when I was drawing something on Illustrator late at night in my dorm room. And I transferred schools to study media arts and design, and anyone who hears me talk hears me talk about this background. I mention this a lot because I really do think this non-traditional journey that I’ve had really is kind of the core, it gives me this unique perspective. And so I got into coding initially because I didn’t like this process of handing off my designs to someone else, something got lost in translation. And I figured I have this analytical background. How hard could it be? Other people learned. I started with Flash and then I moved on to PHP and Python and all of that.
Arquay Harris: And so I later came out to the Bay Area to go to graduate school and I did more coding there, but also fine art painting 3D. And so I’m this very odd combination in that I am a developer, but I’m also a classically trained designer and I have an MFA. And this has really served me well because I’ve been able to have really informed conversations about topography and color and I also understand what can be built because I’m a developer. And then a lot of things happened, fast forward and now I work at Webflow, and Webflow for me is I feel this perfect mix of art and technology and design. And it’s almost just this job that’s tailor made for me, given my background.
Arquay Harris: And I think that my journey and my kind of non-traditional path has really prepared me for this role of VP of Engineering at Webflow, because their mission is this visual development platform. And it empowers non coders who create these incredible experiences for the web. Because whereas, in the past being able to do this was almost this gatekeeper scenario by these few select people who could code. And so what Webflow does is the democratization of that. Getting people into this world of coding, even if you don’t know how to code.
Arquay Harris: And so as VP of engineering, I oversee all of engineering at Webflow. And my career path has been quite windy. I’ve worked at big companies and small companies, early staged companies, companies that were acquired by other companies, right? And so working in these various environments, I think has given me a very unique perspective. And I’ve been able to learn from each role and develop these skills for decision making, which leads us to what we’re going to be talking about today.
Arquay Harris: I think whenever you give a talk, it’s always really important to start your talk with a quote from a really smart person. I don’t know, this is just a thing that I do and you should try it out. So the quote here is that “The difference between a right decision and a wrong decision is context.” It’s very easy to wish that we had a time machine and to look back with hindsight and just know that you have all the answers, but sometimes you just have to make the best decision with the information that you have at the time.
Arquay Harris: And when you’re beginning something, whether it’s a company or any kind of endeavor, decisions are more like a labyrinth. There’s a one true path. I have a muffin shop, I make muffins, I sell muffins, right? It’s really easy, kind of one foot in front of the other, you know what the decisions are to make. But then as you scale, decision making becomes much more complex, right? You can go left, you can go right. It’s more like a maze in that scenario. And it’s not always clear what the right decision is to make.
Arquay Harris: Studies have shown that more choice, this abundance of choice, doesn’t always help us make better decisions. And in fact, it can make us feel worse about our decisions, even if it was the correct one. So take a scenario of a buffet, you go to a buffet and there’s all these choices. And so you have raised expectations.
Arquay Harris: Everything looks good, this got to be great. And then you started thinking about that opportunity cost, where you’re like, “Well, I could get a Mexican or I could get Chinese. I had Italian yesterday for lunch.” And then you make your choice and you either have regret or anticipated regret where you think, “Arg, I should’ve got what that person got. I don’t think I got the right thing.” And then you have self blame where you just say, you never picked the right one, right?
Arquay Harris: And how this can manifest itself in a real world scenario is let’s say you have to make a build versus buy scenario. You do this evaluation and you look at all the tools, you see what’s out there. And then you’re like, “Arg, darn it. I should have picked build.” And that can lead to this horrible cycle of self-flagellation, which can be unhealthy.
Arquay Harris: And so then how do we know what decision is the right decision? And that very much depends on your perspective. So as an executive or as a senior leader, you have this very unique vantage point where you can see very high level, right? And you might also have information that other people may not have.
Arquay Harris: But then at the same time, you could have someone who is in IC who says, “Look, Arquay, you’re way up here. You don’t have the perspective. You don’t really know what it’s like down here in the trenches. And that on call is really nerve-racking and pretty hard.” And so context is really important.
Arquay Harris: So as we just talked about, I have a fine art background. And in undergrad, I studied this film, Rashomon, which is a brilliant film by a brilliant director, Kurosawa. And it’s a story of a murdered samurai and it’s told from three different perspectives that are all quite different, and so much so that this is now used so much as a cinematic technique, that it’s referred to as a Rashomon effect.
Arquay Harris: And there’s modern examples of this. For example, if you’ve ever seen the television show, the Affair, or if you’ve ever seen the usual suspects where you take something that happened and you shoot it from different perspectives and you get this kind of story that doesn’t really align. And so it’s not really that necessarily that these people are unreliable narrators, it’s that truth really depends on your vantage point.
Arquay Harris: So then what is the truth? Right. Okay, there is no one truth. That’s the answer, especially when it comes to decision-making, because generally what fuels decision-making is priorities and priorities are very much in the eye of the beholder. And so context matters and our own experience is rarely the whole truth. And how this can show up in your rural world is often because we can’t make a decision, or we don’t know the one on true path.
Arquay Harris: We end up being pulled in a bunch of directions and so we end up making small progress on many things, right? Rather than making meaningful progress on fewer things. And as we scale both our business and our organization, the ability to make that meaningful progress becomes more and more important. And so a question is what are some things that prevent us from making good decisions? Right? Because many things are vying for our attention. And as I said, we’re pulled in a bunch of directions.
Arquay Harris: So as the leader of an entire engineering organization, I view my role as sometime acting as an umbrella to really shield my team, my organization, so that they can get things done rather than being this funnel that just lets a bunch of process and distractions come through to the point where people are quite literally asking and screaming for help.
Arquay Harris: And to cope with this, we sometimes develop techniques to adapt. And some of those techniques though, are anti-patterns. So you think to yourself, “Okay, well I have to make a bunch of decisions. What’s the best way to make a decision? Okay, well, I probably need information.” So then you create these boss like structures where people are pushing information up to you constantly rather than creating leaders, empowering people, pushing authority downwards. And then when you do that, you can scale yourself and your decision-making and then also your organization.
Arquay Harris: And now, while you want to empower people to make decisions, there’s also a balance because when we don’t always have of the conviction and where sometimes can be unsure about how to make a decision, you get the dreaded consensus based decision-making, where you have to get everyone’s opinion and no one can agree. And so then because of that, you end up making no decision.
Arquay Harris: So you get this paralyzation of indecision that happens. And like everything, everything has a shadow side, right? So you want to have conviction, but you want to be mindful of the extreme because you get this Ikea effect where you think, well, I made it, so it must be great, or my ideas are the best. And so you don’t want to shut out all external opinions and believing only in your ideas and putting those above everything else. So everything is balanced, right?
Arquay Harris: And so overall, I would say that when making decision it’s important to be open to new perspectives. So there’s a balance between open to new ideas and also a consensus based. Now I will totally fully admit that sometimes like this graphic, I’m a square person. It’s like, but I’m a square, and I have decided that I’m square and I’m a square. But the key to being a good decision maker is that you need to learn to let the expertise of others aid you in your decision making and not have so much conviction that you can become stubborn.
Arquay Harris: And I fully recognize that it is easy to say, well, just have conviction. Like just do what you think is best. But conviction is hard because how do you know if you’re making the right decision? Particularly if that decision affects a lot of people. As leaders, we are making decisions in isolation. Some decision that you make can impact someone’s life or their livelihood or their family, right?
Arquay Harris: So, it’s not always easy to know. And so the question of how do you know if you’re making the right decision? The truth is that you don’t, but there’s some things that you can do to gut check. And one example of this is the front page test. How would you feel if your actions were on the front page? Would you be embarrassed? Would you squirm? Would you feel shame about it? Or would you stand proud and happily defend those decisions?
Arquay Harris: Another thing that you can do when evaluating your ideas is it can be good to think about it in terms of a dialectic, right? So if you have some idea or some process, think about what is the antithesis of this? What is the antithetical reaction that someone could have? So that sometimes can lead you to resolution, or it can prepare you if you need to defend your position and show that you thought it through.
Arquay Harris: So whenever I’m rolling out a new process or doing something like that, I think about, okay, well, what is an objection that someone would have to this? Why would someone not like this? Kind of think about all sides of the argument and sometimes that might lead you to resolution because you’ll think, oh, well, that’s a good point. I should have thought of that. Or at the very least think about ways to stick with your decision, but maybe mitigate it, right?
Arquay Harris: Because in preparation for that opposing reaction. And now despite our best efforts, we do all the right things, we think it through, we sometimes just still get stuck. I have looked at this sideways, every different direction and I really have no idea what to do.
Arquay Harris: And so sometimes rubber ducking can help and rubber ducking is a common thing. So for engineers, imagine if you are really stuck on this problem and you don’t know what to do. And so you go to another engineer and you talk through your problem and by virtue of you talking it through, you come up with the solution.
Arquay Harris: And so the idea behind rubber ducking is it doesn’t need to be another engineer. It could literally be anything, it could be a rubber duck, right? And so just that thought process of saying it out loud, it’s just like Eureka, I know what to do. And I have certainly been the benefit of getting on stuck by rubber ducking.
Arquay Harris: And I want to say that this is not easy because to adapt your approach to decision-making requires a pretty significant change in mindset and change can be overwhelming because you think, where do you start? Am I doing it right? Am I in the right direct? Am I just making a mess of everything? But just like mole hills, small changes over time can lead to very big impact. And so I think that decision making is hard, but it’s much easier once you actually start.
Arquay Harris: And so some key takeaways are, you want to focus on the challenge because the first step is just acknowledging the difficulty, that’s half of it. Because if you think about in your life, people who you really admire, or people who have to make these really hard decisions, these people aren’t born with all the answers, right? Like it’s not just they descended onto planet earth and they just had it all inside their brain. No, that’s not usually how it works. It usually takes practice and repetition.
Arquay Harris: And so just acknowledging that it is hard, I think is really important to just kind of ease up on yourself and recognize that this really is hard work. And then secondly, focus on the evolution, right? You won’t always make the right decisions and that’s okay. You’ll be able to adapt. And you’ll iterate. Perfection should definitely not be the goal. It’s more about learning and evolving because if you could get it right on the first try then decision-making wouldn’t be so hard.
Arquay Harris: And then lastly, you should focus on the journey because it’s a marathon, it’s not a sprint and wisdom doesn’t happen overnight. And as you grow as a leader and you face new challenges, you’ll learn and you’ll grow and decision-making become easier and easier. So thank you so much for your time, it was really great to be here today. And I hope that you have some really great questions for me. Otherwise, I’m just going to keep talking about how much I love Girl Geek. So I hope you have questions. Aw, thanks. I’m reading the chat. Everyone is so kind. Thank you. I’ll sit here. I’ll smile.
Arquay Harris: Thank you. Oh, that’s so nice. I don’t know, I should be reading these out loud. It’s very sweet. So I’ll do a little self motivation here and I got a couple questions in chat. And Angie definitely correct me if I’m wrong, if I’m supposed to wait for the moderator, please, someone hop on, but otherwise I’m just going to go through these.
Arquay Harris: The first one is what would you say were the two most difficult things you encountered as you climbed to your current position? Ooh, that’s an interesting thing, right? Because first, I want to just dig into the climbed to your current position thing, because I used to talk a lot about self-advocacy and about how to advocate for yourself and how to advocate for others. And I always talked about thinking about your highest aspiration.
Arquay Harris: And I would say that when I was a little baby developer, I don’t know that my highest aspiration was to be a VP of Engineering. Actually, I would say that it was not because VPs manage directors who manage managers who manage ICs. And the thing that I really loved about management was kind of that one to one connection. Right? And so given that, I think that, that maybe possibly is inherently what I would say was the most difficult thing, which is, I think when I give the talk about self-advocacy, I talk about thinking about your highest aspiration and making sure that you reevaluate it.
Arquay Harris: Because for me, one of the reasons why I never really aspired to be a VP of engineering is because the prototype in my mind is like Andy Grove, right? He’s in khaki pants and he’s wearing a blue shirt and he’s an older white gentleman. And it’s just not something that I really saw for myself.
Arquay Harris: And so I think part of that is just challenging that mindset and thinking like, “You know what? This can be whatever I want it to be. I can define what this looks like.” And I mean, yeah, there’s just the normal things, like big issue of low expectation being a woman, being the only or being the first, those things are also very hard.
Arquay Harris: And so the thing that does give me hope is that I really do feel like things are changing. I hope that answers your question. It kind of got existential, but I think that’s basically just said a thank you so much for asking.
Arquay Harris: The next question is… Oh, okay. This is kind of similar. Thank you so much for sharing such a practical way to handle decision-making. What has been your biggest hurdle to overcome in this area? Oh yeah. I mean, I would definitely say two things.
Arquay Harris: The first is making sure that you have information at the right granularity level, right? Amazon has this concept of kind of like one way doors, which is… And I employed this a little bit with my team a one way door is a thing that effectively you can’t walk back and a two-way door is a decision that you can make, but it’s pretty easy to roll it back.
Arquay Harris: An example of a one way door would be like, may I use $3 million to build a new job queue or something like that, right? Like something where there’s some sort of big implication either financially or internet or time wise or something like that. And so I think it can be hard to know what those one way doors are because sometimes a thing that seems insignificant and small could actually have a years long implication on your team and on the company.
Arquay Harris: And so kind of really getting enough information at the right granularity level that you can make those kinds of decisions. And I think that’s probably just like a pretty hard hurdle to overcome. And then also just the not knowing if you’re making the right decision too, because you never really know until you have the benefit of hindsight and then you can look back and it was either… It’s that context thing, it was either right or wrong. Yeah.
Arquay Harris: So next question. You said decisions are made in isolation. How do you keep yourself accountable and also protect your mental health? I think I’m going to tease apart and I think I know of what you mean by that. Did I say something around how they’re intrinsic, like how they’re… I’m not sure, but I would just answer it and say the way that you can protect your mental health is this whole being easy on yourself.
Arquay Harris: I think a lot of times, particularly when people get to really senior positions, they put this pressure on themselves, like, “Everyone is counting on me and if I make a mistake what’s going to happen?” And I think as a woman and as a black woman especially, there’s this very famous XKCD comic that I quote a lot where the first page is someone is teaching a guy math and it’s like, “Oh, Bob, doesn’t get math.” And then the next page he’s teaching a woman and it’s like, “Women don’t understand math,” right?
Arquay Harris: There is just like every single thing that you do has this added pressure because you are representing an entire race or an entire gender or an entire culture or whatever it is. And so I think that the way to kind of protect yourself is to just acknowledge that you’re not going to get this perfect every single time and that’s okay. That’s part of learning and growing. And I wish that I could say that is the thing that I always knew. Definitely not. It is the thing that I developed over time and the longer that I do it, I think the easier that it gets.
Arquay Harris: Ooh, this is a good one. What is the most difficult decision you ever made? Coming in hot, I love that. That one I would say any time that you’ve had to terminate someone or put someone on a performance plan or something like that, those are always the hardest decisions because you know that that decision that you’re making, just the ripple effects, you’re affecting again that person’s family, their potentially their ability to support their family. You could even be potentially affecting that person’s ability to get another job, right? Based on their performance at this role.
Arquay Harris: And so early in my career, this was a thing that I had to sort of develop some kind of framework around. And whenever I’ve had to do that, I asked myself these three questions. And then this is my kind of way finding, the first question that I asked myself is, am I being transparent? Meaning if I have to let someone go or performance manage them, will it come as a surprise?
Arquay Harris: Will they just be like, “Oh, I never saw this coming.” No, hopefully that is not the case because I’m communicating with them. The second thing is, am I supporting this person? [inaudible] and then I always say is if you need help, I will extend a hand, but I’m not going to carry you, right? Now, and what that means is I will support you. I will give you feedback. I will try to make it so that you can get better and improve. And then all those things considered. If it doesn’t work out the last and most important question that I ask myself…Those things considered if it doesn’t work out.
Arquay Harris: The last and most important question that I ask myself is that I act with integrity meaning was I secretly whispering behind this person’s back? Did I put them on a pit, but really I just want to fire them? And so, having this North Star really helps me with difficult decisions. And I have developed these frameworks about decisions like that that I have to make in my life. But as a leader, that would never get easier no matter how long, for me anyway, how long you’ve been doing it.
Arquay Harris: Do you have advice for other female leaders of tech teams? I mean, sure. Yeah, I think I would say develop a support system because I don’t really feel that I have that coming up because it was so isolating because I was generally either the only woman … I mean, there’s many teams that I worked on where out of dozens and dozens of people, I was the only woman. And certainly, I’ve worked on teams where out of dozens or maybe 100 people, I was the only black person and it is very hard.
Arquay Harris: And so, when you don’t have that community, you can start to second guess yourself and make decisions … decisions become hard. And I’ll give one anecdote that I’ve shared a few times which is I once had a conversation with a white male, [inaudible 00:36:36] white male. And I asked him, I said, “Imagine if every single day you had to go to work and every single person that you worked with was a woman. And now imagine every single one of those women was black.” And that is the reality for so many of us in tech where we are just so marginalized.
Arquay Harris: And one of two things would happen. You would either try to assimilate as much as you can, you would try to get yourself a head wrap or maybe you’d get some braids or something while you were trying to fit in as best you can or you would completely second guess yourself and not have any semblance of self. You wouldn’t get their references. You would have no idea who Issa or Molly were. You would just be confused all the time.
Arquay Harris: And so, for other female leaders, that is quite the reality particularly at the senior levels. I mean, we can cite many, many companies where the only person in their executive leadership or the only person on their board or whatever is just one woman.
Arquay Harris:This isn’t what you asked but this is one of the reasons why I joined Webflow, why it was so attractive to me as a company is that my partner who’s the VP of Product, JZ, who is the best person ever. Still I’ve really tried, I cannot think in recent memory of another company where the VP of Prod and the VP of … Oh, my time? Well, it was a great anecdote but JZ is amazing. That was the TLDR. But I think that was my last question. It’s been great. So, thank you so much.
Angie Chang: Thank you, Arquay. I really love your engagement with the audience. Sorry to leave you hanging, I was typing away. I was like, “Oh no, I have to find her window,” so sorry. Thank you so much for taking all the questions. I love your quote and your talk and thank you so much. Everyone, this is going to be on YouTube later. So, if you missed it today, since I know we’re all busy people, this will be on YouTube. Don’t worry about it. You’re registered. You’ll get it in your email. So, thank you, Arquay so much…
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“Girl Geek X Intro” by Angie Chang and Sukrutha Bhadouria, Girl Geek X co-founders.
Angie Chang: Awesome. I think we’re live now with the Discord Girl Geek Dinner. Hi. Hello from the San Francisco Bay Area. My name is Angie Chang and I’m the founder Girl Geek X. Sukrutha! Say hi and introduce yourself.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hi. Yeah. Hi Angie. It’s like jumping numbers, but yeah, I’m Sukrutha and I’m Angie’s partner and supporter and big time cheerleader. Together, we want to bring to you a community for you to be comfortable to be a part of and not try to seek help from. With that, we also have companies that sponsor each event and so if you’d like to partner with us and be a sponsor, reach out to us to see how you can get your company to have access to this amazing community that you are a part of.
Angie Chang: Cool. I’m going to do a quick check in with everyone. Where is everyone logging in from? There’s a chat feature if you can say hello and where you’re coming in from. I feel…
Sukrutha Bhadouria: People are saying that there’s no audio from us, but they’re also answering the question about where they’re from. So…
Angie Chang: Awesome. It’s good to see people coming in from all over. The pandemic has brought us together virtually. We’ve been doing these Girl Geek Dinners since 2008. They started out in places like Google and Facebook when those were smaller companies and over the years we’ve continued to go to all these different companies. And now in the pandemic, we’re virtually getting together and hearing from women at these tech companies and startups and hearing from them and being inspired continually, and always learning about what’s the latest, what people are working on and what are the challenges that they face and what they’ve overcome and getting really inspired by them.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Angie someone’s dialed in from Kenya.
Angie Chang: Oh my God and Jamaica.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: How cool is that?
Angie Chang: Cool.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Jamaica too, that’s amazing.
Angie Chang: So who here has been to a Girl Geek Dinner before? I’m just curious. And what do you remember or like from it? I think for me personally, I always like to tell people why they come to Girl Geek Dinners, you got to learn about what are the job titles, because they change all the time. They’ve changed in tech and they change in business and the word operation comes up a lot more like product operations, product marketing.
Angie Chang: I think we learned so much by just going to Girl Geek Dinners over the years and seeing the women come on stage and seeing their job titles and hearing them talk about what they’re working on and how they do it. And then people pick it up at other companies and startups and other cities around the world.
Angie Chang: So to me, it’s really fascinating to continue to see what women are doing in tech and other fast moving industries. And I’m really excited tonight to hear from the women at Discord. I think now is a time that we have to turn the mic over to our Discord host, Jire, and she is…
Sukrutha Bhadouria: She is awesome.
Angie Chang: Yes.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: So many different words to describe Jire, I’m going to grab the mic from you and go ahead and do that because I’m excited to introduce Jire. Jire is passionate about leveraging technology to increase social impact. She has served an elected office, worked on education access in the Middle East and redevelop curriculum to impact the way children learn about the internet. That is so cool.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: An alum of the Brookings Institute, Twitter, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and Airbnb, Jire is currently working on inclusion, diversity and purpose at Discord. She holds a degree in international studies and economic development from Boston College. Welcome, Jire. You’re so cool.
Jire Bademosi: Thank you so much for that wonderful introduction. It’s so great to be here with you and with Angie and the rest of the community. It’s so, so, so inspiring. My connection actually to Angie goes so many years ago and I used to be a member of her email for Women 2.0, back in the early, I guess that was Web 2.0 days, but it’s so exciting to be here with you all and also hosted a Girl Geek dinner past when I was at Twitter. And it’s so great to be able to facilitate this online.
Jire Bademosi: As you all heard I’m Jire, I go by she/her pronouns and it’s so again, inspiring to see so many folks in the chat, sharing a little bit about where they’re coming from. I see there’s folks all the way from the Philippines to Kenya, to folks in Orange County, to Louisiana. Again, just so beautiful to see such a wonderful group and community come together for something so important such as this. So I’m excited to meet with you all, and hopefully we can kick things off. First off, let me start sharing my screen. So bear with me.
Jire Bademosi: All right. Let’s get started. What are you all in for today? One we’re going to welcome you all which we’re doing now, we’ll tap into Q&A where you’ll get to meet some of my wonderful colleagues and first, starting off with Beena Agarwal. One of our directors in engineering at Discord. Then we’ll move into lightning talks where we hope to impart some of both our knowledge that we’ve gained as women in technology, but then also reflections.
Jire Bademosi: And last but not least, we’ll turn it over to some other leaders at the company who are paving the way across our product, community, as well as engineering teams. Then I’ll pass it over to my other colleague, Lauren, who helps to oversee a lot of our technical recruiting work. And then we’ll also have some time for networking afterwards.
Jire Bademosi: Again, hi everyone. I’m Jire, I’m the senior manager of inclusion, diversity and purpose at Discord. And what in the world does that mean to you? Essentially our work fosters and activates a culture of inclusion and belonging in the workforce, workplace and marketplace.
Jire Bademosi: I’ve been at Discord for just over six months now. In my off time, I love all things art, culture, architecture, vintage treasures, hiking, and the occasional versus battle so hopefully I have some friends in the audience that I can connect with on some of these things that I’ve hold near and dear.
Jire Bademosi: But truly, I just love people and hearing their stories and I think that’s kind of the through line between all of my favorites and things to do. But you haven’t just come here to meet me, right? You all came to learn more about Discord so we can tap into that. So a little bit about Discord. Discord’s story begins back in 2015 when our founders really came together and we’re trying to think about how to create a place and a space to find belonging in their lives.
Jire Bademosi: And the hope with Discord is that it creates that place for you to be able to connect not only with those that you know, but also things that you care about and to be able to have genuine relationships based on the things that you care about with your friends and those communities that you hold dear, and truly be across the globe.
Jire Bademosi: I think it’s a testament to that to be able to see people truly from all over both the United States and even outside of the United States and in various continents all coming together, because we care about, Girl Geek X, and similarly, Discord wants to do that for you in the communities and places where you hold dear.
Jire Bademosi: And that’s really what I think makes Discord a really special place to work. So more about the metrics, we have about 150 million monthly active users, which really goes into the monthly folks who are coming across the globe and coming together with their friends, as well as communities.
Jire Bademosi: We have various servers, which really are those hubs of community and over 19 million, and I repeat 19 million are active every week. And there are over 4 billion server conversation minutes every single day. So just under, I don’t know, the population of the world, I guess, or so.
Jire Bademosi: Across this board, what actually powers this place are ton of wonderful, amazing humans and I want to break it down a little bit for you. We have administrative folks who really are that backbone helping to make sure that all of the folks are able to do their best work by providing that administrative lens.
Jire Bademosi: We have folks on the assist development who are making those connections with brands like you have, StockX if you’re trying to get the latest Yeezys, or if you’re trying to see what Gucci’s up to in their new time ball, all that’s happening on Discord.
Jire Bademosi: We have a customer experience team who’s paving the way by really with each and every single one of our users as much as they can. If you ever tweet them on Twitter, they’re pretty active there as well.
Jire Bademosi: We have a data science team, you will get to meet Nancy just later on. We’ll talk a little bit about some of the work that she’s leading. We have a wonderful design team that’s helping to bring to life all things [inaudible], which you’ll hear a little bit probably about later today. We have a wonderful engineering team who helps to build Discord.
Jire Bademosi: Finance is important, that they help keep the lights on and that they pay for all the wonderful things. I might be biased, but I think the people talent and five team is pretty darn cool and that’s our team that I happen to be on, which really works to, one, think of about employee experience end to end from the time that you’re considering working at Discord to the time where you maybe at the company itself.
Jire Bademosi: As well as our product team, getting in the weeds on all the PM stuff. And then legal, which keeps us honest and helps us make sure that we stay not in trouble. And then our marketing team really getting the word out.
Jire Bademosi: And last but not least is trust and safety, which really helps us try and build the right policies and processes to make sure that Discord can be a place for people to belong. So that’s a little bit about what’s behind the curtain as far as the teams that make our company a company.
Jire Bademosi: But I think what also is pretty awesome about Discord is that we have a total wellness program that really takes in to the fact that we’re not just one thing we’re not just a singular person, we’re a whole person. And that includes our physical wellness. That includes our mental wellness. And that includes our financial wellness, whether or that’s through services, such as Headspace to meditate, whether that’s modern health to provide, counseling sessions, coaching sessions. Whether that’s our gender affirmation fund to support our colleagues. Whether that’s carrot to support our colleagues in fertility journeys, or even thinking about financial wellness, especially when we think about inclusion for communities that may not have been provided these resources in the past.
Jire Bademosi: And so really thinking about it through three major lenses and even within each of those buckets, we have a number of traditional perks as well, whether it’s our desk fund or support for employees to be able to get their exercise on or what have you but all of that exists and more within Discord. That just a little bit, give you a little taste a little bit of behind the scenes of Discord thus far.
Jire Bademosi: And then I got to talk a little bit about inclusion, diversity and purpose. One, because I am passionate about it, but two, I think that’s what’s a special sauce about Discord and our team and what it really stands for. And within each of these buckets, we really try to dedicate intentional time, effort to bringing this alive.
Jire Bademosi: And so number one, within our workforce, we really want to build programs and pathways to attract higher and develop diverse talent. And really the why behind it is Discord again, is about belonging and to actually be able to do that, we have to start within and we have to be intentional about it and we have to communicate it and really build those programs to make sure that that’s successful. Then from our workplace, what about folks who are here and that’s where the internal inclusive culture development comes from.
Jire Bademosi: And so that’s everything from employee resource groups to our employee engagement team, to even employee giving and volunteering opportunities that we have for employees. And then last but not least is the marketplace and I think what’s so exciting about Discord is the reality that it really is a consumer facing product. And people, I’m sure, and I’m actually curious, I might even ask you all, how many folks in the chat, if you’ve ever used Discord before, if you’re using Discord, I’m sure I would see quite a few folks jump in and it’s important for us to have that inclusion diversity and purpose lens, as we’re thinking about the company. A
Jire Bademosi: And that’s where that marketplace work comes into contact with us. And so that’s just a little bit about Discord, but I will pass the mic. I think you all be seeing a lot of me today. So bear with me as we go along for this journey, but I want to welcome up my colleague Beena Agarwal, who is director of engineering at Discord. I’m going to stop screen share so y’all can actually meet and see Beena. All right, welcome. Hi Beena. How are you?
Jire Bademosi: Good. It’s nice to see you. Long time to see.
Jire Bademosi: Amazing, amazing. Well, I have to tell the rest of the crew here, since we have all these friends joining from truly all over and who use Discord daily like Nicole says, Nicole uses Discord every day. I see people saying really stanning Discord and so I think getting to talk to you is pretty exciting in the sense that you are in charge of really seeing how to drive Discord from a multimillion dollar business to a multibillion dollar business.
Beena Agarwal, Discord Director of Engineering, in conversation with Jire Bademosi, Discord, Senior Manager, Inclusion, Diversity, Purpose
Beena Agarwal: Hi, Jire, I’m good. How are you?
Beena Agarwal: Nice to see you too. I’m excited to be here.
Jire Bademosi: And I think it’s so exciting to see you in that position and I want to first start things off with folks who get to know you and learn a little bit more about who Beena is. So I’ll turn the mic over to you and share a little bit more about who you are and what brings you to Discord.
Beena Agarwal: Yeah, absolutely. I can start with my background and start from the beginning and then feel free to go into ask me for any details and I’m happy to go to that. I started out my career as a software engineer. A long time ago, I was at Symantec working on network intrusion detection systems. And after doing that for a while, I wanted something that was still just as challenging and more fun so I actively sought out the gaming industry and was at Electronic Arts as a software engineer.
Beena Agarwal: And then that’s where I got into management and I ended up leading a mobile studio engineering for a mobile studio at EA. And as part of EAs pivot to mobile strategy, I was working on casino games, which made a lot of sense, because they make a lot of money. And after about four years of doing casino games, I had to take a step back and think about what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. And I wanted to do something a little more mission oriented.
Beena Agarwal: I ended up starting my own education technology company. And I did that for a few years and then I was very curious about the intersection of technology and healthcare. I actively pursued some health tech companies and actually around the same times, I started conversations with Discord and I was completely blown away with everyone that I talked to here. It was clear that there was a very much a people first mentality in leadership style. And that really resonated with me.
Beena Agarwal: However, at that time I had actively gotten out of the gaming industry and also I was just one year into my health tech journey. So I decided to pursue health tech and give it a full shot. And then a couple years later, Discord had grown a lot. My manager reached out to me and a couple things that happened in that time, in those two years during COVID, Discord had actively expanded out of the gaming industry and this renewed mission of creating space and a sense of belonging for everyone really resonated with me.
Beena Agarwal: I pursued those conversations again and decided last year that it was a good time to join Discord. And so I’ve been with Discord for a year and so that’s what brought me to Discord. Outside of work, I am a new mom. I have an 18 month old so I spent a lot of time being a slave to a toddler. So any moms out there, if you have any tips, I would love to hear them. And I like exploring the outdoors.
Jire Bademosi: Amazing, amazing, and lots of congratulations as well in the chat, both for your career and as well as your little one. And I think you shared a lot about your career journey, both into entrepreneurship and also something that I think is something that we can all relate to, which is sometimes maybe it’s not the right time or, and then you find the right time and you still stay close and I think it’s so powerful to really think through that.
Jire Bademosi: And now that you’re a year into your time at Discord, what does your role really entail? I try to give a little bit of a tidbit, but I didn’t want to tell a full bit about your work, but can you tell us more about what you do at Discord?
Beena Agarwal: Yeah, absolutely. So here at Discord, I lead engineering for the premium products organization and that is really building revenue generating products for Discord. So what that truly means is overall Discord’s mission is to create belonging for everyone. And we, our teams exist to fund that mission by creating a sustainable business model for decades to come. We do that by scaling our premium products and ensuring that they truly align with the user’s interests. This includes the teams that work on a Nitro subscription products, a boosting subscription products, and the underlying platform that ensure that our products are robust and scalable.
Beena Agarwal: And my role in particular has evolved a bit for the past year. Truly, we just started focusing on scaling our business models early last year. So it was working with a lot of our counterparts to up with a strategy and clearly applying the goals for the organization and then making sure that we have the tools, the systems and the processes in place, and that we are building teams and setting them up for success to meet our goals.
Beena Agarwal: Since then, we have scaled the engineering organization here within premium products from 10 engineers, when I first started to about 36 engineers now and we have some audacious goals in front of us, so we are definitely adding more and scaling the organization to about 50 by the end of the year.
Beena Agarwal: And then it’s a large part of the role is also cross-functional, so as a core revenue organizations, besides with the product teams and the design teams and the analytics teams, it’s literally working with almost every team in the organization to make sure that we are working on the right things on the most impactful things.
Beena Agarwal: This include finance for all our revenue recognition, it includes partnering with business development to make sure that we are going after the right deals, it literally includes working with any team that is building features for Discord to make sure that we are also thinking about how we going to monetize things and making sure that everything aligns with the users’ interests ultimately.
Jire Bademosi: Right. And I think you say something really important and I think as a unique delineation for where Discord is, and it’s in that at the end, ultimately also about the user, which I think is such a unique lens to how Discord has conversations about monetization that I think is different than many platforms. I don’t know if you want to expand a little bit more on that philosophy.
Beena Agarwal: Yeah, absolutely. And we are continuously rethinking that and evolving that, but at the core of it, it is figuring out what truly engages our users, where our users’ interests are, and because ultimately it’s engagement that leads to conversion and we truly believe that. A
Beena Agarwal: And we are a very data driven organization and by data driven, I mean both from a qualitative perspective and a quantitative perspective. We are constantly doing user studies, looking at the vast amount of data that we have to really figure out where users are spending their time and what is it that they truly value in our products so that we can build upon that.
Jire Bademosi: I love that approach. And again, obviously I’m a little biased, but I think having that qualitative data that really dives into something that you can’t get in a numerical quantitative really allows for that balance to occur to hopefully help us learn more about our communities as well as the folks who come to Discord every single day. But I’m curious, what gets you excited in the morning? What makes you excited about Discord? What makes you excited about your role?
Beena Agarwal: Yeah, absolutely. I am definitely very mission oriented and that’s one of the reasons that I joined Discord. Helping Discord achieve that mission of creating belonging is truly what excites me. And within premium products, that really means how does our organization connect to that mission.
Beena Agarwal: We remind ourselves of that constantly, that we exist here to fund that mission of creating belonging for our users. Working on that is definitely very important and exciting. And then what that tactically means is we have some audacious goals in front of us. We are at 115 million monthly active use like you said, we are multimillion dollar business right now and we are constantly thinking about how we want to get to multibillion dollars in revenue and with a clear goal of getting to a billion dollars in by end of 2023.
Beena Agarwal: We are actively working backwards from that goal and that is super exciting for all of us to figure out how to get to that billion dollar goal. But it also means how are we scaling the organization to get to that goal. So I think about that a lot, making sure that we are bringing in the right people that embody our principles and values and empowering them to do their best work.
Beena Agarwal: And then also defining the culture of the org as we scale and grow. We really understanding what is it that we truly value where we have been a different size of an organization for a long period of time and there are certain things that we enjoy operating in a certain way. What are core principles that we want to keep? What are things that we want to evolve and how do we define the culture of the org as we scale?
Beena Agarwal: Those are some of the key things that are super exciting to me personally.
Jire Bademosi: Yeah. I think all of that’s very exciting and billion dollars is no joke and I think it’s so important and great the work that you’re doing and you’ve probably learned so many lessons along the way. Are there any that you can share with us?
Beena Agarwal: Yeah, sure. There is a book by Jim Collins called Built to Last, where he talks about time telling and clock building. The premises that often leaders spend a lot of time crafting a vision, building and bringing an idea or a product to life and he refers to this as time telling and in studies that he has done, what he found that truly visionary companies are the artifact of clock building.
Beena Agarwal: What that means is building an order company that can prosper beyond the presence of any leader and endure over time. The company and the organization is the true creation and the product and leaders are in service of that.
Beena Agarwal: And I think about that a lot and how that applies to my role here. So the reality is that we have to spend as leaders, we have to spend some time doing the time telling and the clock building, because in reality, we have a lot of audacious goals in front of us and we have to make sure we spend our time in those execution details as leaders and making sure that everyone’s working towards those goals and that we’re executing against those goals.
Beena Agarwal: But the true benefit is from that clock building, like building the org, building the culture of the org. So I’m constantly thinking about how, what is the right balance here? How much time should we be spending building that again? And how do we balance that with the execution details here? And it’s something that it’s hard to find that right balance and that’s something that I’m constantly trying to learn from and evolve.
Jire Bademosi: Absolutely. I feel like all of us in one way or another, I’m curious, I’m sure in the chat, there’s plenty of people who are trying to find balance myself included and especially when you’re a hypergrowth startup environment and really trying to make an impact in such a important way. I’m curious that you’ve worked at both startups and building a team there, you’ve worked within a company like a large one such as EA and you’ve also worked at Discord now for a year. And how have you found the leadership at Discord to be different than at other places?
Beena Agarwal: Yeah, that’s a great question. One thing I will say is that leaders here truly embody the people first part of the culture. And a lot of times when you go through the interview process, you learn a lot about the culture and then when you join the company, you find that aspects of it might be true and there are aspects of it that are not exactly be expected.
Beena Agarwal: And I will say in my one year time, year, I find that everyone has been totally true to everything that I learned as part of the interview process. The reasons that I joined Discord have totally held true. So what I mean by that is everyone is very true to the mission. Everyone really cares about the mission all the way from the individual contributors that I’ve interacted with all the way to the leaders, the senior leaders of the company.
Beena Agarwal: It shows up in a lot of different ways. All the way to how the CEO runs all hands and how transparent he is about everything that he communicates in these all hands. So we have a weekly all hands that is run by the CEO where he talks about things that are top of mind for him. And then we go through the different parts of the organization will also give updates and then in the end we have a Q and A section.
Beena Agarwal: And it’s amazing to me, how you ask any question, anyone can ask a question and the responses are always very thoughtful and how the CEO is very transparent by that. So that’s one aspect here, how leaders are truly transparent here. And then the other thing is, as far as the people first mentality goes, everyone really creates space for us to be our authentic self.
Beena Agarwal: One of the things that I was very concerned about when I was joining is… Joining company remotely during the pandemic is definitely not easy. Building a rapport with the team remotely is definitely not a walk in the park. And then also I was a new mom at the time I had just come out of maternity leave, my kid was five months old.
Beena Agarwal: There were a lot of things that were important to me, including nursing and it was very important for me for various reasons to continue to do that. And I was very upfront with my manager about all those things that were important to me and what I found that all of my apprehensions were totally, they weren’t a problem for anyone. Discord made it very easy to onboard, to build rapport with teams. They truly had frameworks around all of that.
Beena Agarwal: And then also, made space and time for me to take care of things as I needed, whether that be blocking time on the calendar or if I had to attend a meeting, being able to turn video off and nurse the baby as needed. It was also refreshing to see that there were a lot of male allies in the company, including my own manager who often during meetings would say that, “Hey, I actually need to go feed my kids. So I’m just going to turn the video off and make lunch for my kids.” It was really refreshing to say that, to see that and to normalize things and say that, “Hey, it’s okay. This is life in this world and it’s okay to do that.” It truly helped reinforce some of the decisions that I made and why I joined Discord and everything that I learned during the interview process and leadership here has totally helped me.
Jire Bademosi: I think that’s so well said. And I think that commonality is really around, one, the fact that we actually have those action points. Whether it be through the all hands, where our CEO literally every Tuesday really opens up, not only the floor to folks who may have been at the company, whether they’ve been there a day or they’ve been there since the beginning an opportunity to ask questions and to hear the responses live and really creating that community of transparency to talking about what it’s like coming back to a work environment and really having that holistic, whole person application of our values and our principal.
Jire Bademosi: It’s really cool hearing you share that. I know we don’t have too much time, but I’m seeing quite a few questions come in from folks. Maybe we could get to a couple of them with time that we have left. Let me see here. I see a question a little bit about more on our work culture, in particular. And I know we talked about it, but I want to respond to Anita’s question in that how would we describe Discord’s work culture? What are Discord’s future plans or collaborations in the next year? So maybe we could answer that from like an engineering perspective on your team.
Beena Agarwal: Yeah, absolutely. As far as the work culture goes, we definitely strive for excellence, but at the same time, we promote work-life balance a lot. Some of the examples that I give, they were truly important for me. I’ll tell you, from my own perspective, just in my entire career, until I had a kid, work-life balance was misnomer to me, pretty clearly, just because I enjoyed doing what I did and I just worked all the time, not because I had to, but because I really enjoyed it.
Beena Agarwal: When I had a kid, that changed and work-life balance was very important to me, and that was one of the things that I really looked into deeply when I joined Discord. And I can say that we definitely take that very seriously here, and we ensure that folks are not overloaded, that we do planning appropriately.
Beena Agarwal: We make sure we plan for projects upfront and ensure that we don’t have crunch times and avoid them as much as we can. So that’s one thing I’ll note in terms of work culture, from an engineering perspective, and then, Jire, feel free to add… You’re on the people team. You know a lot about this as well.
Jire Bademosi: Totally. Yeah. I mean, I think that was a really helpful example just around how Discord really takes a time to not just say, “Okay, you work at Discord and that’s it.” It’s really holistic, and I think it’s, one, seeing that the company has allowed people to do 80% of capacity, not necessarily saying you have to be at 100% capacity, which really frees up a lot of time.
Jire Bademosi: I mean, I have coworkers who are able to work at Discord and be in graduate school. I have coworkers who are able to be caregivers of children or of family members, et cetera. And so all of that not only is existing but is thriving.
Jire Bademosi: And I think that’s the really unique piece that I want folks to really take with them and that it’s encouraged, not only through the words that we’re saying but through the policies that exist, whether it be the parental leave that exists, whether it be the family leave that exists. We have unlimited sick time in case someone’s not feeling well. We have paid time off where you accrue it and so really encouraging folks.
Jire Bademosi: And even myself, my managers, you need to take time off, encouraging folks on the team to do that. And I think that, again, through actions versus simply saying it, I think really makes a difference between what I’ve seen at Discord versus at other companies. I think that’s really a testament to the work environment that we have here. Let me see if we might have time, Beena, for one more question, because we have to pass the mic and then we’ll come back and make sure to respond to as many questions as we can today.
Jire Bademosi: This question comes from Karen and a little bit more about some of the qualities that you look for as you’re expanding your team, if you could talk a little bit about that. I know teams are growing rather rapidly, but I’m sure folks are keen to hear a little bit more about the engineering process.
Beena Agarwal: Yeah, absolutely. And we have a very well-defined interview process. And as specifically the question talks about, outside of the job description, what are the qualities that we look for? During our interview process, we have attitude and values panel, where we really dig into some of those non-technical skills. What we really look for is folks that will embody our core principles and our core culture. And there is an awesome blog post on things that we value and our principles, so we really dig into those through those behavioral questions, and that’s what we really value besides the technical skills that we go through.
Beena Agarwal: Then, from a leadership perspective, in engineering managers in particular, we are, again, like I said, very much a people-first organization. We believe in growing and hiring really strong tech leads and giving them autonomy in terms of execution and leaving room for managers to really focus on career growth and coaching of individuals. That’s something that we value a lot. We definitely look for leaders that are able to focus on that versus the technical execution. You still have to be technical and be able to guide discussions, but we don’t expect you to focus more on coaching and career development.
Jire Bademosi: Wonderful. Wonderful. Wonderful. All right. I know we’re running up on time, and folks, we are going to get to as many questions as we can, so please bear with us. We also have some recruiters in the audience, but next up, I want to welcome one of my colleagues and fellow east coasters, Megan. Can we give Megan a big shout out for being off and wanting to do this presentation today? Welcome. Welcome. Megan, I’ll pass the mic to you. I’ll see you all in a bit.
Megan Zlock: Hello, everyone. Let me go ahead and get my screen sharing going. Okay. And pop out chat. Can somebody give me a thumbs up just to know I can hear and… you all can hear and see me? Okay. Sounds good. I’ll go ahead and get started. Just to do a little bit of an intro, hi, I’m Megan Zlock.
“Digital Accessibility: Ensuring Access to People with Disabilities” by Megan Zlock, Discord Software Engineer, Digital Accessibility
Megan Zlock: I’m a software engineer on the accessibility team at Discord. I’ve been at Discord for about out 6, 7 months, but I have about 10 years experience as a front-end and full-stack developer. So yeah, new to Discord, but not new to the game. And today, I wanted to talk about digital accessibility a little bit.
Megan Zlock: Before I get started, I want to mention, I know I’m talking to an audience of lots of folks, so this may not be new to a lot of you, but when I talk about accessibility, I tend to start from the beginning. It’s hit or miss. There are definitely tons of veterans out there who know all about this stuff. And then you have folks who haven’t really dove into it yet for one reason or another, so I start at the beginning. But hopefully I’ll have some resources towards the end that’ll be helpful for everybody.
Megan Zlock:Let’s talk about digital accessibility. What is it, what does it mean for engineers, and where do you start? I like to pull this quote… It’s just from Wikipedia, but I do like this particular quote, “Accessibility is the inclusive practice of ensuring there are no barriers that prevent interaction with or access to websites on the worldwide web, by people with physical disabilities, situational disabilities, and socioeconomic restrictions on bandwidth and speed.”
Megan Zlock: While that last particular point I do find incredibly interesting, I mostly focus on my job on folks who have physical or situational disabilities. That’s what we’re talking about today. How do we make our websites accessible for folks who may interact with your site in a little bit of a different way than other folks?
Megan Zlock: I also like this quote from Microsoft. They’ve got some really good documentation on inclusive design. So designing inclusively doesn’t mean you’re making one thing for all people. You’re designing a diversity of ways for everyone to participate in an experience with a sense of belonging, and we love that word belonging at Discord.
Megan Zlock: Basically, in practice, when you build for accessibility, it’s really interesting how a lot of folks get caught up on like, “Oh, I have to make one thing that works for everybody.” But really, when you get into the nitty-gritty of how to do certain new things, you really have to build in a couple of different ways of doing things, whether somebody’s using a keyboard or a mouse or a screen reader or something else. It’s really interesting when you start diving in and really connecting all of those experiences.
Megan Zlock:Why does accessibility matter? The first one I always bring up, as my Captain Obvious reason is, it’s just the right thing to do. Inclusivity is important. We want everybody to be able to use Discord. So why not? But if you need further convincing, it’s also our mission.
Megan Zlock: At Discord, we love to say that we create a world where everyone belongs. We love that word belonging. So it’s just part of our mission. We want to make sure that everybody, regardless of their physical abilities, can take part in communities on Discord. And then also, it’s the law.
Megan Zlock: If there was no other reason, there’s also that one. Especially as an international application… Lots of folks all over the world use it… we need to make sure that we’re passing and following all the criteria that we need to follow for disability law. To dive into that a little bit further, typically for engineers, that means complying with the WCAG. That is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
Megan Zlock: And just to go over that a little bit in my lightning talk, I don’t have much time, but basically WCAG conformance falls into three levels, A, AA, and AA. And this is an additive process. Any rules in A are also in AA and are also in AAA. Typically, conformance means complying with A. The AAA rules are very specific. They can be very specific to certain audiences. You may want to do some UX, see who you have using the site.
Megan Zlock: There’s one rule that says you can’t use jargon, but then that doesn’t work out so well when you’re doing like a medical site. So yeah, you have to pick and choose your AAA rules. In a lot of instances, it’d be very difficult to comply with all of them. And if you want to get started with WCAG, I really think the best place to start is the W3C. They have this really good quick reference guide, where you can do some filters. You can see what’s in A, AA, AAA, as well as a little bit of filtering based off of your particular role.
Megan Zlock: Just to keep going with that. So what goes into accessible product engineering? There is a complying with WCAG, but WCAG only gets you so far. When you start working in accessibility, knowing the fundamentals is really important, having really good HTML and CSS to start with sets you with a really good baseline, if you’re building a website.
Megan Zlock: Of course, if you’re doing React data or any kind of web app, you’ll want to be using the right components or views or accessibility attributes on those as well. And then you want to build on top of good HTML with Aria. If you’re not familiar with Aria, that stands for Accessible Rich Internet Applications. That’s basically extra attributes added to HTML to imply states or extra labels or extra accessibility information in hints. And it works just like HTML attributes, but it’s an added layer that works well with JavaScript.
Megan Zlock: And then, lastly, testing, testing, testing. I cannot advocate enough for testing, whether you’re trying out a screen reader yourself or just doing some keyboard testing, I would especially recommend doing some level of user testing.
Megan Zlock: I, as an accessibility engineer, am a fairly abled-bodied person. It’s really hard for me to know if I am building the right thing for somebody who natively uses these assistive technologies. So luckily, at Discord, we do have a bunch of volunteers who work with us and can user test with us.
Megan Zlock: And it’s an amazing resource to make sure that the stuff that we ship works how we intend it to. But yeah, just another note on the organizational level, it’s helpful to think of accessibility like performance or security. It’s an ever-present piece of maintenance that you have to do. It’s never done. You don’t just conform once and you’re done. It’s going to be something you’re going to be working on for a long time.
Megan Zlock: Accessibility at Discord, what does my job look like? A lot of it is bug fixes. I am an engineer on the team. A lot of the times I’m adding labels that were missed or reconfiguring some Aria attributes, things like that. Working on the design system, the accessibility team is really, really close with our design system team so that we can make sure that our primitives, or little components that we use everywhere, are very accessible.
Megan Zlock: We’re working on writing some automated testing to catch bugs so that it’s not just us working on accessibility at Discord. People can catch any violations as they’re working and take care of it for us. And then also we do some internal engineering training. My job isn’t just code. I’m also teaching engineers how they can work within our system.
Megan Zlock: Last off, this is a lightning talk. I only have 10 minutes. I wanted to leave you all with some tools so that you can dive in and learn your way around accessibility. And I really think the best thing that you could do is try out some of the testing things.
Megan Zlock: First off, start in design. To give some of the designers who may be present some resources, there’s the Able plugin for Figma. There’s the Stark plugin, which is available for Figma and Sketch, if you don’t use Figma. Color Safe is kind of an interesting tool that I ran into a while back for creating accessible color schemes. There’s Contrast Checker. It’s not a very pretty site, but it’s a nice way to see if your color contrast passes. Is white text on this blue background going to have enough contrast to meet the WCAG standard?
Megan Zlock: There’s also Color Oracle. This is a Mac-only application that I use occasionally that you can turn on, and it changes the colors on your screen so you can get an approximation of somebody with some form of color blindness might see. And then for an additional reading that I don’t have time to go into, Microsoft’s Inclusive Design is great. I really recommend it. And for longer-form reading, A Web for Everyone is a book. It’s got great personas and everything in it.
Megan Zlock: As you code, I recommend checking out Inclusive Components. I go back to it so often, especially for their recommendations on how to build a good card component. And then I really do recommend, while you code, to test with keyboard. Try that out as you’re building. It’s so easy to just hit the tab button and try it out.
Megan Zlock: There’s some tips for keyboard accessibility. There’s the accessibility inspector in Chrome dev tools, idev in Chrome. That’s right there ready to go. If you want to add things on to Chrome, you can add axe DevTools. It can be a paid product, but the free one does allow you to scan your page for any violations. You can get a get around with a free version. If you’re not using Chrome, I do also like the Wave extension. It does mess up your page a little bit when you run it, but you can find all the violations. And then if you’re working more in the app space, there’s the accessibility inspector built right into X Code. You can just turn it on now. And then Flipper is also kind of a nice one. I haven’t used that one much, but we do use that one at Discord.
Megan Zlock And then finally validate. A few things that we do, some testing libraries that I recommend axe-core, especially if you’re using axe DevTools, it’s nice to test with the same thing both manually and in your testing suite. And then I added a couple of other NPM modules that we use as well to check if things have accessible names and things.
Megan Zlock: And then, lastly, for manual testing, this is just a list of tips from WebAIM or from Deque. You’ll see a lot… or actually, I think their names pronounced Deque. Anyway, they’re a big accessibility presence. So a lot of these links have their resources on how to do gestures and all of that. If you’re new to screen reader testing, I kind of recommend starting out with a touch screen, because then you, as a sighted person, can see what you’re touching and hear what it says, but just to start out.
Megan Zlock: And with that, I think I will wrap it up. I like to start here. If you’re new to accessibility, it’s never too early or too late to start. It’s never too early because you’ll always save yourself some work later. And it’s never too late either. If you’re just picking this up…
Megan Zlock: I picked this up like six, seven years ago and it’s been a learning process throughout. You learn so much just diving into it and really just testing and trying to make it work.
Megan Zlock: Anyway, that’s what I’m going to leave it on. I don’t know if I quite have time for questions, but I’ll turn off screen share here and see if we do. Let’s see, chat was going pretty quick, so I wasn’t quite able to follow, but let’s see.
Megan Zlock: Okay. I see one question from the audience. “How often do you work with product designers/UI/UX designers to ensure designs are accessible?” The accessibility team has three engineers, including myself, and we do have one designer who helps us out with that. And that’s if you just count our dedicated designer.
Megan Zlock: Since we work so closely with the design systems team, we technically have access to those folk too, because the design system should be accessible to start with. Of course, they make sure that our color contrast passes all of the standards and things like that. And there’s some work to be done if you go and check there, but we’ve got a really good team on it.
Megan Zlock: Let’s see, so someone else asked, “How do you test for people who are deaf or have no limbs?” I’ll start with the no limbs. There are a lot of accessibility devices out there, and for someone’s who’s paralyzed or has no limbs, there’s single switch buttons, there’s head WANs, there’s eye-tracking software, things like that.
Megan Zlock: For the most part, all of that technology leads back to keyboard accessibility, and eye tracking’s going to be like a mouse. If you are making sure that your application or website is accessible for keyboard, you are covering a lot of folks, so that one is really important. And then for Dev, that one’s a little bit harder. I would just say, as long as as much of your website is text as possible…
Megan Zlock: Media should always have a text alternative and stuff like that. As long as there is some text equivalent, everybody can interact with your content somehow, whether it’s like read back to them or visible to be read and all of that stuff. Anyway, I should probably hand it off since we are doing lightning talks. I’m on the east cost, so sorry if I don’t join you all for social time later, but I will kick it over to Kelsey for the next lightning talk.
Kelsey Shuler: All right, there, looks like I am up now. Let’s see, I will go ahead and share my screen now. And let’s see, can you all see this okay? Actually, I can’t even see chat anymore. Okay. There we go. Cool. All right. So hi, everyone.
“How To Survive Making a Big Mistake at Work? Lessons and Reflections” by Kelsey Shuler, Discord Engineering Manager, SRE
Kelsey Shuler: My name is Kelsey, my pronouns are she/her, and I manage the site reliability engineering team here at Discord. My team is responsible for defending the customer experience, while making sure that we don’t just throw people at the problem. We want to make sure that we’re not sacrificing our engineers to get that done.
Kelsey Shuler: Who am I to talk to you about this? I’ve spent many years as an SRE. I’ve managed teams of SRE for several years after that. And I’ve definitely caused my own share of outages. In addition, I’ve mentored other people as they’ve gone through their first outage. For better or for worse, making mistakes is something I’m used to doing.
Kelsey Shuler: I would like to share with you a story for my very first and worst outage. A few months into my time as an SRE, I was working on a Friday during my company all-hands to upgrade the operating system on some of our servers.
Kelsey Shuler: At the time, this was a manual process. It required running a handful of commands by hand, but as all-hands is going, I see real key engineers get up and leave the room. I think, “Huh, that’s kind of weird, wonder what’s going on.”
Kelsey Shuler: But eventually, I also receive a page that goes to the entire on-call rotation that things are very, very broken. I’ve heard from people after the fact that it was maybe a little bit alarming to see the entire infrastructure team stand up and leave all-hands all at the same time.
Kelsey Shuler: Essentially, what ended up happening is I ran a command that ended up wiping a large number of live production databases, because I just dropped some quotation marks from the command. This ended up leading to a large outage that brought down different parts of the company for four days, led to 20 people working around the clock through the weekend. It was a substantial problem.
Kelsey Shuler: To add even more color to the degree to which things were broken, for years after this happened, this was one of only two incidents that my company continued to talk about. It was part of the new employee onboarding. We used to explain how we handled these sort of situations and was only one of two incidents that we actually gave special names to. This one was called The Last Outage or TLO.
Kelsey Shuler: Not only that, but of course on the anniversary of my outage, we decided to have a whole event for this, called it Trustworthiness Week. People got special stickers to put on their laptops. For years after that, I got to see stickers of my big mistake. And we had lots of conference rooms that actually ended up being named because of this outage.
Kelsey Shuler: Hopefully, I’ve given you an idea of what my credentials are. I’ll go back to the incident itself. As I mentioned, we paged everyone because our site is down. Everyone’s scrambling to try to figure out what’s going on, and I’m mostly just off to the side. I’m very junior at this point, and I’m just waiting around the off chance I can be helpful, but then I had my oh-no moment.
Kelsey Shuler: Someone mentioned something that sounded suspiciously close to something I’ve been doing during all-hands. My stomach had that big, heavy, awful feeling, and I just felt like I knew that somehow I must have done something wrong.
Kelsey Shuler: At this point though, I got one of the more senior SREs, told him that I felt like this might be related to some work I had been doing, and walked him through what I had been doing. He was able to grab other people. They were able to confirm that this was the root cause of what had happened.
Kelsey Shuler: And we used this, actually, work to help recover the site. For my particular [inaudible], It was really important that I worked to get the right people informed, I helped spread knowledge, and get that extra help.
Kelsey Shuler: The next day, I think, is something that you don’t necessarily think about or expect is how hard it is to go back to your job after a large mistake. For me, coming in that Monday was so difficult. I had an entire weekend of just thinking about how things were so broken, how there’s an entire team of people who had their weekends ruined, and everything was my fault. I felt like there was no way they weren’t going to fire me.
Kelsey Shuler: Even if they didn’t fire me, I didn’t know how I was going to keep doing my job, where it was dangerous and I could just drop quotation marks and everything would be broken again and then, of course, they would fire me. When I got in though, I had great people around me giving me the same advice. “It’s okay. This happens to everyone who works in our field. We shouldn’t have allowed the tools to allow someone to wipe the databases. Our backups should have been in a better place to recover faster, but most importantly, we don’t blame you.”
Kelsey Shuler: When it’s your turn, take these things to heart. Come in, but give yourself space and time to get back to normal. Find work to you that feels like it’s safe to be able to tackle.
Kelsey Shuler: Moving forward, for this section, I think it’s really important to talk about things that could be done by the company and by the individual. While an individual could take action that leads to something going wrong, ultimately, it’s the group that’s responsible for what happened.
Kelsey Shuler: Here at Discord, we make sure to adopt a blameless post-mortem process when something goes wrong. We shouldn’t be pointing fingers, but instead, every time that some major mistake happens, we should be learning from it. At every turn, we ask ourselves “What changes can prevent something like this from happening again?”
Kelsey Shuler: But this is only something we can do if people are safe enough to be able to be honest about what occurred. We don’t want people hiding or trying to avoid detection because they’re afraid.
Kelsey Shuler: As a leader here, I’m also that person to make sure that this can happen. I make sure that I help people bounce back from their own mistakes. I work to make sure that they feel understood and they’re not alone as they’re going through something like this.
Kelsey Shuler: For my part of the talk, I’ll leave you with one piece of advice. For you individually, though, be patient with yourself. Find out how you can learn and grow from your mistake and then come back better than ever.
Kelsey Shuler: With this, I have a couple of minutes left. I would love to actually have you all talk about your mistakes. Throw it in the chat, if you’re comfortable. I don’t know if we’re able to have you all come up and share, but I think that would be really amazing if anyone was willing to speak to a mistake that you’ve made. Let everyone know that it’s something that happens to everyone. If we can’t facilitate that, cool, but I think share this.
Kelsey Shuler: I think it’s really good for us to feel comfortable owning the fact that we’re going to make mistakes and we all do it. But yeah, that’s my talk. I’ll go ahead and call it here then. And I will go ahead and hand things over to Natalie to talk about product marketing.
Natalie Grant: Okay, can you guys hear me? Oops. Lost the window here, one second. Okay. Trying this again. How’s that? Can you hear and see me? Okay, great. Thank you for the people who said yes. I was kidding, chat. All right. Awesome. Hi everybody. I’m Natalie Grant. My pronouns are she/her. And I am a, oops. Hang on. Can’t see my screen. Okay, one second. There we go. Go. All right. I got it. Thanks everyone. Okay, I’m going to try sharing my screen one more time. Here we go. Okay. Got it. All righty. Thank you. Such a supportive chat. Thank you guys. Okay, so I’ll start over again.
“Product Marketing: Speaking the Language of Technical Storytelling” by Natalie Grant, Discord Developer Product Marketing Manager.
Natalie Grant: Hi everyone. My name’s Natalie Grant, and I’m a product marketing manager for Discord developers. Those are the people who build apps and bots on Discord using our API. And today, oh no. Are people still having trouble? Okay. Some people can see, some people can’t, I’m not sure why. Okay. I’m going to keep going. But if someone wants to let me know a tip here, I can adjust. Okay. Yeah.
Natalie Grant: I’m a product marketing manager for Discord developers, those are the folks who build apps and bots on discord using our API. And today, I’m going to talk a little bit about what product marketing is and why I love it and how to approach technical storytelling.
Natalie Grant: In a nutshell, you have a product organization with someone who’s managing the product, and you have a marketing organization with lots of subject matter expertise. I’m going to give a quick caveat, lots of companies are different. I’m going to share a high level example of how you can think about it based on my experience. You’ve got a PM and you’ve got lots of subject matter experts who specialize in specific things. And what product marketing is… Oh, good. Someone’s interested in this role. Love to hear it.
Natalie Grant: What a product marketing manager does is connect these groups. Partnering really closely with product to identify the right people who are going to enjoy that product the most. We call that a target audience. And then, you work with the whole marketing organization to make sure that all of those subject matter experts can help you reach those people, which is what they do best.
Natalie Grant: In addition to working out what a target audience would be for that product, some other big things you’d work on are positioning, writing messaging, sometimes the name and the price of something. You get really close to customer feedback. Running qualitative and quantitative research, and just generally being the source of truth for that narrative about the product.
Natalie Grant: A PM and a PMM are really close partners. And a lot of the skills are very similar. Some companies don’t have both, and I’ll come back to that in a second. But first, I wanted to dive a little bit more into what a PMM does, because there’s a lot of acronyms and a lot of buzzwords. I’m going to use metaphors because we all love a good metaphor.
Natalie Grant: The first one is a center of gravity. Subject matter experts that you work with in a marketing organization and all of your cross-functional partners, they work on a ton of products. When you’re the PMM, it’s your responsibility to sort of bring them back continually to a source of truth about what the benefit of the product is and who the target audience is and represent that every single day.
Natalie Grant: And the other thing you want to do is, this is a metaphor that a mentor of mine used many years ago, and it might be my favorite because I still use it all the time, is I think about it like an orchestra. Your marketing partners are all the best at that instrument and they specialize in specific channels. For example, social media marketing, or email marketing or web marketing, PR and comms. And as a PMM, you need to make sure that they’re all in sync together. You need to make sure they’re using the same songbook and you need to make sure that things sound good for all the people who are listening.
Natalie Grant: I kind of think about it like being a conductor of an orchestra and really listening to what needs to happen and make sure everyone’s working together really well. You need to connect a lot of dots. Things like policy and legal and customer support. You obviously need to be really good at communicating, but specifically, you need to work on interpreting different technical information to who you’re talking to, depending on what it is they need to know. And then kind of clear everything else out of the way for them, because people need to know very specific things to do their job, but they don’t need to know everything.
Natalie Grant: Part of communicating with them is interpreting the most important information that they can bring your message out to all of your users. And then this was a bit of a spoiler because it was the title of my talk, but storytelling is very important, too.
Natalie Grant: You need to paint a picture. It’s not just what something is called or how much it costs or when it’s available, it’s really more about why they should care, why it will or won’t make their life better. Will it save them time, will it make them laugh? And there’s internal storytelling as well, pitching ideas and making those ideas resonate with people.
Natalie Grant: And actually before I was a PMM, I was a writer. That’s actually my background. Storytelling is my favorite part of the job. And so, I’m really lucky that I get to do it every day. And then the last one, which is kind of funny, but it’s true is a little bit of matchmaking. You have users who have a bunch of unmet needs and you have really talented engineers that can build all sorts of solutions.
Natalie Grant: When you’re working with technology, a lot of it truly is just matchmaking. Problems and solutions, people, and the solutions that will meet those needs. And so that’s a really fun part of the job as well. I’m rattling off a lot of skills, I do just want to kind of call out one thing, which is hard skills and soft skills are equally important.
Natalie Grant: If you have a hard skill like knowing SQL or getting certified in an analytics tool, or if you have an MBA or you can do strategic planning, you might also have soft skills like influencing and being curious and learning quickly or having executive presence so that you can represent your side of the business well when you’re talking to other teams. If you’re really strong on hard skills, but you don’t have a lot of soft skills, you can do really great work, but it’s harder for people to see it and appreciate it.
Natalie Grant: If you have soft skills without a lot of hard skills, people love you, but you aren’t adding as much value or driving impact. And as a PMM for many years, I really feel this equally, they are equally important and it is a continual practice to build them. And if you’re someone who is curious and likes learning new things, PMM-ing is definitely a great job for you because personally, I feel like almost every week, I’m learning a new skill or practicing a skill that I haven’t used in a long time.
Natalie Grant: If that sounds enjoyable to you, which it is for me, then definitely consider PMM-ing as a career.
Natalie Grant: Going back to these metaphors, I wanted to kind of emphasize some things to keep in mind about when you’re playing this role with all of your internal partners. In order to be the center of gravity, to maintain that source of truth for everybody you’re working with, you need to stay curious and you also need to be comfortable not fully understanding all the technology every day.
Natalie Grant: You kind of need to get to the heart of it, get to the benefit of it, and be able to assess risk mitigation, but you don’t necessarily need to program it or understand all the complexities involved. And that can sometimes be a delicate dance to do with yourself when it comes to confidence and learning things quickly. It’s a continual practice. You also need to be really good at listening and influencing and syncing people up.
Natalie Grant: Sometimes we call this driving alignment. It’s kind of a buzzword-y thing, but it’s true. You need to spot patterns and solutions when you’re talking to multiple people. You might start to hear themes pop out. And so, if you’re able to recognize an ongoing challenge that multiple people are flagging to you, you can then go back to your product team and see if you can build a solution to address all of those at once.
Natalie Grant: Getting comfortable, thriving and ambiguity, as they say. And then, I did mention research, qualitative and quantitative research when you’re getting to know your customer, your target audience. It sounds kind of obvious, but you need to care about people.
Natalie Grant: You need to empathize with people, especially if you aren’t personally in that target audience. And that’s something that I like calling out because I think it’s easy to forget that at the end of the day, when you are a PMM, the power of empathy, the power of putting yourself in someone’s shoes.
Natalie Grant: This was talked about a little bit in the accessibility lightning talk as well, is a really, really important thing to maintain. If you care about people and you like hearing what their needs are, again, might be a good candidate for a PMM. I wanted to bring it back to this image here and end with a little bit of advice for people who are thinking of interviewing for a PMM role or thinking about being a PM or PMM, which not all kind companies have both. I mentioned this earlier. It’s really awesome when they do.
Natalie Grant: I love it when they do, Discord does, but some questions to think through when you’re interviewing for a PMM role.
Natalie Grant: INumber one, ask about the company’s philosophy on product marketing, because companies are different. Some marketing teams are very brand focused, some companies are very and driven, and a PMM being that center of gravity really needs to have a robust understanding of how to be successful in that company. Definitely ask about that, directly, I would recommend.
Natalie Grant: And number two, pay attention to your PM partner when you’re interviewing, because you’ll probably be working with them every single day. And I’m super lucky, we have fantastic PMs at Discord and I love working with every single one of them. And I actually knew that from my first interview because it was something I was specifically looking for.
Natalie Grant: And then the third thing is, like I mentioned, you got to be comfortable with ambiguity. Nothing is ever constant. Things are going to change. Companies grow, people come and go. The world is also unpredictable. You just kind of have to be flexible and jump in and just kind of always think of it with a curiosity mindset and an openness. Personally, I have been in situations at past companies where I didn’t have a PM at all. And I had to step into many aspects of that role until we got someone in place, which brings me to my final point, which is…
Natalie Grant: Many skills overlap, especially the research, communication and influencing part. It’s not uncommon for PMMS to move into product management and vice versa. And at Discord, actually last year, one of our PMMS moved into a PM role.
Natalie Grant: Becoming a PMM opens up a lot of doors for you because you get exposure to all sorts of roles and functions. And this works with the subject matter experts as well. I’ve had friends that started as a more generalist and then worked with all these subject matter experts, the people playing all those instruments, the best at what they do, and were just drawn to one of them. I really just love this person who does paid media or PR.
Natalie Grant: And because you work with all those people, you can kind of see the benefits of being in that position and then you can make a career condition. And I also have a good friend who went the other way. I knew someone who was a social media marketer, worked with me as her PMM and then said, this looks really interesting. And she became a PMM eventually as her career track. It does happen.
Natalie Grant: You get a lot of great exposure being in this role. And I just kind of wanted to emphasize that if you’re curious and you like learning new things and you’re comfortable working with technology and explaining technology to people and telling stories, then you’re a prime candidate to be a PMM. I hope that was helpful.
Natalie Grant: And maybe someone watching just got convinced that this might be a good part of their career. If that’s you and you’re listening, go do it. I wish you all the fun and fulfillment and adventure. I think I’m going to hand it off to Nancy next.
Nancy Liu: Hello. Can you guys see me and hear me? Awesome. Yeah. Thank you so much. This is Nancy and I feel really, really excited to be here and meet with you in this event. And also, thank you so much in advance for your time with me today.
Nancy Liu: Just to share a little bit more about myself, I joined Discord about five months ago and I’m a data science manager supporting the marketing data science team. For today’s topic, I will talk about marketing incrementality test. Let me quickly share screen. Can you see my screen well? Okay, awesome. I understand this topic could be a little bit too technical, so I will try to provide as much context as possible and also speak from high level, hopefully to make it easy to understand for everyone here.
Nancy Liu: Before getting started, I want to briefly share my opinion on how I think data science team can add value to marketing in general. I think, Natalie just gave us a really great talk about product marketing, which really resonated with me really well.
Nancy Liu: And I feel really excited about what our marketing team is doing and how data science team can support marketing as well. In my opinion, I think data science can help marketing from many different areas, especially in two areas.
Nancy Liu: One is targeting, one is environment. Targeting means who we should target with our marketing programs. For example, which users should receive our marketing notification or which countries should receive our marketing campaigns. Environment means how do we qualify the impact from our marketing programs? The marketing incrementality test, which we are going to talk about today, is about environment piece, the second piece.
Nancy Liu: I will first talk about the marketing incrementality task in general. Then I will share a real example about how we measure brand marketing using geo test. Give me a second. Let me try to find my slides. I can only see the screen share for now. Yeah, here we go.
“Marketing Incrementality Test: Mathematical Approach to Measure Incremental Lift” by Nancy Liu, Discord Data Science Manager Marketing Data Science & Analytics
Nancy Liu: First, let me explain what is a marketing incrementality test. This is basically a data science approach that measure incremental lifts to show the true impact of our marketing campaign. You basically have test group and a control group. You can spend your marketing dollars or marketing efforts at a test group while do not spend your marketing dollars or marketing efforts as a control group. You measure the difference between the two in the end. This is called incrementality test.
Nancy Liu: Why is incrementality test important? First of all, it tells us how effective the marketing efforts is. It can also help us understand whether our marketing return is worth a marketing investment, which can help us to optimize the allocation of marketing dollars and marketing budgets. Oh, you cannot see the share screen. Is that a problem for everyone?
Nancy Liu: Oh, awesome. Thank you. There are two general approach or methods we can do to measure incrementality. The first method is called A/B test. Second one is geo test. I just want to highlight that A/B test and the geo test, they are not really alternatives to each other because they’re actually applied in different scenarios or different situations.
Nancy Liu: Let’s talk about each of the methods one by one. First A/B test. I’m sure a lot of people might already be familiar with A/B test. Basically, you define a group of users as the audience. For example, if you work for social media company, the group of users you define could be all the daily active users in US and Canada. And then you can randomly place the users into test group and control group and spend marketing efforts or dollars in the test group. In the end, you compare the difference between the test group and the control group. And that gives you the incrementality.
Nancy Liu: Second, let’s talk about the geo test, which is shown on the right side of the slide. Unlike A/B test, geo test is now looking at individual user behavior. Instead, it’s looking at each geolocation to define test and control. For example, test group could have 5G locations and the control group could have another 5G locations.
Nancy Liu: If we compare the difference between A/B test versus geo test, the biggest differences are that first of all, geo test is not really reliant on the ability to track individual user behavior. And Discord does care a lot about user privacy.
Nancy Liu: On the other side, there are only so many geo locations we can test with. According to news and definition, there are only 210 DMAs, which means designated market areas in US. 210 is really a very small simple size. And what comes with that is there’s always some natural differences between two geo locations.
Nancy Liu: The challenge of geo test is that because of the limited number of geos, geo test actually lose a lot of statistical power to reach stats significance, and cannot really control external factors very well. It’s really hard to say there is a perfect apple to apple comparison between test group and control group. Not as a challenge for geo test. However, given this challenges, there are still several scenarios we have to use geo test and cannot really apply A/B test.
Nancy Liu: The first scenario is that, for example, you want to test your SEM budget. SEM means search engine marketing, which means you increase the visibility of your company in search engine results page, primarily through paid ads, for example, on Google. Because we cannot really control who will search on Google and who will be exposed to search engine marketing, so we cannot really apply A/B task at user level very well.
Nancy Liu: The second scenario that we cannot really apply A/B test very well is about doing a test in non digital world. For example, you set up an ads on TV, or you set up a billboard in a train station. You cannot control which users will see the billboard in train station, right? That’s why you can not really do A/B test very easily at user level.
Nancy Liu: And in these two scenarios, we should consider geo testing instead of A/B test at user level. How do we do the geo test considering the challenge we mentioned earlier? In order to address challenges in practice, what we already do is call a match market test. In a match market test, we carefully select and match the geolocations based on their similarities to form pairs of regions.
Nancy Liu: For example, in a slide here, you can see that there were two orange pairs and two gray pairs. You randomly select one region in orange pair to control group and the other one in test group. And also you select one region in gray pairs into test group, while the other one should go to the control group. And your launch share marketing budget to the test group, and then reserve your marketing budget in the control group. After a while, you’ll compare the difference. For example, new user registration between test and control to conclude your incrementality.
Nancy Liu: We have talked about both A/B tests and the geo test. Now let’s switch the gear a little bit and talk about a real example of how we can measure brand marketing impact using geo test. This is also my last two slides for today.
Nancy Liu: Brand marketing is an upper funnel of marketing, which tends to focus more brand awareness. It’s unlike performance marketing, which is on the bottom funnel marketing and has direct impact on registration. Brand marketing does not really have very direct impact on KPIs, therefore it’s more difficult to measure the impact compared to performance marketing. In order to measure the impact of brand marketing, we do geo tests, use the match market test.
Nancy Liu: For example, we first select a few pairs of geo regions and assigned some to test and some to control. And then we spend the brand marketing dollars to test group only, while reserve the brand marketing dollars in control group. The statistical method we use is called BSTS or business structural time series. The series, not very difficult to understand. It’s just to predict what registrations will look like for the test group without brand marketing. I think Google created a very useful package, our package called causal impact. I also linked it here in case there is any interest to take a look into this for more research.
Nancy Liu: After doing the causal impact analysis with BSTS, you can just compare the counterfactual prediction, which means what registration will look like without brand marketing versus the actual performance on new user registration. The difference between a counterfactual prediction and actual will be the causal impact from brand marketing. That’s basically what I want to talk about for our marketing incrementality test.
Nancy Liu: Thank you so much for listening. Hopefully that’s easy to understand, even for the audience who is not that close to a marketing or data science world. Thank you so much. With that, I will hand it over to Jire.
Jire Bademosi: Thank you so much, Nancy. And thank you all for being here and getting to learn a little bit from some of the leaders at our company. I think we’ve talked about data science with Nancy, we talked about product marketing with Natalie, we talked about making mistakes with Kelsey, and we also talked about accessibility with Megan. And I’m curious, just in the chat, what are folks learning? What are folks feeling? How are we doing? Let’s see, oh, I hear from Felicia that has been wonderful. S
Jire Bademosi: hout out to everyone thus far, but I want to also introduce you to some more amazing leaders at the company. We’ve been so honored to see so many wonderful questions, comments, folks reaching out even on LinkedIn and sharing how this event has been really impactful for you. May want to continue that with this next portion of the event.
Jire Bademosi: I want you to help me welcome with a virtual hello and a virtual warm welcome to Evelyn Masso, as well as Mindy Day. I think Chloe as well will be joining us momentarily, but at least let us welcome a few folks for now. Hello, hello. Oh, there it goes, Chloe. Okay. Now we have a trio.
Discord leadership panel (Clockwise from top left: Jire Bademosi, Mindy Day, Chloe Shih, Evelyn Masso).
Mindy Day: Hello.
Jire Bademosi: All right. Y’all have seen me, kind of gotten to meet me before, but I feel it would be nice to meet some more folks from the Discord team. Maybe what we can do is just quickly start off with just our name, the team that folks are on. And then we really want to use this time to really benefit y’all and hear the questions that you are interested in hearing from. I’m going to just popcorn it around and I’m going to start off with Evelyn.
Evelyn Masso: Hey everyone. My name’s Evelyn, excited to be here. I’m the engineering manager for presentation frameworks. And my pronouns are she, they, and I think I forgot the last thing I was supposed to say or was that it actually?
Jire Bademosi: Well, you shared a little bit about your work so that’s good.
Evelyn Masso: Yeah. I’m the engineering manager for presentation framework, which includes the accessibility team, the design systems team and the foundation and performance team. Lots of UI infrastructure stuff is the part of the area that I work with.
Jire Bademosi: Amazing.
Evelyn Masso: I will go ahead and pass to Mindy.
Jire Bademosi: Awesome.
Mindy Day: Hello. Can you hear me? Test, test. Yes. Okay. Hi everyone. My name’s Mindy. I use she/her pronouns and I am the senior manager of community at Discord, which is on the marketing team. We really focus on surprising and delighting the discord community as well as creating programs for specific segments of our community like our partner program. And I’m excited to be here. Yay.
Jire Bademosi: Amazing. And Chloe, share a little bit about you.
Chloe Shih: Hey, y’all.
Jire Bademosi: I think we’re kind of matching, by the way. I’m noticing Chloe and I are matching, Evelyn and Mindy are matching. Totally uncoordinated, but coordinated at the same time. I love it. Okay. Sorry. Go ahead, Chloe.
Chloe Shih: No, not at all. I am a sub, so I’m a last minute addition to this panel. I feel I’m not ready with the cool backgrounds, but hi everyone. I’m Chloe, I’m a product manager on the community’s engagement team. We’re working on making Discord the home for your community and we are coming up with all kinds of features to make it easy for people to interact with each other and gather online. A few things we on are events and stages.
Chloe Shih: And if you have seen on my LinkedIn, I’ve posted about some new form type features that we’re testing out. It’s just really neat. Yeah, that’s my team.
Jire Bademosi: Amazing, amazing. Wonderful. Well, I think we have quite a few questions that have already come in, but I want to start with one that I think might allow us to learn a little bit more about the teams that we are part of and follows on the initial conversation that I had with Beena, where she talked a little bit about the people first mentality around how Discord treats both its employees and the environment that it creates.
Jire Bademosi: And this question from Karen asked how does Discord also create collaborative environments? We are a people first company, but really how do we create that collaboration?
Mindy Day: I could start. I think there’s kind of two types of collaboration that comes to mind. There’s collaboration within the immediate team. And so, making sure when we’re going to kick off new work or we get direction about a new area that we want to go, that everyone on the team has a chance to get informed about this work, and we give everyone, no matter your role, a chance to give feedback, brainstorm, because we know that good ideas can and often come from all across the business.
Mindy Day: Then the other part of collaboration that we do is cross-functionally. So not just even within our own community team but making sure that we collaborate with friends across the business and they get looped in with plenty of time to make sure whenever possible, we’re not surprising them with any last minute requests, and they can embed our plans in their plans.
Mindy Day: I think working for Discord and using Discord all day also facilitate that. We’re really casual. We’re always happy to jump into voice chats, to just hash things out with each other. And even though we are working remote, I think Discord really encourages that sort of collaborative environment, which is really fun.
Jire Bademosi: Amazing. Oh, go ahead, Evelyn.
Evelyn Masso: Big plus one on all of that, really. [inaudible] my answer.
Jire Bademosi: Fair enough. Now I’m kind of curious. I know we got straight into what is Discord and the collaboration that happens. But I also am curious just because we have so many folks from different parts of the company. So right now in this conversation, we have, Mindy from the community perspective, we have Chloe from the perspective of product and we have Evelyn from the perspective of engineering and all in different aspects, but all are part of that same unifying factor of what is Discord. And obviously our day to day look totally different.
Jire Bademosi: I’m curious, what is a day in the life of each of you? I know they could be very different but I think the folks want to know. I mean, I also selfishly want to know, but I think the folks as well, that are here would also to know more. Maybe we could start with you Chloe, not to put you on the spot but I am kind of sort of, yeah.
Chloe Shih: Oh man. Wow. It’s been so busy lately but I think right now we are in testing mode to see if this new big bet feature for community is going to work. And I think every morning I come into an inbox of a bunch of DMs from admins, community creators, and I try to get their feedback on what they want to see. I know that the world is moving virtually and we’re building these communities online.
Chloe Shih: We’re connecting online through interests. So how do we make that easy for people and safe and have authentic conversations and get people to connect and do it in a way that’s really natural for everyone? And I think trying to create that is really hard because there’s not a really great way to do that today. And Discord is the default for a lot of communities. So every morning I’m just tackling that question.
Chloe Shih: And then I go to stand-up, I work with all my engineers, I’m a designer. And then we do this thing called bike shedding, where we explore all kinds of different designs, how users might react to it if things don’t look right. Any wild ideas that we want to throw out. We also have couch time, which is unstructured time together to just sit, kind of co-working spaces. We sit together and if anyone has something they want to bring up, they can bring it up during couch time.
Chloe Shih: And then we have tactical meetings throughout the day, with data, with the community team, with Mindy’s team and with design and other leads and engineering. So lots of different meetings just to get to that next step of what do we need to do next? Are we solving the problems for our community members and hopefully have time for hangouts and getting boba with coworkers. Yesterday I had a coworker send me boba and I was like, “I love you.” So yeah, that’s I think the day of my life, yesterday, today combined.
Jire Bademosi: Amazing. That’s pretty awesome. I think that really brings into what the magic of our wompers world of Discord. I’m curious, Chloe, what is your day in the life like snows giving post or pre?
Chloe Shih: Wait, sorry, me?
Jire Bademosi: Mindy. Sorry.
Chloe Shih: Oh, okay. Yeah.
Mindy Day: Yes. I was just looking at my calendar because I was like, what do I do all day? A lot of meetings as well, similar to Chloe spend time meeting one on one with members of my direct reports. One-on-ones with key folks across the company to make sure that we’re staying aligned and we’re on the same path as things do develop very quickly and rapidly. A quick 30 minutes once a month with some people can go a long way and making sure we’re not veering off path.
Mindy Day: Definitely agree with making space for casual collaboration. We have a server where everyone on my team has a voice channel that’s their desk. So like Mindy’s desk. We can say things like, “Oh, meet me at my desk,” but we also have a Boba Guys voice channel. It just kind of makes it feel more fun when we can hang out in those voice channels.
Mindy Day: But yeah, truly a lot of meetings and desperately trying to find unblock off two hour chunks of focus time. Because I think two hours is the minimum amount of time that you need to really deep to then be able to write up strategies, the notion docs, to then hopefully have sources of truth for other people to reference and make sure that we know what the biggest strategy is and the vision.
Mindy Day: I truly love it. I think my career has developed where I’m not spending as much hands on time within the community and more of my focus is on the strategy. So that’s been a shift for me throughout the last couple years.
Jire Bademosi: Very awesome. I might have to take some of these ideas and perhaps bring them into the people talented vibe. I that idea of the desks as well. And next up, Evelyn. I’d love to hear from you a little bit about what you’re up to.
Evelyn Masso: Yeah. I love some of those ideas that I’m hearing too. I’m going to steal some these for sure. So yeah, I mean I’m also a managers, so meetings with one-on-ones usually every day or every couple days a week with folks on my team. All the teams that I work with do stand-ups every day. So there’s a couple stand-ups that kind of kick off my morning usually.
Evelyn Masso: And then since I’m engineering manager, a lot of my work has to do with coordination and project management. And also goal setting and kind of checking in on where we are in reaching those goals with different projects. And that also includes personal goals for people that I’m working with directly as well. One thing I was going to call out is… Yes, I’ve also been working with a larger usual team on a larger than usual project lately.
Evelyn Masso: There’s been a lot of coordination. We have something pretty interesting and exciting happening in a lot of six weeks or so. So there’s just been a lot of… The last couple weeks have been, especially cross-functional I would say, which is really fun. It’s great to have all that energy coming together as we have a project coming towards its completion, its launch.
Jire Bademosi: Very cool. I love the element of anticipation. Everyone heard that little nugget of-
Evelyn Masso: I can’t talk about it for sure. So, sorry.
Jire Bademosi: You can’t talk about it but let’s just keep our eyes peeled for the next six to eight weeks. Some news I guess, will be coming down the pipeline. I have a question specifically for you Mindy from Suzanne Guzman. How are you liking the shift from more community facing to larger strategizing? So more of the leadership role that you’re taking on within your team?
Mindy Day: Thank you for the question. It’s really rewarding. It was definitely a little nerve-wracking because I’d spent… So much of my job satisfaction and joy was getting to help those community members interact with them, build those relationships and hear firsthand the impact of our product on the community. But it was a shift that I had been wanting to make in my career. And a lot of the fulfillment now comes from enabling the members of my team to do that work successfully.
Mindy Day: And the strategy, the work that I’m doing at a higher level now should hopefully be driving a bigger impact for the community. So learning I’m one person, I can never do it all, but if I can shift my focus into build those relationships and securing more resources, we’ll actually be able to have a lot more value for the community. That’s kind of where my passion still drives is serving our community and treating them humans and being playful, but having a bigger picture and a bigger vision about what that could look in the future.
Jire Bademosi: Yeah. I feel there’s a lot of really good nuggets there, especially around moving from an individual contributor to more of a management role and still at the end of the day that core around really putting the users first is such a unique and important lens. And that’s important to recognize as we start to move within different roles within our respective careers.
Jire Bademosi:I know Evelyn not necessarily on the community side, but even on the engineering side, as you’re growing your team a lot even this year, how you’re starting to also think about how to build a team, well also maybe not doing the hands on work that you were doing probably earlier in your career.
Evelyn Masso: Yeah. That’s going to be easier because I’ve been doing management for a minute and I’m not as good as a quarter than I used to be. Part of it is just literally not being able to do it as much anymore. And also I’ve been at Discord about six or so seven months now. And while I’ve worked in tech stack that are similar, previously in my career, I haven’t really worked very much in the Discord code base itself.
Evelyn Masso: I rely on members of the team a lot when it comes to actually getting things done on the engineering side of things. As we think about growing the team and having more folks come on one of the big things that I’m, I guess working through with the teams and with myself is like, “How do I hand off more of the running the team parts too?” Kind of taking it even more of a strategic, further step back over time.
Evelyn Masso: That’s really helping me lean into my skills around coaching and mentorship, which are pretty big reasons why I became a manager in the first place, but those are things that I to do anyways. It’s really just kind of doubling down even more on those skills.
Evelyn Masso: And I think an important part of that is also learning what I need from folks that I work with directly to trust them and build trust with them and what they need for me to have trust in me. I can earn and build that trust reciprocally, and kind of having an active dialogue about what those things are and understanding those things take time too.
Jire Bademosi: Absolutely. Time. I feel that’s such a important phrase to really close with and thinking about how important that is when we’re thinking about this work. I just saw a note here and a question from Des, specifically for Chloe.
Jire Bademosi: And the question is, Chloe, what do you do to organize your time? You seem very busy and I guess Des wants to hear all the code, all of the awesome hacks that you might have in order to stay organized with all of the work that you’re leading.
Chloe Shih: Oh my God, I am the ultimate organizational catfish. It’s not true. I think that I struggle with this a lot, because there’s simply way too many things. And I think in product, there’s way too many priorities and everyone is asking you to do… Pull you in different directions. And you also interface with all kinds of teams and there’s little tasks to do all the time. I think that at the end of the day, there are a lot of different prioritization hacks.
Chloe Shih: You can use the Eisenhower decision making matrix, figure out what’s your high priorities. What’s urgent. There’s so many frameworks decide whether something should be done first or not. You can use task may management and to-do lists, but I’m really simple brained. And I just have a very… If I can only do one to three things today, what are those things?
Chloe Shih: And then I need to sit down and do it. I might also think about for the tasks that can only be done by me, what are those things? And for every anything else, can I delegate to someone else and parallel process the tasks and not let myself be the bottleneck?
Chloe Shih: Otherwise, I feel really bad about myself and my productivity, but I think the answer is setting boundaries and expectations on what should your scope of work be. Yeah. I think the answer is not to do everything and not to do everything as fast as you can is just picking out what to do as the art, which I’m still figuring out. But I think everyone struggles with it. Yeah. Everyone has their own strengths. But if anyone on the panel has crazy life hacks, I am all ears-
Jire Bademosi: Listen-
Chloe Shih: Looking for advice.
Jire Bademosi: You and me, both Chloe. You and me both. I might actually pop that question over to Mindy and Evelyn in case y’all have any hacks. I know Mindy you all use Asana really well on your team. And I think is a really good hack, but not to frame your question.
Mindy Day: Code lifelong struggle as well. I do think, yeah. Plus one to all the things that Chloe said, and so often we do put off the most impactful work in favor of just busying ourselves because it’s always so many other things to do. It’s so easy and comfortable to just let yourself be like, “Oh, there’s no time to do that thing that I kind of don’t want to do,” even though it might be the most impactful.
Mindy Day: I think once a quarter we try and do this little exercise where you just make a grid. Most impactful, most effort, least impactful least effort. And it’s a really just brutal way to just assess the facts about sometimes the high effort things that we are doing, even if we love doing them, aren’t having the most impact. And it’s just a way to kind of review that and reviewing your calendar too, to see where you’re spending your time.
Mindy Day: These things are good practices to start doing to just assess because you got to focus.
Jire Bademosi: Yes. Yes to that. And tomorrow is Thursday at Discord and Thursday everywhere else in the world. But on Thursdays we have a no meeting Thursday which started off as a pilot as a way for us to really try to have more, both autonomy on our schedules, but also thinking about how we might be able to prioritize. I will be the first admit that sometimes end up scheduling a couple meetings here or there, but for the most part, it’s a pretty cool practice. I think just emphasizes that hopeful practice of being diligent with our time.
Jire Bademosi: Evelyn, not to put you out there too, but I’m curious if you have any hacks where the folks who are curious.
Evelyn Masso: Yeah. It’s really a simple hack. I use a paper to-do list and I just cross things off as I do them. And then if I haven’t done something for a while and it’s way back at my to-do list, I will ask myself like, “Is this actually important? Did I not do it because it’s not important or it can happen later or am I avoiding it?” And then I can kind of think like, “Okay, no, you really have to go do that. You’ve been avoiding it for 10 to do items.” Or be like, “Okay. Actually that wasn’t something that you really needed to worry about.” But for some reason, for me, having it be written on a paper and getting to cross things off and just have it go a forever list kind of has been really helpful.
Jire Bademosi: Absolutely. And as I think about all of the lightning talks that we had today, where we were able to hear a little bit from various parts of the company. I think something that resonated with me was also hearing Kelsey’s talk around mistakes or lessons that we might have learned in our career, whether it’s either currently or in recent past or a long time ago or early on in our careers.
Jire Bademosi: Are there any lessons or words of wisdom that you’d to leave the folks here with? I think it would be great to hear from each of you because you have so many different perspectives that could really resonate with folks as we bring our leadership panel to a close today. I’m happy to start as well.
Mindy Day: Yeah, you start.
Jire Bademosi: Okay. Perfect. I mean, I think for me some of the lessons that I’ve learned or one, my mom always told me this, but from a very early age, the worst they can say is no. And that really has helped me a lot, especially when I was starting a non-profit organization out of my college dorm room. Everyone was starting actual for-profit startup. And I was like, “Oh, I’m going to start a non-profit.” You automatically have no money to be made.
Jire Bademosi: I think knocking on doors, figuring out how to get through all of the no’s really taught me a lot and built a thicker skin in me as far as what’s possible and what’s not. And then how I apply that in a corporate lens is sometimes that really gives me some strength as far as like, what is and isn’t possible.
Jire Bademosi: And I always say that, especially in the tech world, it’s Disneyland, it’s make believe and that none of these companies existed when I was five years old. So all of what we can do is really up to us and our innovation and our persistence to be able to really reach what it is that we want to. I feel those are some of those lessons that even from a young age that I still apply to myself today. Go ahead.
Chloe Shih: I can share, I guess a nugget of wisdom. I guess I’m trying to frame it as if I were to tell my younger self, give her some advice, what would it be? And I think that for so long in school and college and how I viewed the world society and work, I’ve always kind of acclimated towards the societal norm. And I always said, “I need to do that because everyone’s doing that.”
Chloe Shih: I think that I was so obsessed with someone else’s system of beliefs that when I finally went to go explore the things that I really enjoyed, and I discovered what I did and didn’t like, and I found my own voice. I just wish I didn’t blindly follow as much. And I wish I questioned more.
Chloe Shih: I wish I challenged myself to really think whether I like what I’m doing and whether it’s the right thing and what it gives to myself and every day is really precious. And I know that some exploration, it requires some exploration for myself to get to that point of deciding what something means to me. But protecting my time and protecting my intentions and how I want to develop and protecting who I want around me and the problems I want to face every day, I wish I took more intentional steps earlier. Yeah.
Jire Bademosi: All great advice. Curious, Evelyn and Mindy, any last words, or if you were to speak to younger self or other lessons along the way that you’d to share with folks? All right. Well-
Mindy Day: Oh, sorry.
Jire Bademosi: Oh, go ahead.
Mindy Day: I was trying to give Evelyn… Evelyn wanted to go. Younger self…
Mindy Day:I think in tech things move very quickly and you finish one project while you are working on another and encouraging yourself just to pause and reflect on far you have gone and how much you have learned even in a month, six months, 12 months, just to give yourself some grace and some kindness with learning new things constantly. It’s very tiring.
Mindy Day:And I think burnout is so prevalent in tech. So making saying those boundaries like Chloe mentioned, reflecting on truly how much you have learned even though you are moving so quickly. And then some of the things that I have written on a sticky note, just remind us for myself every day is just to have fun.
Mindy Day:We get paid to work on these problems together and challenges and anyone who can make each day coming to work a little more fun, makes everyone’s job a little easier.
Mindy Day: Saying no and remembering that you are the expert and they hired you for a reason and they’re paying you for your time and your expertise. And to just be more confident in what your gut is telling you, because so often even now after doing it for 10 years, I still feel an imposter or question whether I should speak up and I need that daily reminder to trust myself.
Jire Bademosi: Amazing.
Evelyn Masso: One other thing I’ll add too which is, I feel a lot of time in my career I’ve been focused on what is the problem? Or what is broken that I need to work on to fix? Whether at work or something I’m working on for myself and a big part of things recently for me have been…
Evelyn Masso: That’s a way to approach things but also making more space for being grateful and appreciating the things that are good or okay, as well alongside of things that you want to change or dig into more. So having a little more space for that is something I think is really important.
Jire Bademosi: Amazing. Well, first off, I just want to thank you all for the time that you’ve shared with us. The gems that you dropped. To all the folks in the audience, major thank you for being here today with us. The time for our leadership panel has come to a close. So big thank you, Chloe, Evelyn and Mindy for your time today.
Jire Bademosi: However, we have a few more things in store and that’s one introducing my colleague in bringing up Lauren to the stage. And then I believe after that, there is a networking session that Andy will be talking a little bit about later. But again, thank you, Chloe and Mindy and Evelyn for your time. And I will be passing the mic over to Lauren. And I think this also ends my monopoly of the microphone today, but thank you all for having me and hopefully I’ll get to see you all. (silence).
Angie Chang: Hi. It seems we’re waiting for Lauren or I could find her. Okay. We’re waiting for Lauren to join. There we’re. All right.
Jire Bademosi: I think we might be having a few technical issues with promoting Lauren up, but I think we can at least do our best and see if we can try and bring her up again. But I don’t see her in the attendees. So Angie, maybe we can quickly tag teams so that we can at least open up the networking rooms while we have folks.
Angie Chang: Okay, cool. So I guess what I could do is say thank you for joining us for our first virtual Girl Geek X virtual event. Jire you are an amazing host. Thank you so [crosstalk] all the things. And first of all, tell us about Discord and then hosting Beena and having a panel and just entire event was this is amazing.
Angie Chang: I think we all can feel the warm energy of the Discord women. So I think everyone’s energized to learn more about working at Discord. We’ll be emailing out jobs to everyone who’s registered as well as a link to a survey. So be able to look out for that.
Angie Chang: We enjoy having Jire, Beena, Megan, Kelsey, Natalie, Nancy, Evelyn, Mindy, Chloe, and maybe Lauren will be joining us to talk about recruiting. But in the meantime, we will be having some networking. Starting now we will be putting people into breakout rooms.
Angie Chang: We’ll be hopping off this webinar and going into Zoom breakout rooms where you’ll be meeting four to six, maybe other girl geeks. Whoever can stay for another half an hour or so. And we’ll shuffle the rooms three times. So you’ll be in each room for about 20 minutes. And you’ll see a one minute warning when it’s time to wrap up and we’ll be putting the link into the chat that you can click on and go to the Zoom meeting. And that way we can see you on the other side and where you can be in your rooms.
Angie Chang: You can have your own little name that you change to say whatever we wanted to say. And yeah, will, you’ll just see you in that Zoom meeting. And if you can hang out with us, please do. If not, if you’re on the East Coast, you can go to bed. You’ve had a long day. So thank you so much for being with us. And we will see you in the Zoom breakout rooms, if you would to continue chatting with girl geeks. Other than that, yeah.
Jire Bademosi: Thank you so much, Angie. Thank you to the Girl Geek X community. We’re incredibly honored to be here with you all. You will be hearing from us. If you are interested in roles, we really would love to meet you and get to know you and hear your stories and hope to find a role that’s right for you.
Jire Bademosi: We have curated a few roles that Angie will be sharing with you all in the next day or so as well as an open opportunity. Maybe you don’t see the role that you’re really passionate about. That is totally fine. We do have an open ended roles so we can make sure to hopefully engage as many of you as possible. But again, thank you so much for your time. We hope you learned something new.
Like what you see here? Our mission-aligned Girl Geek X partners are hiring!
Angie Chang: Hi! Welcome to Girl Geek Dinner virtually in a pandemic. This is the Webflow Girl Geek Dinner 2021. My name’s Angie Chang and I’m the founder and CEO of Girl Geek X. Hi, Sukrutha! I want you to introduce yourself.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hi! I’m Sukrutha and yes, Angie’s partner in crime whenever I can be a good partner to her. Welcome everyone to the Webflow Girl Geek Dinner!
Angie Chang: I wanted to like really quickly say a bit about what Girl Geek is and kind of go back to the beginning where I started Girl Geek Dinners in like over a decade ago, where I was just really excited to put women on stage at different companies in the San Francisco Bay Area. Now that we are doing this virtually, we can have people join us from around the world. We have people of all genders coming from all cities around California normally. Now we get to have people from all over the world! Thank you so much for coming and if you want to tell us where you’re joining us from in the chat, we would love to see where you’re dialed in from. We not only do Girl Geek Dinners in-person and virtually…
Angie Chang: We also do an annual virtual conference every International Women’s Day – March 8th usually – we are doing our International Women’s Day conference called Elevate. That’s an all day event with lots of speakers and sponsors talking about what they’re working on. It’s like a really all day Girl Geek Dinner, where you learn so much and then you got to meet other women. And you can also… There’s a call for speakers so if you haven’t that email, you should look at the girlgeek.io website and there is a link to apply so you can become a speaker.
Angie Chang: We had at least three speakers, I believe last year, who came in through the submission process. I encourage you to think about what your expertise is and apply to speak. We are reviewing everything in about a month. What else is there? Am I forgetting anything else?
Sukrutha Bhadouria: No, but I did want to say given the Elevate conference is our favorite time of year, we absolutely would love you to apply right away. Don’t overthink it, just do it. There’s a lot of times that we don’t see enough female speakers at tech conferences or conferences in general, just because of unconscious bias that we put on ourselves.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: I feel like sometimes we think it has to be perfect when it doesn’t, it just needs to be authentic. So please go ahead and apply.
Angie Chang: I think it’s about time to bring on our first speaker. Arquay Harris is going to be telling us a bit about Webflow, I’m really excited to hear her speak about the company.
Angie Chang: She is the VP of Engineering at Webflow and previously we knew her in her previous life as a Slack Director of Engineering and you might recognize her we kind of always say, oh, my God, if someone asks us like, “Did someone get hired from a Girl Geek Dinner?” We’re like, “Yes, Arquay. She got hired at the Slack Girl Geek Dinner and has worked there for about four years, I believe. And yeah, I’m just super happy that you’re now at Webflow. You’re going to tell us all about it. I heard so much about no-code and the growing company, so yeah, I’ll pass the baton to you. Welcome, Arquay.
Arquay Harris: Excellent. I hope like I’m not the only person who’s got hired. I think it’s like I’m in good company of all the people. First we’re just going to learn almost everything that you wanted to know about Arquay – consider it your Arquay 101, if you will. But before I get into it…
Arquay Harris: I’ve been going to Girl Geek for a very long time. I’ve considered myself an OG kind of person. I looked at my email and I thought like, what is the earliest Girl Geek that I ever went to? And I found this ticket from 2009 and it was some company called LOLapps. Does anyone even know what LOLapps is? I literally have no idea what that is. I had to go on Wikipedia, I think it’s like a Facebook game or something and I don’t know if it exists but it’s the funniest thing, and I know I went to one before 2009, but this is the oldest one I could find in Gmail and all my Yahoo mail has been deleted. That was pretty funny.
Arquay Harris: I really support the organization. I really love their mission and what they’re trying to do. I really am sincere supporter of Girl Geek. Really quick pronounced R-kway, really sorry to disappoint, it’s nothing exotic like an African princess or anything like that. My parents really just like SEO. I say this a lot and people don’t believe me, but it actually is the truth that’s why I’m named Arquay.
Arquay Harris: I thought a really good introduction would be to talk about my kind of traditional, non-traditional background. Growing up I really loved math and as you can see, I one day dreamed of visiting this island nation of Sohcahtoa, and so I was president of the math honor society, and I really loved math. I went to college to become a math teacher. It’s because I had pretty humble beginnings and I really believe that math is like the kind of great equalizer.
Arquay Harris: You can math and science your way out of poverty so to speak. I had an after-school job though that really introduced me to things like Photoshop and Illustrator. Even though I loved math, I noticed that I was most engaged when I was kind of doing this stuff. I transferred schools and I studied media arts and design, and I got into coding because I didn’t like this process of handing off my designs to someone else. I thought I’m really analytical like I learned to code, I will have this math background, I could learn to code, and so then I started with Flash and then PHP, later and then Python.
Arquay Harris: I later went on to grad school and I did more coding of fine art painting, and so the really interesting thing about me I would say is, even though I’m a developer and I very much consider myself an engineer, I actually have been MFA. I’m a formerly trained designer and it’s really served me well just in my career and in my life to be able to have these informed conversations about topography and color and understand what can be built.
Arquay Harris: I like to tell that story because people often say like, “Oh, I really want to get into coding. I really want to like do this technical thing. I don’t know if I can do it, you can do it. We can all do it. I think there’s no one true direction or path and everyone’s journey is different.
Arquay Harris: This is a good transition into what I do all day. I’ll tell you a little bit about what I do at Webflow. The thing that I really like about Webflow, especially if you hear my story is how Webflow is really invested in kind of democratizing this idea of creating things for the web, visual development platform.
Arquay Harris: Previously there were these gatekeepers, it was like you had to have a CS degree and it was only coders and only people who had like done a certain thing could really create these experiences for the web. I really identify with that mission as well as the fact that I think it really aligned with my design and kind of artsy background. It’s almost a perfect gig for me. I really dig it.
Arquay Harris: Really quickly, I’m sure you’re wondering VP of Engineering. What does this person even do all day? Well, I do this combination of what you might have heard called the Three Ps, which is people, processes, product. Those are the kind of main things that a VP of Engineering does, but process being like how you actually develop software. People is the mentoring piece. Product is the actual strategy of what we’re doing. And then I even have my kind of own framework where I really believe in advocating for the people on my team execution, which is kind of the bread and butter of what engineering managers do.
Arquay Harris: Then these business priorities, because it really matters like you could advocate all day and you could execute all day, but if it doesn’t align with the business priorities, then there’s probably an issue there. So I just wanted to give you a high level, an intro, setting you up for this talk, telling you a little bit about me and my story.
Arquay Harris: I’ll be here later asking questions in the Q&A, if you have any more questions about me or the product or Webflow in general, because we are hiring, we’ll be here talking to you about our open roles and all that stuff. I look forward to talking to all of you and you’re in for a great night. I’m a little bit biased, but really it’s going to be good. So yeah, I’m about to hand it off. Okay. There you go. That’s it. I highly recommend you put puppies in your presentation if you need to take a sip of water. Who’s up next?
Sukrutha Bhadouria: You’re so cool. Oh, my God. Yeah. You’re one of our favorite girl geeks ever, because every time we’re greatly entertained and amazed by what’s going on in your career. Right. So, before my daughter interrupts us Jiaona Zhang is next. Oh, my gosh, she’s an amazing, amazing, cool coster and VP of Product at Webflow, and she’s also an active angel investor or lecturer at Stanford University and of course created Reforge. Oh, my gosh welcome.
Jiaona Zhang: Thank you so much. I’m so excited to be here and that is so adorable hearing your daughter’s voice. All right. I do not have a puppy poster or segue while I drink water and pull up my slides so give me one second.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: All righty.
Jiaona Zhang: So excited to be here. I lead product at Webflow and just a little bit of background on me. I started my career actually in consulting and really wanted to not be advising and actually be on the other side of the table and truly operating. I started my career in product by being a product manager at a mobile gaming company. Definitely not something I thought I would do growing up, but it was a really great way for me to get my hands dirty and learn how to ship things. I spent time at Dropbox, at Airbnb, at WeWork, and then ultimately made it to Webflow.
Jiaona Zhang: I’m so excited similar to Arquay, in terms of being able to work on a mission statement that is really about empowering everyone to build. As someone who didn’t have a technical background, I was an econ major in school being able to create tools so that all of us, no matter what your degree was or what you’ve studied, you can build and you can actually build for the web. That’s just something that I think is so exciting and democratizing. I’m happy to talk about my background a little more later in the Q&A but today I actually wanted to share five lessons in product strategy.
Jiaona Zhang: First of all, product strategy is something that I think a lot of people scratch their heads out they’re like, “What is it exactly? Is it the company strategy? Is there something different like what’s a strategy? How do I know I have good strategy?” What I want to walk through today is what I’ve personally learned over my career in terms of what strategy is, and also how do you really go about bringing that to life and going through some examples there? I don’t believe in progressive disclosure so I’m going to go ahead and share the five lessons at a high level. Then we will go through each one and talk about in more detail
Jiaona Zhang: The five lessons that I’ve learned is first, the most innovative company start with a really bold mission, then this concept of your strategy, and we’ll talk about what? This thing, it really should look like a pyramid from your mission down to your strategy. The next thing I’ve really learned is that it’s really important to articulate real user value before business value. Lesson four, you do not have to do it yourself and then lesson five is you to bring your product tragedy to life. You actually design it into your organization. That’s one of the best ways to execute on it
Jiaona Zhang: Let’s go ahead and get started with each one and talk a little bit more about what each one means. So for the first one, the most innovative companies start with a bold statement. We’re going to do a little bit of interactive at Q&A and I sense that I’m going to ask people to put some stuff in chat. So, first of I’m curious if people know what Tesla’s mission statement is, if you do take a moment and just go ahead and type it into the chat, and we’ll see if anyone does, everyone has it.
Jiaona Zhang: Mark saying, just do it, just do it. It’s whatever you think a lot of people have no idea. Okay. That’s really interesting. Ruling the world. Okay. Boom Boom. Well, I know SpaceX is just to colonized Mars so I’m assuming that Tesla is also very grand. Okay. Caroline has, bingo, essentially to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy. That’s literally exactly what their mission statement is, to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy. And the reason why this is meaningful is because when you have a mission statement that is something like this, it enables you to really innovate towards this fourth star.
Jiaona Zhang: Imagine a world where Tesla’s mission statement was to build the best electric vehicle or to build the best luxury car or to build whatever else, right? Like it would really limit what they do. It would limit the concept of, hey, you know what we actually should do in order to achieve this mission of transition to world sustainable energy, we should have a vehicle, but we also maybe should have solar panels. We should also have charging stations. Like how do we get the world to be using sustainable energy much more? And so when you have something that is much broader than what you’re currently working on a mission that is inspiring and really ambitious, it actually creates that room for innovation and it really allows you to think bigger around how can I achieve that ultimate mission?
Jiaona Zhang: I’m curious if anyone knows what Airbnb’s mission is? How’s the world? Share. It’s really interesting. There’s a very big difference was how’s the world versus share. And I’ll talk a little bit about that later. To make locals share their experience. Okay. Another thing in the vein of sharing. Sharing, okay. Sharing community, something about being at home when you’re not at home. This is actually Airbnb’s mission, which is really to create a world where people can belong anywhere.
Jiaona Zhang: When you are anchored on belonging as your mission as your north star, you’re able to think about all the different ways, all the different aspects of a travel experience that you might want to improve in order to achieve belonging. For example, making that when you feel at home that is a part of belonging somewhere, making sure that you are connecting with locals Tara had the locals and sharing their experience.
Jiaona Zhang: It’s actually part of belonging, making sure you feel it’s part of a community that’s also part of belonging. And so again, when you have a mission statement and that’s where you anchor the company and everything that your company does, you are able to think much broader and open up much more room for, if we were to truly achieve this, what can we do? What are the products we can build? What are the programs we have? And so that actually brings me to Webflow since this is a Webflow and girl geek talk.
Jiaona Zhang: Here at Webflow our mission statement is to empower everyone to create for the web. On top of that, we also really care about making sure that everyone in our company are leading impactful and fulfilling lives while working on this mission statement. The reason why, so I’ll focus more on the first part, which is empowering everyone to create for the web.
Jiaona Zhang: The reason why this is really important and to start here as a part of the product strategy is it is something that we could be working on for the next 100 years. And we will continue to make progress towards this really ambitious mission, getting everyone to be able to engage in the act of creation.
Jiaona Zhang: When we do something like that it also gives us the room to think, okay, to achieve something as ambitious as this, what are the big things we need to do in the short and medium term to ultimately accomplish this journey? When you start with a mission as opposed to we’re going to build X, Y, Z, that’s our product strategy. When we start with a mission, you really get everyone at your company rallied against this is what it means to ultimately long term be successful. These are all the different ways we can innovate towards that, creating much more room for both depth and rep of what you can do as a company.
Jiaona Zhang: All right, the second lesson, it should look like a pyramid. And why say it, I really mean… We just talked about starting with your mission statement that flowing through to your product strategy should look like a pyramid. And so what does that actually look like when you break it down? The first thing is you have your mission statement. So I gave you a few examples. The Tesla example, the Airbnb example, Webflow example. From there, you actually can go and talk about your vision. So if your mission is, what are you ultimately trying to achieve? Your vision is in or we believe that if we do this, that is the best way to help us achieve that mission.
Jiaona Zhang: From there, you actually need to formulate company strategy. And when you have these north stars in place your company strategy will be a lot crisper and focused. And then from there comes your product strategy. And so you can see it’s actually this almost like it’s this nesting doll, this pyramid structure where everything kind of ladders up into your mission statement that we just talked about. So let’s go through a Webflow’s example. So again, this is our mission statement to empower everyone to create for the web. What is our vision? How do we really achieve that over the next five, 10, 20 years? We believe that the best way to achieve it is to build the world’s most powerful no-code development platform.
Jiaona Zhang: Every single word in this sentence actually means something really critical to the way we think about how we approach our vision and also our company strategy. So the first word that I’ll talk about is this concept of power. We believe that in order to empower everyone to create, especially all the different things that you’d want to create, we need to give you power. We need to not just give you a template, but real powerful tools that you can use to customize whatever it is you want to create. We fundamentally believe in no-code, which is instead of asking people to have to learn how to code or all of these different things in order to create, we want to make it much more visual, much more intuitive and give you that abstraction layer.
Jiaona Zhang: And finally, we really believe in order for us to actually achieve our mission, which is to empower everyone to create really anything. We can’t do really do it alone and we have to build this platform. I talk more about that as part of lesson four, but platformization and really creating that platform is a big piece of what we believe we need to do. And as a result, it ladders into our company’s strategy, right? So if this is our vision, how do we then pull that into our company strategy. Okay, what we need to do is ultimately to lean into the power to really, really enable this no-code revolution, and then ultimately create a platform.
Jiaona Zhang: From there, what you actually build, that’s the product strategy and it basically hangs off of the company strategy, which hangs off of the vision, which hangs off of the mission. And so our product strategy, what we actually build what are the features of this no-code platform? What are the ways we can actually bring that power to life? How do we make sure our platform is extensible that comes from our company strategy?
Jiaona Zhang: All right. That was awesome too. It should look like a pyramid and now you kind of have a sense of what is, and we’re going to move on to lesson three, which is, it’s really critical to articulate your user value before your business value. Imagine a world where Tesla’s strategy was, we’re going to build the best electrical vehicle. We’re going to beat Prius, we’re going to beat whatever X vehicle that other brand has. That’s not super inspiring and it also doesn’t ultimately create the best product out there. Imagine if Airbnb was like “We’re going to be booking.com. We’re going to be even better than booking plus Expedia plus Vrbo plus everything combined. That’s also not something that really gets that. This is what our users need, and this is therefore what we have. We can build to fulfill their needs.
Jiaona Zhang: Finally, going back to Webflow, imagine a world where… What we anchored on was we got to beat WordPress, really. We got to beat X thing that’s out there that people are using today. It really limits what you’re able to do, and it limits your innovation because really the most creative, innovative companies are building something that is like leagues beyond what is out there in the market today. Instead here at Webflow, we really think about the user value first. We think about something like everyone who watches Pixar movies, you see this just richness of animation and just what you can create on the screen that was all done via software so that you don’t have to literally create every single person or molecule or snow drop, or Anna’s like dress pattern, right?
Jiaona Zhang: Like you actually have software to scale that. And so that is really anchoring on the user value of how do build something that’s beautiful and delightful for people to watch. Then how do I make it so that every single person who’s, for example, working at Pixar can do it scalably and do it in a way that you can actually create a beautiful movie in X year’s time. And so that’s the same way we think about Webflow which is the value of really getting people to be able to create something that is powerful and ultimately what they’re looking to do. And so the way we think about the user value is we want to give people the building blocks. And here’s an example of some of the building blocks we’ve had in the past. Just illustrated like as an analogy. And you take these building blocks and you actually put them together and create whatever it is that you are looking to do.
Jiaona Zhang: I need something really custom on the UI side and then I need to add our data layer. I need to add some stuff around the CMS. I need to add a storefront. All of these different things I need to add in order to bring my idea to life, we’re giving you the tools to do that. And when you anchor on user value, you can actually see where that can go. You can think of a world where… Today you can build these particular structures, but what if in the future you can actually build a house and a really elaborate house at that.
Jiaona Zhang: If that’s our anchoring around is the user value that we want to generate for our users to be able to go from literally having to code, to being able to put things together and build some of these like really nifty- like planes and trains. Then one day to being able to build everything up to something like this house, this beautiful tailored, polished house. Everything up to something like this house, this beautiful tailored Polish house. If that’s what we believe in, and that’s the user value, then that is really our guiding principle, as opposed to chasing down features with competitors that might ultimately not be the thing we want to benchmark against. It usually isn’t a thing one at benchmark against, because competing against again, for example, WordPress is not going to get us the type of innovation and type of product unlock that we want, as opposed to saying, “Hey, if we want to be able to enable people build something like this, this beautiful house, what would we need to do enable to… in order to enable that?”
Jiaona Zhang: All right, lesson four, which is you don’t have to do it yourself. And I think this is a big lesson for a lot of companies where they have a very ambitious mission and vision, and you look at yourself and you’re like, “Hey, we’re a startup. How are we going to achieve that?” The answer is, you focus on a very critical core and then extending it and allowing your community help you get there. And so we really think about this in terms of an ecosystem.
Jiaona Zhang: What are the native capabilities that are most important to Webflow? And then how do we actually partner, whether it’s with other companies or with a whole community of developers to enable that long tail of use cases. And what’s really interesting, and this actually is almost bringing up lesson three in sharp contrast again, is when you do this, when you really think about the user value first, you then automatically unlock the business value. And so in this case, when you think about the user value of, hey, in order to get that beautiful house to be something that people can build we need to have a partnership with our entire community. That’s user value. You unlock the business value naturally, which is in this case, when you have a community, you really create this wonderful moat against your product, where it’s a lot harder to displace you because so much of your community has these integrations and are deeply embedded in what you provide. And so it actually results in business value naturally when you first focus on user value.
Jiaona Zhang: The last lesson is to design your product strategy into your organization. This is the best way to bring your strategy to life and ensure that you are executing on it. The reason for this is because as you grow as a company, even if you’re beyond just a very small group of people that can just quickly slack each other at all times, it’s really difficult for anyone outside the people working closest to the problem to really understand the best way to solve that problem. So when you design your org in a way that reflects your product strategy, that reflects the type of investments that you want to make in the user value that you want to unlock, you actually empower the people who are working closest to the problem and on the product to make the right decisions for you.
Jiaona Zhang: Here at Webflow, we’ve really mapped our engineering product and design structure to the things that we really believe we need to unlock. For example, you’ll see on here capabilities. How do we build the best first party capabilities for our creators? Then how do we also unlock this ecosystem to extend those use cases? How do we then make sure that anyone working on our community, or sorry, working with our product, they are able to be successful, whether they’re collaborating with each other or they’re going into larger and larger companies that need very… Like much more specific workflows? And then from a growth perspective, end-to-end, segment-by-segment thinking about that life cycle. And then last, but definitely not least, there are the very important foundational investments, infrastructure investments that we need to make to make sure that everything is able to come to life, and that these things are interoperable and connected.
Jiaona Zhang: All right. I know I am pushing on my time. With that, thank you so much for listening. Those were the five lessons that I personally learned around product strategy that I hold near and dear to my heart, and hopefully that can be helpful to your respective companies.
Angie Chang: Thank you, JZ. That was really an excellent product strategy talk. Thank you so much for sharing. I’m going to just really quickly remind everyone that we are taking questions for the speakers in the Q&A. So if you go below, there’s a little Q&A button that you should be seeing, and you can ask your question there, or you can ask it in the chat, and we’ll copy it over.
Angie Chang: Olena is a tech lead and staff software engineer at Webflow, and she loves react function programming and non-fiction books, and is currently focusing on creating value between engineering and product. Welcome Olena.
Olena Sovyn: Hi, I am Olena. I’m very happy to be, to be here today, and as an engineer, I would like to talk a little bit about how we can make code reviews even better experience for everyone. A little bit about myself before we start. So I’m Ukrainian who lives currently in London. For last nine years, I am working in software industry, and half of the time I am with Webflow. Currently I am a tech lead and staff software engineer at Webflow, and during my last four and a half years, I did more than a thousand blue requests and performed more than a thousand code reviews.
Olena Sovyn: Let’s get back to our topic for today. Let’s talk a little bit what we can do better in our code reviewers. First of all, why I choose actually to talk about code reviews? Why doing bad jobs with code reviews actually matter so much. I choose to talk today about this because I believe this is a unique opportunity as it is a win-win situation for a company, for you, and for your teammates.
Olena Sovyn: When we have code reviews, we have that unique process that can empower both your company, your teammates, and yourself, for you to develop your career, and for your teammates to develop theirs, and at the same time to company to sustainably grow. So typical cycle for code request, look like something like this. Request is ready for a code review, then code review is happening. And then you might think that today at my cloud will be concentrated mostly on this code review, but actually interesting thing with code review can start even before code review itself. And one of the things can be self review.
Olena Sovyn: What is self review? Self review is one full request also is going to his own change, his or her or them, on changes and leaving useful comments for code review body. For example, what these comments can be about. They can provide information why these changes were added to the code base, or they can provide information what specifically code review body should look for the most important part of the change.
Olena Sovyn: What else can happen before the code review and is happening actually? Every time when we are entering code review process? We are choosing code review body, and let’s look how typically this process look like. For example, we have a team with three people, Rose, Mark, and Boris. Rose is very experienced engineer. She is with a company for a very long time. Mark is with a company also for a long time, but he only recently switched to become an engineer. And Boris just joined a few weeks ago, but have been in the industry for a very long time.
Olena Sovyn: Whom would you choose to be your code review body? Looks like Rose is an obvious choice, but actually if you look wider on the code review process, we might want to choose Mark or Boris. Why? Because code review can be not always a place where other engineers provide. You feel bad, but this can be also a place where other engineers can learn from you and from the changes that you introduced to the code base. And if, for example, code review body would be someone like Boris, they can bring fresh perspective on the changes that you introduce into the code base.
Olena Sovyn: You can specifically enforce and empower them to see code review as aligning process, by reaching to them directly and asking them to specifically ask your questions in the code reviews.
Olena Sovyn: Use code reviews as a way to share a general and domain specific knowledge. So we talked a little bit about choosing code review body. What is happening next? I’m calling a magic moment in code review process. What is happening next? Next is actually code review body reading code for the first time. Why I’m calling this a magic moment? Be with me and listen carefully.
Olena Sovyn: Reading this code for the first time is something that you never will be able to do again. You can read this code for the second time, for the third time, for like end time, but never for the first time. Why is this such a unique opportunity and such a unique signal? Because this is a way where you can really evaluate. Is this code readable? Is this code obvious? Will be it easy to work with this code? And my advice for you, how to better capture this signal of following.
Olena Sovyn: How to read code for the first time. Take notes. If you are doing code reviews with GitHub, you actually can make a draft of the comments in the code review process. You don’t need to share them all in code review you when you submitted, but you can capture this your first thoughts when you first saw this code. And at this moment, what I am advising to pay attention to. Ask yourself a question. How easy code is to understand, do all variables make sense? Does code organization make sense? Is it obvious actually what code is doing? And remember that this first impression is your invaluable signal.
Olena Sovyn: After our first read, let’s deep dive in code review process itself. In many cases, code review process might end up being like request for change. Or if everything was straightforward, this can be like, look good to me and look good to marriage, but actually code review can be a great about sharing feedback, about changes that one engineer want to introduce to the code base, share this structure from other engineers. This feedback can be like anything. It can be that code review body lines today. Something that they found useful, something that something surprise them. How to make this sharing feedback on all the ways. This sharing of difference in the code review process be good is to talk from the place of respect.
Olena Sovyn: When I’m code reviewing changes, I trust it’s a person that did these changes did their best, and no matter where they are in their engineering journey, are they junior? Have they been in the in industry for 30 years? Have they just joined the company? Or been with the company for five years?
Olena Sovyn: I believe they did their best and with best intentions to also to come up all my, this understanding in the code reviews. What I try to do is if I’m not sure about anything, any change that happened in the changes I ask rather than state. When I review changes, I am trying to remember that I’m not reviewing a person. I’m reviewing changes. So I try to avoid using you word anywhere in my code review feedback. And also I’m trying to be as specific as possible.
Olena Sovyn: Let’s concentrate on this last point a little bit more. So what does it mean to be as specific as possible? Let’s look at this one example of the code review comment. It’s not the best approach to do this calculation. Yes, it is a feedback, but how can it be better? Maybe something like this? Why the second one is better than the first one? Because it’s contained why changes are needed as well as it is generous with example. The one blue request author will be seeing such code review comment. They will be easy. It’ll be easier for them to act on it.
Olena Sovyn: Make sure that your comments include everything that the blue request author might need. We talked a little bit about like that we need to include why we request some changes, examples, but there is one more thing that we would need to include in the code review comments. For example, be as specific as possible. Let’s look at another example. So this is an example of a code review comment. We have three version of this pattern in our code base now. We should have only one, okay. This is a feedback and it is information, but it is unclear and unspecified in this code review comment is what actually code request also should do business information. So make sure that in your code review comments, it is clear what changes are expected to happen after the code review was submitted.
Olena Sovyn: You can use, for example, for this emoji system. Well, by one emoji you can code changes that are requested before a request will be good to match. With other emoji you can mark with just a suggestion. And with third one with appreciation. This case remember two things. First, your teammates should understand what each emoji means. And second one is that this emoji can’t be only color coded because you want the system to be accessible.
Olena Sovyn: Also make sure that they have different shapes. And also remember to bring some positivity and praise in your code review feedback. It can be in the form of…
Olena Sovyn: One of the tips that one of the engineering manager in the Webflow that is really nice to place some humor in the general code review feedback. Like here is a memes that in some way is connected to the changes that was request also introduced.
Olena Sovyn: After the deep dive, what happened next is end of the code review. What can we do at the end of the code review? Already mentioned that we can in place here, some positivity, some praise, but what else can we do here? I think like in the end of the code review, it might be good also from time to times to connect full request also to the bigger picture, to the big aim, to which the changes have contributed. For example, let’s compare, let’s see this code review summary.
Olena Sovyn: This is really great explanatory documentation. It is a good, positive feedback, but how much better is this one? This is really great explanatory documentation. It’ll be such much easier with each to onboard new engineers in this code review comment. We are connecting changes with a bigger purpose of this change, but from these changes, it’ll be not easy to onboard.
Olena Sovyn: I today talked a little bit about what hidden gems I found in the code review processes during my times at Webflow, but I’m more than sure that between you are many skillful engineers and you also know much more hidden gems in the code review. Please share them in the chat, and I want you to thank you.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you so much. That was just absolutely insightful and wonderful. Let’s see real quick if there are any questions for any for you. I think there are a few that you can take on the chat. Let’s move on to the next speaker.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: The next speaker is Siobhan. Siobhan is the lead data engineer at Webflow. Getting to work with engineers, scientists, analyst, and everyone else who will talk data with her. That’s awesome. She’s been a teacher, a mentor, and a workplace culture, plus mental health advocate. Some tech topics she loves are functional programming, so less and coding, Fred Brooks on architecture. Her dream is to one day, be in the Kafka Four Comma Club. Welcome.
Siobhan Sabino: Thank you. Let me share my screen. I’m going to mix it up. I’m not going to ask if everyone can see my slides. I’m just going to hope for the best here. In this presentation, we’re going to talk about data engineering. To give you a little bit of background, I am a data engineer. We will talk about what that means. I’m Jersey born and raised. It is very late for me here. Apologies if I yawn.
Siobhan Sabino: I know here is where I would typically put a picture of me, but since we can all see me, here is a picture of my nephew Brody instead, because he has a very handsome cat. What we’re going to be doing and talking about the data engineering secrets is first we’ll go through my journey to become a data engineer, what the job entails, what I’ve learned about it, the glory or lack thereof in the job, the whys of being a data engineer, some of our secrets so you can take them and use them, and then the final slide to wrap it all up. The journey…
Siobhan Sabino: All data engineers tend to have very different ways we came to this job. So my journey is that out of college, with my CS degree, I got my first job in data warehousing and ETL. These are not flashy technologies, but they’re very stable things, very common in finance and healthcare, very well established.
Siobhan Sabino: From there, I moved on to a job where for whatever reason, technology was picked by our manager, seeing stuff on hacker news and going, that seems fun. For some reason, that was how our office picked tools like Kafka and Avro, and they needed an engineer who would be able to feel comfortable working with those. And my options were to learn those or learn JavaScript. And I didn’t want to learn JavaScript.
Siobhan Sabino: I learned those things would put me on this trajectory to becoming a data engineer where I finally moved into a job where I oversaw systems that had more than 2 billion messages a week coming through terabytes of data. And now I’m here at Webflow giving this presentation to you.
Siobhan Sabino: What does the job entail? If you ask a data engineer, what data engineering is, I think this subreddit from data engineering community really sums it up. Where the question was, tell you a data engineer that telling your data engineer and the community you voted the top answer to be, “I have no idea what my job actually is,” which does sum it up immensely.
Siobhan Sabino: If it’s hard to say what a data engineer is, let me sort of show you what a data engineer does to give you an idea of what those might entail. A day in my job might look something like this. I come in nice and early, ready for the day. Overnight, the transformer failed. Why? None of the 35 error we expected or why it failed. So we have to figure that out. No worries. Then someone shows up to say, but the numbers look wrong. I have to figure out, does that mean we’re missing data? Is there a bug upstream? Is there a bug downstream? Or have we accurately reflected what are, unfortunately, just numbers today?
Siobhan Sabino: Then it gets to about 9 o’clock. This is the point where someone tells me the iOS app has stopped sending events. It did that a couple weeks ago. No one noticed. And in looking into this, we realized the Android app, it’s sending events. All of them are wrong. No one knows why this is happening or how to fix it. There isn’t really a statement or call to action there. You just got to figure it out yourself.
Siobhan Sabino: About 10, 10:30, legal asked me to describe about 75 terabytes worth of data by the end of the day. Ironically, this will be the easiest thing I tackle in my day. Right before lunch, find out another team’s going to do a very risky production deployment, because that’s always fun. It might damage our data. We have a big report running the next day. I have three minutes to figure it out. Typical. Then when I finally get to lunch, the new manager tells me they’re excited to hear about my small data platform, which makes me cry on the inside.
Siobhan Sabino: After lunch is when the Postgres incident happens because we all know that’s when database incidents happen. My job doesn’t actually involve Postgres, but as someone who spends a lot of time thinking about databases, pitch in to help. As that wraps up finance of course hits me up on Slack to know why data systems are expensive. This week it’s about why moving billions of messages costs money, because last week it was about why storing terabytes of data costs money.
Siobhan Sabino: At this point, one of the data scientists asked me to explain what a container is. This will be the hardest thing I have to do. And I will hand them off to the junior engineer who is much better qualified to explaining this than I am. At that point, my manager is unfortunately told he gets to tell me that I don’t get to send metrics out for these systems because these are big systems and they’re expensive to monitor. We then get in an argument. I tell him that when someone gets paid, they’re not going to know what’s happening. He says, “We’re going to have to run that risk.” The joke will be on him. He will get paged on in the middle of the night, and I be asleep and not able to help him.
Siobhan Sabino: And at that point, there’s 17 minutes left in my day. So, that’s what being a data engineer is like. The sort of problems you face as a data engineer are not just the immediate, something’s on fire. It’s thinking about this long-term design and maintenance systems that will live for years. I inherited a Kafka cluster so old that the people who made Kafka couldn’t believe we were still running it. I don’t like that achievement. We should not have hit that. We have streaming systems now, which are exciting, but they’re also overwhelming. Because that means lots of things are happening at once, which is a different can of worms than batch problems, because there, you don’t know how you messed up for several hours or possibly days.
Siobhan Sabino: Pick your poison. There is data everywhere. It’s in databases. It’s in spreadsheets, it’s in people’s heads. None of it has schema. All of it looks slightly different from the other, because it’d be too easy if the field state always meant either New York or active and not both of them at the same time.
Siobhan Sabino: People also want answers, but they don’t know what the questions are, and you got to figure that out, which is exciting, but the main sort of problem as a data engineer I face is these problems of negative engineering. Writing defensive code, paying down tech debt, refactoring, updating, upgrading, as opposed to positive engineering, which is what we tend to think of, which is I write code for a new feature. It goes off and it’s a great time, which leads to the glory or lack thereof in data engineering.
Siobhan Sabino: When no one knows what you stop from happening, no one knows what you’re doing, right? So if all of your work is negative engineering, you’re not shifting new features. You’re not shipping new services. You don’t really have updates for the rest of the company to understand, and you tell them everything’s very niche and backend and people sort of nod, but they don’t understand what you’re talking about because you can’t show people very easily. Here’s the incidents that didn’t happen because we made the system resilient and self-healing. Here’s the data that was not lost. There was no loss of data or trust because we’ve been working on the tech debt, and the bugs, and the monitoring people can’t see how much work you’ve removed from their plate by really thinking about how can I make this as easy as pie.
Siobhan Sabino: …plate, by really thinking about how can I make this as easy as possible for engineers or scientists or analysts. When you’re doing your job, you’re invisible and the moment something fails, that’s when that’s all anyone can see and suddenly everyone just wants to know, what did you do and when are you going to fix it?
Siobhan Sabino: It might be obvious by now why a company would want a data engineer. When you have questions, like how do we get the data to answer our questions? How do we move it fast enough? How do we store it? How are we in compliance? How do we make sure that people who need it can use it. Those are the sorts of things a data engineer thinks about and can help you answer. But at the same time, why would someone become a data engineer?
Siobhan Sabino: Because you’re probably sitting at home thinking, Siobhan, you’re not really selling me on this and I get that.
Siobhan Sabino: If what your favorite part of being an engineer is, is producing new features or making visible work that end users can see and use, this probably isn’t for you and that’s okay. I don’t know how front-end engineers like Olena do it, I would not have the patience for it but I appreciate the apps and websites that are built.
Siobhan Sabino: What I like though – and what you might like – is when you have these really hard problems that have no easy or obvious solution. When you think at massive scales of time and space, this is a system that will live for at least five years and how many terabytes of data it will process monthly, weekly. When you’re exposed to every bit of technology in engineering.
Siobhan Sabino: I’ve made an Android pull request. I’ve never used an Android device in my life but I made an Android pull request. I’ve had to have the inner parts of Objective-C explained to me. There is no reason I could have been there but I’ve gotten to work with it because if your favorite part of engineering is getting to help others to do their job, then maybe you’d like being a data engineer.
Siobhan Sabino: I promised you in this presentation, I’d give you secrets. Here are the secrets. This is going to be a crash course, some tools, some ideas that you might need or use or want to look into. That way there is no gatekeeping, no one can make you feel like you don’t belong. These are the magic words to know, that way you can get involved.
Siobhan Sabino: When we talk about data, data is the raw representation of a thing. Information is the value extracted from data. People will often tell you that they want data, what they really want is value from that data.
Siobhan Sabino: A bounded data set is finite which is what we traditionally face. Infinite sets though, those unbounded data sets of constantly growing data, that’s what we’re faced with now in the world.
Siobhan Sabino: A data warehouse is a database that’s been specifically designed to hold all your data for analytical purposes. It’s expensive because it does its job. If it costs half a million dollars a year to run but it lets you make at least $2 million in decisions, it’s paid for itself.
Siobhan Sabino: On the other hand, the data lake is an application that has an actual purpose. Don’t worry about it, that’s not entry level. You will hear lots about data lakes because vendors love selling them to people and many data lakes go awry so often, that has a name, a data swamp. That’s not a helpful term to know but I just think it’s very pleasing.
Siobhan Sabino: What is probably more of interest to you is a data vault, a place where you can keep a copy of all of your data just in case someone deletes the production database, you find a bug and you want to re-run the code.
Siobhan Sabino: When you act on data, a batch engine is a way to process a bounded data set. A streaming engine is processing an unbounded data set. Just because one is newer, does not mean it’s better. They’re both tools that can be used correctly for the right problem.
Siobhan Sabino: ETL is the idea of extracting data from a source, transforming it and then loading it to its destination. This is not a new idea, it’s been around for decades and even if you don’t design your systems to reflect those steps, it’s a great logical way of thinking about acting on data.
Siobhan Sabino: Data cleansing is, heck grating to do but it’s super important. If you want to have opinions about data, start cleansing that data, you will have opinions really fast.
Siobhan Sabino: Data lineage tells you where your data’s been and who’s used it. That’s great for legal and compliance reasons, it’s great for debugging and for making live diagrams of what does the system look like.
Siobhan Sabino: Data tests compliment your code tests so that you know that things are right. This is not an area where the industry really has good examples of the way with code tests, we could talk about a meaningful unit test, integration tests, test driven development, we don’t really have that for data tests. So just do your best and know that, that’s all we can ask of you.
Siobhan Sabino: When you talk about data systems, a change data capture system pushes the events that happen inside of a database out to other systems so they know about it. If you want a CDC, you probably want one going to an append-only log.
Siobhan Sabino: A data pipeline allows large volumes of data to move around freely and quickly. It allows systems to come and go either producing data or consuming data without really needing to worry about each other, they don’t have to be the same language, they don’t have to share the same paradigm. If you want a data pipeline, you probably want to build one around an append-only log.
Siobhan Sabino: If you’re looking into an event driven architecture, you might think you want a message queue or a publish/subscribe system. In reality, you probably want an append-only log. I don’t know if you could tell but I like append-only logs which is great for you because I have a suggestion for one, Kafka.
Siobhan Sabino: Kafka is a great append-only log that can really scale. It’s written in Scala and Java, it has lots of support for non-JVM languages. So, if your backend is Node.js and Python, you’ll work great but for data engineering, JVM, especially Java and Scala are going to be the main languages you’re working with.
Siobhan Sabino: To go with Kafka, I’d suggest the library Avro. This allows you to find schemas about your data, part of that data cleansing and understanding what your data looks like. It also works beautifully with a system called Schema Registry. As this name suggests, it lets you register schemas there so you can see what they all are. That’s why answering a legal request about what terabytes of data looks like is easy. You just go tell Schema Registry, explain everything to me and then you send that to lawyers in a spreadsheet and it makes them happy.
Siobhan Sabino: Functional programming is a paradigm that works really well with data system because it lets you compose together these very small pieces that you can test and feel really confident about and then build them up for each use case.
Siobhan Sabino: Scala and functional programming, both get a bad rap. People will tell you they’re really hard to learn. The official language book for Scala does a really good job covering the basics of functional programming because a lot of people do a lot of crazy things, they get all over the place. Don’t worry about that. We’re looking for basic fundamentals here.
Siobhan Sabino: If you’re looking for setting up cloud storage, use your cloud-of-choice’s storage system for cold storage for that data vault. For the warehouse, just use what your cloud offers. So if you’re in AWS, for example, put your data vault in S3 and Glacier. If you want a warehouse, put it in Redshift. There’s vendors selling other products but your cloud-of-choice’s options, those are going to be super easy and they’re actually going to work really well.
Siobhan Sabino: To wrap this all up, this is my website and email. If you ever need me, if you’re a data engineer and you need someone to talk to or if you’re just having an absolutely terrible day and you want to talk to somebody, that’s my email. So long as you’ve spelt my name right, you hit me up.
Siobhan Sabino: Being a data engineer can be extremely thankless job but it’s still an incredible feeling to get to help others and see what they can do because you were there to support them right?
Siobhan Sabino: In the chart JZ showed, I work in the infrastructure pillar. I’m way at the bottom and I love that. Even if you don’t want to be a data engineer, use our tools and secrets but also if you work with data engineers, maybe be kind to them, they’re probably having a rough day and would appreciate it.
Siobhan Sabino: Again, even if you don’t want to be a data engineer, something like Kafka, that’s a massive ecosystem, it has lots of great community support, lots of great tools and articles. Maybe it’ll give you an idea for something you can do, just another tool in your toolbox for how to solve the problems you are working on.
Siobhan Sabino: Functional programming or Scala, like I said, people give them a bad rap. They’re not that hard and as a data engineer, they’re going to be your friends. Even if you don’t need to move terabytes of data or millions or billions of messages a week, you probably still work with data, so maybe figuring out what it is data engineers would suggest might make your job easier.
Siobhan Sabino:Because I had a manager who believed all presentations should end with a call to action, my call to action is to tweet my sister, that Brody is a handsome cat. Don’t worry about her, she’s in the chat. So she knows I’m doing this. And that is my presentation. Thank you.
Angie Chang: Thank you, Siobhan for that excellent talk on data engineering and for hanging out with us from the East Coast. So, our last speaker is Katie. If you have any questions at all, please do add them to the Q&A in Zoom or ask it in the chat and Arquay will be asking these questions to our speakers after Katie’s talk.
Angie Chang: I’ll do a quick intro to Katie. She is a software engineer on the Collaboration Team at Webflow and she co-leads the Asians at Webflow Affinity Group. Previously she founded and ran a tech meetup in Portland, focused on career development for people who are newer to tech. She’s passionate about helping people from underrepresented backgrounds get involved in tech and creating safe spaces for them to feel welcome. So welcome, Katie.
Katie Fujihara: Hello. I’m going to go ahead and share my screen, one second. Are you able to see that?
Angie Chang: Yes.
Katie Fujihara: Okay, perfect. Hello! Hi everyone, my name is Katie Fujihara. Today I’ll be giving a talk on how to be your biggest fan, a guide on how to self advocate. Just a little TLDR of who I am. Yes, I am Katie, said that already.
Katie Fujihara: I come from a non-traditional background, majored in marketing and Japanese, never thought I’d be a software engineer. In 2018, I attended a coding bootcamp and co-founded and ran a local tech meetup in Portland called Future Leaders in Tech.
Katie Fujihara: In 2019, I joined Webflow as an apprentice software engineer and currently I am a software engineer too, still at Webflow. That’s my baby dog Yochi who is quarantined right now so he doesn’t bark while I’m giving this talk.
Katie Fujihara: Just a little quick agenda breakdown – what we’re going to be talking about today, should be a fairly short presentation. First up, will be Glue work versus Glamour work and how that relates to unconscious bias. Next, will be personal concerns and challenges when it comes to promotions. And the last bit will be the meat of the presentation which is tips on how to advocate for yourself.
Katie Fujihara: First off, let’s go over glue work versus glamour work. You’ll notice that on the slides in the bottom corner, some of them will have these QR codes. If any of these particular topics interest you, feel free to hold your phone up or your camera up to the QR code and scan that, it’ll take you directly to the source of work I got all of this information from.
Katie Fujihara: What is glue work? According to Tanya Reilly, glue work is, “the less glamorous and often less-promotable work that needs to happen to make a company successful.” So examples of glue work can include writing docs, setting up team meetings, improving team process, establishing coding standards, mentoring and coaching, improving new member onboarding.
Katie Fujihara: What is glamour work? So, examples of glamour work on the other hand are what sounds like more glamorous, writing code, and shipping features. As software engineers, this type of work is often valued more than glue work because it signals technical competency. A poor manager may determine promotions and rewards based off of the false equivalence that more code written automatically means a stronger, more impactful engineer, which we know is not always the case.
Katie Fujihara: Next, I’m going to be going over a bit of the importance of glue work versus glamour work. A national study conducted by the Center for WorkLife Law and the Society of Women Engineers surveyed over 3000 engineers. It showed that women were 29% more likely than white men to report doing more office housework, and for the sake of this talk, we’ll call it glue work, than their colleagues.
Katie Fujihara: Prescriptive stereotypes show that women of color are under the most social pressure to volunteer for glue work and the unequal distribution of glue work and glamour work between women and men is evident when you see that men are more likely to be promoted to executive positions. This is an indicator of how much more impact glamour work has when it comes to promotions.
Katie Fujihara: A little bit about my experience with all of this. I’ve been at Webflow for two years now and in that time I’ve gotten two promotions, but I’ve also cycled through four different managers in that time. I’ve also found myself doing quite a bit of glue work and was nervous about it being invisible. As many of you who have worked in the startup world know, organizational change and uncertainty is common among early stage startups and startups going through hyper-growth.
Katie Fujihara: Therefore, it is important to learn how to navigate these spaces and to track your own personal growth. During all of this uncertainty and changes and not wanting my career to get stunted, I had these four major questions on my mind.
Katie Fujihara: How do I ensure my career does not stagnate? How do I ensure that my new manager understands my impact? How do I make the glue work I do visible? And how do I ensure organizational changes do not affect my promotion timeline?
Katie Fujihara: My solution, pretty simple, make all the work I do, glue work included, as visible as possible and to advocate for myself. Next up the meat of this presentation, tips on how to advocate for yourself or tips that I find helped me in getting promoted.
Katie Fujihara: A quick reminder, you can have good peers and a good manager but at the end of the day, you need to be your biggest advocate, your biggest fan.
Katie Fujihara: My first little tip would be to track your progress and wins. Seems pretty obvious but it needs to be stated. I would recommend creating a progress document that you update a regular cadence, whether that’s monthly, bi-weekly, whatever it takes for you to remember to do it, that’s the cadence for you.
Katie Fujihara: If you know what is required to get to the next level, organize your progress doc in a way that highlights how you are satisfying these requirements. Link to PRs, Slack conversations, code reviews, screenshots of public or private praise, anything that can serve as evidence of your impact.
Katie Fujihara: Lastly, share this doc with your managers. If you move managers, bring this doc with you and show it to your new one, that way they can have all the context of work that you’ve done.
Katie Fujihara: I have two examples below of how you could structure your progress doc. For example #1, I have it broken down in six month increments, so January to June, July to December and I’ll usually put bullet points of the things that I’ve done, the contributions and I’ll also link or take screenshots of Slack conversations, PRs, things that serve as evidence that support the contributions that are the things that I’m saying I contributed to in the progress doc. For example #2, this is if it’s structured by knowing the requirements to get promoted already.
Katie Fujihara: Say the requirements are, must write documentation, must write unit tests and provide thoughtful feedback and code reviews. The way I would organize my progress doc would be to have each of these requirements as the headers of each section and then put the contributions underneath each section that support this. That way, you have all of the proof you need to show that you’re operating at that next level.
Katie Fujihara: Another tip is to not lose promotion traction during manager handoffs. If you. #1, know you are close to being promoted and, #2, know you will be changing managers soon, push for your current manager to start the promotion process because there are so many unknowns when getting a new manager.
Katie Fujihara: I actually had to do this when I was going from apprentice software engineer to junior software engineer because I found out I was getting a new manager. Usually the amount of time they want you to be an apprentice is six months but I was at about my four month mark and I was worried that when I switched managers, my new manager wouldn’t have all the context that my current manager did. I really, really pushed for him to start that and luckily he did. I was able to transition before I got that new manager.
Katie Fujihara: The reason you want to do this is because your new manager will not have as much context as your current manager. They may not be as helpful when it comes to advocating for you and they maybe preoccupied with other things as they are onboarding.
Katie Fujihara: Consider that your new manager might be onboarding to your team or onboarding to your company, they have a lot on their plate. I don’t know if any of you are managers, but I’ve heard if you’re a manager, you have just a ton, a ton of things to do that most people don’t ever see.
Katie Fujihara: As a report, do your due diligence to get those things started and to advocate for yourself because who knows your promotion might be the bottom of their priority list at this time. Start it before if you can.
Katie Fujihara: Another piece of advice would be to push for 1:1:1s during manager handoffs. As Lara Hogan states, “Your new manager might not be familiar with all that you’ve done already, which could slow your career momentum.”
Katie Fujihara: What exactly are 1:1:1s? It’s when you, your current manager and your new manager all sit down and go over your previous work, strengths and areas for improvement. It’s a time for everyone to get aligned on your goals. This is a good time for everyone to get context around everything and your new manager to understand exactly your impact. I found these really helpful in the past.
Katie Fujihara: Last but definitely not least, make your work as visible as possible, be as loud as you can about wins, be transparent about what you’re working on.
Katie Fujihara: This could be through updating your Slack status, we could be like, “Oh, I’m working on a bug fix” or something along those lines, just so people know what you’re doing.
Katie Fujihara:Be transparent in stand-ups, just make sure everyone knows what you’re working on, don’t undersell anything that you’re doing and ask questions and be open about any blockers that you’re facing. You don’t need to suffer in silence if you are stuck on something.
Katie Fujihara: Find quantitative ways to measure the impact of your work on a business level. Talk to your product managers or talk to your engineering managers about how what you worked on is performing, so you can get those hard numbers that you can use to your advantage when it’s time for a promotion.
Katie Fujihara: Lastly, talk to teammates and mentors about your progress. The more they know about your work, the more they can help advocate for you when the time comes for a promotion.
Katie Fujihara: A little quick summary, I told you this talk was going to be quite short. You have to be your biggest advocate, track your progress and wins in a progress doc, try to kick off a promotion process before a manager handoff if you’re able to, push for those 1:1:1s and make your work as visible as possible.
Katie Fujihara: Thank you. Twitter is @KatieFujihara if you want to keep in touch or LinkedIn, whatever works for you but that is all I have for you today. Thanks for listening.
Arquay Harris: Once everyone joins, I’m going to lead into some Q&A. We actually have a question come through and since it’s a question that could apply for all of us, maybe I’ll just sort of facilitate for a couple of us to answer it.
Watch the Webflow Girl Geek Dinner Panel Discussion with Arquay Harris (Webflow VP of Engineering), Siobhan Sabino (Webflow Lead Data Engineer), Jiaona Zhang (Webflow VP of Product Management), Katie Fujihara (Webflow Software Engineer) and Olena Sovyn (Webflow Staff Software Engineer).
Arquay Harris: I’ll start with you, JZ. The question is, how did each speaker find their way to their current role at Webflow? The tactical stories help us understand if everyone applied got recruited, how they got to do something new, i.e. if their resume didn’t show the same job title. Effectively, what was your journey to Webflow?
Jiaona Zhang: Sure, happy I started. I joined Webflow at this point about a year and a half ago. I joined Webflow actually coming from WeWork. WeWork was definitely a very interesting journey. I joined after I left four years of Airbnb and what was really attractive about it was to be able to start in the tech organization from scratch in a place that didn’t exist.
Jiaona Zhang: That company did go through a lot, that was very unexpected. After hyper-growth for six months, I was really thinking about restructuring the team in the latter six and so when I was leaving WeWork, I really thought about what I wanted to do next. I actually had the time to think about it because I was pre-planning and working with my team to make sure I was landing in a really good place. I knew that I wasn’t going to be staying with the team long term.
Jiaona Zhang: I thought about smaller companies, I thought about larger companies and what really drew me to Webflow was a couple things. One, I think when you have… Personally for me, when I had the opportunity to lead all of product, was a very different experience than what I’ve done before which was large organizations but not necessarily the entirety of the product team and there’s something that I was really excited about to do that at Webflow.
Jiaona Zhang: The other thing is, why Webflow? There are other companies out there but I think it’s so rare to find these two things, the first one is a mission and a product that just gets me fired up every single day.
Jiaona Zhang: We talked about this before, which is getting to help the world be able to create something that is in 1% of the world today, which is right access to the web, being able to democratize that and make sure that everyone has access to it. I think that’s something that a lot of us here, it really resonates with. I talked about this earlier, where I’m not technical, that wasn’t my background and being able to build a tool that everyone can create, regardless of their… Do you have a CS degree? Do you have a coding background? That’s just something that really draws me.
Jiaona Zhang: The other piece is the people. I truly think that… I’ll say this as a product leader, the product leader and the CEO needs to have a very, very strong relationship and I can’t think of another person who is both a combination of the best chief vision officer and the kindest human but that combination is just so rare and finding both of those things in Vlad is something that was really appealing.
Jiaona Zhang: I, again, talked to a lot of different founders and it’s a really, like a one in a million opportunity to get to work with Vlad to bring that vision to life. Then the team, the team here is just so kind. Our mission statement is not just, this is a thing we want to accomplish but these are the things that we want to accomplish with the people here together. So, again, that is just very rare and that’s how I made my way to Webflow.
Arquay Harris: Great. Although JZ, it’s a little bit hurtful because I thought you told me that the most important relationship is between the VP of product and VP of Eng. I don’t know, this is all just, this is all…
Jiaona Zhang: You weren’t there when I joined.
Arquay Harris: Hurtful.
Jiaona Zhang: Now, Vlad has been replaced by Arquay.
Arquay Harris: That rings hollow. I don’t know. I’m actually going to go second because it’s a good segue into why I joined the company which is definitely the people. Every single person that I talked to… Vlad is maybe the nicest human ever. Everybody read the Steve Job’s book, so you get these kind of megalomaniac CEOs or founders of companies and it’s a little scary out there and he’s definitely nothing like that, has a really great vision.
Arquay Harris: Every single person that I met, I met Brian, I met some of the other people at the company and then, honestly, JZ, one of the things that really struck me, especially considering this demographic, Girl Geek Dinner, is I have literally racked my brain and in over 20 years of experience, I cannot think of another company where both the VP of product and the VP of Eng. are women of color.
Arquay Harris: If someone in chat can give me another example, I thought about it and we are not diversity hires or something like that. We are just women who are out in the world doing our jobs but that is something interesting that you don’t see every day and I think it’s just JZ’s vision and the way she could articulate, not just what we’re doing today but what we’re doing in the future and how she also values that part.Today, what we’re doing in the future and how she also values that partnership between product and engine design, and then just generally every person. I’m coming in…
Arquay Harris: I’ve only been at Webflow for about six months and I’m coming in, I’m kind of doing this operational Excel and stuff and no one is licking all the cookies being like, “No, this is the way you do it.” They’re like, “Great. That sounds awesome! You have a great idea. Let’s try it.” You know, everyone’s amenable to change and they know that we’re here and we are going to have to do different things to get us to a different point.
Arquay Harris: And it’s just a really like amazing place to be. Speaking of that, like maybe we transition to Olena. I’m curious about you ’cause it’s very, very late for you, so I’ll let you go and see what your answer is.
Olena Sovyn: I joined Webflow four and a half years ago when it was like a company of 40 people. And for me it was a company where I was able to solve very difficult challenges while still being on the front-end part of the application. It was very rare for me and also of all people that I met through my interview process were just awesome. As a first retreat, I just understood that these people are my people because they were so kind, so human, so humble, at the same time, so smart and so visionary, focused on our mission. It was just awesome.
Arquay Harris: I’m on mute, but what about you, Katie?
Katie Fujihara: I came to Webflow. Yeah, two and a half years ago actually through… Vlad found me on Twitter, but it was a, you know, I think that when I first joined Webflow, I was in a point of my career, I didn’t have a tech career yet, like I was looking for my first role. And it was at that point where I was just looking for someone to take a chance on me. I know a lot of people who are juniors in their engineering career, this resonates with you, where you just want someone to believe that you can do it ’cause you know, you can do it.
Katie Fujihara: It’s just you need to sell yourself. And luckily for me, I was given that opportunity at Webflow and you know, like everyone else was saying, what really sold me on the company was meeting the people and just like going through the interview process and being introduced to all of the engineers. I’ve always been kind of intimidated by what people consider like the engineering type or the stereotype of engineers.
Katie Fujihara: Everyone I worked with in the interview process was not that stereotype, and it was just really fun. And I could tell that they really value the personality of people here on top of their technical skill and everything like that. They just want people who can work with other people well, and for me to that was really attractive. So, and two and a half years later, here I am so… yay.
Arquay Harris: Yay. And then Siobhan, I’m really hoping there’s going to be a Brody cameo at some point. Your sister’s on there, I saw.
Siobhan Sabino: Well, she is. Oh, remind me tomorrow. I have so many pictures of Brody I’ve stolen from her, I have a whole album. I joined Webflow earlier this year, essentially how I came to here was my previous job I’d been at for a couple of years, we’d finished a couple big projects. My junior engineer that I had been training, I knew she was fine, that she could take this on her own.
Siobhan Sabino: I felt like my chapter there had come to its natural conclusion, of everything was sort of in a better place. And the day I realized maybe it’s time to look for something else, it ended up better. A recruiter I had worked with there, now works at Webflow, and she had reached out a couple days earlier and I felt like the universe was like, “Hey Siobhan, here’s the next thing.” Because as everyone said, it was really the people.
Siobhan Sabino: When I think back on my favorite projects technically I’ve worked on, those teams, it was awful. Whereas my favorite teams I’ve worked on, those have been some of the hardest projects technically, but we were all in it together because it was the right people trying to do the right thing. That’s what really drew me to Webflow, was feeling like, “Yes. We’re going to come in and we’re going to make a change and we’re going to do the best we can and we’re going to do it together.” And that’s what really drew me in.
Siobhan Sabino: Plus now, we have a cat channel and I can show people pictures of Brody all the time and they love it, because I also love them.
Arquay Harris: That’s a great answer. We have an answer that came in through the Q and A, and it is, “What’s the best advice that someone gave you early on in your career in software development engineering?” How are you Katie?
Katie Fujihara: Okay, so actually I will say that… not necessarily a piece of advice, but something that Olena did actually, because I worked with Olena before on a feature.
Katie Fujihara: One thing that she taught me is that even if you or a staff or senior level engineer, you have so much you can learn from junior engineers, and that has stuck with me since. I remember she would vocalize also when I would teach her something that she liked or she didn’t know about or something. She would always just like be so open and humble in saying that to me, and it helps reinforce my confidence that even though I don’t have the years upon years of experience like her, she still can take away something from me and that I have knowledge that is valuable to other people, so that’s what I would say.
Arquay Harris: That’s very sweet. I won’t make every single person answer but I’m curious about you, JZ, I know that you’ve had a very long and kind of storied career. What was some early advice that you got?
Jiaona Zhang: Yeah, I can’t exactly answer the, you know, what advice I get in software engineering since that’s not my background, but the two pieces of advice that really have just stuck with me in my career, and there’s one that was early career and then was one that’s later career. I’ll share both.
Jiaona Zhang: The early career one was optimized for learning. That’s a piece of advice I’d gotten and really resonated with me and something that guided my career for the first five, six years, where when I joined Pocket Gems, which is the mobile gaming company, I was like, “I don’t know what a PM is. I’m here to do it.” When I joined Dropbox, I actually worked on the most technical product I could find because I had that imposter syndrome about working in technology, so I joined the Dropbox developer platform team and I was, “What is an API? I’m here to learn.”
Jiaona Zhang: You know, when I joined Airbnb, I’d worked at engineering driven companies. I’d worked at almost like business product driven companies, but I never worked at design driven company. When I joined, I really wanted to learn what it would mean to build from first principles and design thinking. And again, so that’s really something that guided me early career.
Jiaona Zhang: Later in my career, a piece of advice that’s really stuck with me that might seem unintuitive is “Ask for help.” I think that when you get further and further in your career, it’s almost harder to feel like you can ask for help. And I think, especially in the industry that we work in, that we all work in. It’s like, “Oh, if I ask for help, are people going to think I’m not competent?” Or they think, “I look 20, are they going to think…” Like there’s just like a whole like thing where if you ask for help, is that going to be looked down upon?
Jiaona Zhang: The advice I’d gotten from a mentor was, ask for help because you should always feel like you’re failing. If you’re learning and you’re growing, you’re pushing and pushing on that impact, like there are always days where you’re like, “Man, that did not go the way I wanted to go.” Like you should be in some ways failing and learning from that. And in order to do it in a way where…
Jiaona Zhang: Because the more senior you are, you are responsible for a lot of people and for the impact on the company. And if you do not ask for help clearly and often, it’s just not human to be able to take it on your shoulders all the time. Ask for help is something that I think about every single day, something I push myself to do every single day.
Arquay Harris: Oh, that’s so good. I mean, this reminds me of… It’s a similar question that people ask, like, “What is the advice you give to your younger self?” And for me, there is an extra pressure like, to take you back on what Jay-Z just said, where there’s this famous XKCD comic where, the first pane is like, “Oh, Bob doesn’t understand math.” And the second one is like, “Women don’t understand math.” But for me it’s like, if I admit that, I’ll miss something. It’s like, “See, I told you black women can’t do SQL.” And it’s just like this.
Arquay Harris: I would rather like buy a book on Java Beans than ask for help. And I would have wished I would not done… I wish I would had not done that, because I could have gone farther faster, right? Had I had that support system.
Arquay Harris: We have another question in chat and I’m going to start with you, Siobhan, and the question is, “What advice would you give to someone who has no technical background, that’s starting this from scratch in a bootcamp?”
Siobhan Sabino: Oh, that’s an interesting one. I like that. I think oftentimes engineers, whether intentionally or not, do a lot of gatekeeping, especially in a company where engineers are asked to talk with non-engineers. We are not taught to think about how do we communicate that? How do we make sure we’re using language that everyone understands? We’re bringing everyone along.
Siobhan Sabino: One of the things I’ve really learned as a data engineer and I’ve really loved is getting to work with non-engineers and having to explain technical things to them. It is very hard to explain what is a Docker container to someone who’s not an engineer, but when you practice that, that’s really important.
Siobhan Sabino: I think oftentimes when you come from a non-technical background and suddenly you’re faced with engineers throwing these words around, you think, “I’m the problem.” It’s important to remember from a cultural perspective, “no, this is something where everyone should feel involved.”
Siobhan Sabino: You should feel comfortable saying, “I don’t understand. Can you explain that to me? Can you explain that in a less technical manner?” That way, we are bringing everyone along and sometimes engineers will say, “Well, I understand so why don’t you?” The point is, if we’re all on the same page, we’re all going to do better together, right? High tide raises all boats.
Siobhan Sabino: I think, especially if you’re coming from a non-technical background, I’ve done a lot of interviews. And let me tell you the non-technical people or people who switch careers, they’re always my favorite, because they think about things so differently. And that different perspective is so valuable. They’re thinking about how do I explain this to non-technical people? How do I approach the problem differently? As much as many people will tell you, this is a weakness, it’s not. It really gives you a different insight. And I think it will make you just a better person to work with all around
Arquay Harris: Totally agree. I’m curious about you Olena and then I feel like we should go to Katie as well after that, who actually lived through this experience?
Olena Sovyn: I would dabble on like advice about education. There are so many teachers out there, especially with everything available now online. If you have teacher at your boot camps that can’t explain something, look for another teacher on YouTube, because there are so many approach how to teach others and some approach might work for you better.
Olena Sovyn: Some approach might work for other people better. If you don’t understand something, this is not your problem or your limitation. This is just the way someone tries to educate you, and it doesn’t work for you, but there are so many other ways how you can be educated and learn about something. Maybe your way is to ask for examples, maybe by watching videos, maybe by creating talks, who knows.
Olena Sovyn: Explore how best you can learn, what you want to learn.
Arquay Harris: Oh yeah. Katie, go for it, if you wouldn’t mind.
Katie Fujihara: I think something that is really important when you’re coming from a non-technical, completely unrelated background, doing a bootcamp, the thing that people often don’t tell you while you’re in the bootcamp is how difficult it is once you’re out of the bootcamp to get a job and to get noticed.
Katie Fujihara: What I would recommend is to find a way to differentiate yourself early on, figure out what you like, really double down on your strengths and your weaknesses, like figure out what those are early on and just like really lean into your strengths.
Katie Fujihara: I know for me, personally, like one of my strengths is I’m very community driven. And so while I might not be the most technically savvy person or I definitely don’t consider myself that, I lean into the participating and building communities.
Katie Fujihara: That for me, that meant attending lots of conferences and networking at them or speaking at conferences or speaking at meetups, just getting myself out there so that I could network with people.
Katie Fujihara: Another way, if in-person type of things isn’t your jam, I’ve noticed that people were very excited when they found out that I contributed to open source projects. That shows that you’re engaged with like the open source community, you know? And you have proof that, of your technical skills, by like linking to PRs. It’s evidence. It’s very easy to just point things like, “Oh, I’m active in here and this is my work.”
Katie Fujihara: I found that this was a lot more useful than working on side projects that were never finished or anything like that. This one you just pick and choose what things you want to learn about in open source projects. Maybe it’s “Oh, I want to learn more about CSS.” So you take only those types of issues, and then you get to go through the code review process with maintainers, and so then you get to learn about that.
Katie Fujihara: That would be my recommendation, contribute to open source and join communities.
Arquay Harris: Oh, I love all of these answers and Katie, especially. I remember years and years ago, people used to say like, “Oh, I want to get into coding, like what should I do it?” I would always say, “Code.” Even if you make a website for your mom’s Canasta club, just do it, like just start doing stuff. And so it’s just like, “I love your attitude.”
Arquay Harris: And the other thing that I wanted to comment on is when Siobhan said that the people who are kind of career changers are her favorite. I have had that experience as well, where like, if you say you have a CS degree and you go to college and let’s say you learn something like data types, you might learn it over a quarter semester, like group projects, and they have like a lot of fillers, right?
Arquay Harris: If you go to a bootcamp and for 24 hours, you know, 20 hours a day for two weeks, you learn data types, you’d be pretty good at them. Right? Like there is this like practical thing. And so for me, I always like… It takes all types, right? Like there’s many different roads traveled. And I think that this very much feeds into the next question that we have, which is, what advice… Sorry. Oh, there was a question, and it was deleted, but I remember what the question was.
Arquay Harris: JZ had talked about imposter syndrome. Have any of you ever – has anyone else ever experienced that? And what, what are some ways that you tackled it?” How about we start with, how about you, Siobhan? And then JZ, I think, if you have anything more to add.
Siobhan Sabino: Yeah. I actually started studying computer science when I was 14. My high school had classes. The way I got into it was when I was 13, my mother made a passing comment of, “Oh, you’re always on the computer. Maybe you should go to the computer science academy.” I was like, “Well, yeah, maybe I will.” In that way, teenagers have, so that’s how I got into computer science. And at that point I don’t even think we had internet at home, my sister can correct me if I’m wrong. Like we didn’t have internet at home. Internet was something at the library.
Siobhan Sabino: It’d probably be like 10 years until I’d hear the phrase imposter syndrome. But I remember that was the first time I encountered this idea that because I was a girl, I wasn’t supposed to be good at math or like computers. I remember when other middle schoolers found out I was going into the program. They were like, “Well, why are you in it?” I was like, “You’re just mad, because you’re not as good of algebra as I am. Study harder.” But that was…
Siobhan Sabino: I remember getting to the classroom and there was three girls in the class, which in retrospect is three more than probably most people expected. I remember sitting at my terminal one day because all the boys were having a great time, goofing off, being friends, and I felt so alone crying to myself, thinking, “Either I can quit or I’m going to see this through.” And I look back at that now, and that was probably the closest I came of… I was exposed to that at a very precious age where 14 is a very hard age to do that, but it was in a controlled environment.
Siobhan Sabino: I had a mother who supported me, and I had teachers who were women and supported me, so I was able to make it through. By the time I got into college and then into my first jobs, it was absolutely normal that I was the only woman. And at that point it was what it was. When people say, “Don’t you feel like you don’t belong?” It’s like, that feels like a “You” problem.
Siobhan Sabino: I know I belong and I don’t need to prove that to anybody. That was very unique experience for me, but really having that moment of saying either, “I’m going to quit or I’m going to keep going”, and I loved it too much to quit.
Arquay Harris: That is great. I think this will be our final answer before we head into the break, the networking sessions. JZ, take us home. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this.
Jiaona Zhang: I’ll share my thoughts, but I actually think Arquay, you should take us home, because I’m really curious also in your thoughts on imposter syndrome, but I’ll share mine. Yes, a hundred percent. Definitely something that I’ve struggled with, I still struggle with.
Jiaona Zhang:I think that the first piece is when… so the product has been a discipline that I think has taken lots of different twists and turns, and it really was rooted more in marketing. I think the modern day product management like… a lot of people actually harken it back to Google with APM program, right? They had program managers at Microsoft, so on, so forth, but Google was really where it was like, “You have to have a computer science degree and then like being a PM is awesome. You get to be part of like this club and you get to like make decisions.”
Jiaona Zhang: But the thing is like, it was such a closed door kind of environment, where it’s like you really did have to have a computer science degree to even be interviewed for Google. And so, one of the things that I thought was really important as a turning point, a product as a discipline is like, no, actually recognizing that by bringing in perspectives of like other perspectives that aren’t just the computer science one, in a fact that your role is to really understand the user. Like, do you need to be technical to understand the user? No.
Jiaona Zhang: In fact, the more the user… You were like, the more that you project yourself onto the user, the worse products you’re going to build, right? And so I think that like moving away from that, like you have to have that degree in order to get an interview, into actually the role is really to understand people. That requires empathy, that requires curiosity. It does not require a coding background. I think really where things are changing and have changed.
Jiaona Zhang: I think part of my personal journey with imposter syndrome, especially in the product management role, is really understanding better what is the role of product management. It’s actually a very different role than the role of an engineer, for example. I think that is a big piece, but Arquay, I’m really curious about you.
Arquay Harris: Yeah.
Jiaona Zhang: Yeah.
Arquay Harris: I definitely have struggled with imposter syndrome, my whole career.
Arquay Harris: I was thinking recently, there was this article and it talked about how if you track historically over time, women’s participation in computer science, it was mostly female dominated. You had like the hidden figures. They were literally called computers, Bletchley Circle, like all this stuff.
Arquay Harris: Then at certain point, there was a huge drop off. What people have attributed to is the eighties, because you got into this like revenge of the nerds or like weird science and like, “Computer science is for boys and nerds and white dudes”, and that sort of thing got into the culture. Women began to think that like, “They don’t belong here. This is not for us. Math is hard.” Like all of these things, right? Yeah, I definitely struggled with like, “Oh, do I fit?”
Arquay Harris: Add the race and the gender, like all the things, right? At a certain point, I really just like stopped comparing myself. I have this whole like… When I’m talking to my friends or whatever, this kind of joke, how like I never compare myself to other women, for example. I’m never like, I’m like, “Oh yeah, she looks great in that dress, but I bet she’s terrible at CSS specificity or whatever.” Right?
Arquay Harris: You can’t compare yourself, like it doesn’t work like that. There’s all like apples to apples kind of thing. You really need to think about what makes you special, whether it’s like whatever dress you’re wearing or how good you are at JavaScript or whatever.
Arquay Harris:And thinking about like knowledge is a circle, right? Like no one knows everything in the circle.
Arquay Harris: What part of it do you specialize in? I think we do in culture, you’re sort of ingraining people to focus more on your weaknesses than your strengths, right? Like if there is a thing that you struggle with, I bet there’s something that you’re really great at.
Arquay Harris: We all have value. The thing that I think is also interesting is like, we were all hired. There was all some spark that people saw in us. There’s some potential that we have and it’s up to us, whether or not we live up to that potential and we lean into it or we let others define who we are and how we behave.
Arquay Harris: On that note, this has been super great. I’m not exactly sure what happens, but somehow magically, we are going to go into breakout sessions. Oh, there’s Angie! Oh, save us.
Angie Chang: Well, thank you all so much for joining us. We are going to be wrapping up. I want to say that Webflow is hiring!
Angie Chang: We’re going to be sending out an email afterwards to ask about how this event went and then we’ll have some link to the jobs there, so check those out. If not, just go to the website and look at the jobs there as well.
Angie Chang: They’re hiring for engineers, engineering managers, product managers, design managers, a ton of jobs.
Angie Chang: Tell your friends this is an awesome place to work. You’ve met some amazing women who work there and yeah, spread the word.
Angie Chang: In the chat, there is a link to the Zoom meeting where we’ll be doing the breakout sessions. If you want to join us, I know it’s getting late, please do join us by clicking on that link. It’s also available in an email that will be sent- that’s already been sent to all attendees. There’s a link to the Zoom meeting.
Angie Chang: Thanks so much for everyone for speaking. We’ll see you on the Zoom meeting, if you want to have another 20 minutes of meeting each other face to face. See you on the other side.
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Angie Chang: Thank you all again for joining me for this Strava Girl Geek Dinner in the middle of a pandemic.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Post pandemic now being virtual, you get to see more people across different time zones that we wouldn’t otherwise been able to see.
Camille Tate: I was being truthful, we do have a team of all stars and we’re going to talk about a variety of topics that you all may have an interest in.
MacBeth Watson: So what I did was I took a bunch of short term contracts and tested the waters and figured out what was right for me, what I really enjoyed solving, what problems I enjoyed solving.
Tara King-Hughes: I said, okay, I’ve got to do something with this and that led me to a career in development and in development, I always wanted to connect the dots and X, Y, and my boss was like, “Well, maybe you should be a dot connector.” And then that landed me in product.
Shailvi Wakhlu: I always really encourage people to focus on growing their own functional expertise that extends beyond that specific use case for that specific consumer and think towards other use cases and what would be your skill set that will continue to apply in those different situations.
Danielle Guy: Look inside, find what makes you happy, what brings you joy and don’t be afraid to prioritize yourself. When you look into your next adventure, your next company and role, make sure that your values and beliefs align with whatever company that you’re looking at.
Elyse Kolker Gordon: You can do it, you got to put yourself out there to be able to do it.
Angie Chang: Welcome to this Strava Girl Geek Dinner. My name’s Angie Chang and I’m the founder of Girl Geek X. Sukrutha, do you want to say hello and tell us a bit about yourself?
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yeah. Hi, I’m Sukrutha and I’m dialing in from San Francisco. Angie and I work together on this. Obviously, we’re backed by an amazing supportive team behind us, Amy and Amanda, thank you. We are excited to have you all join us tonight for Strava sponsored virtual dinner. Pre-pandemic, we would have obviously met in real life, but post-pandemic, now being virtual, we get to see more people across different time zones that we wouldn’t have otherwise been able to see.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: I use Strava on the daily, and the magic of Strava is being able to bring people together all across the globe with one focus, just trying to motivate each other to work out. So whether it’s a walk or run and I really appreciate the partnership we’ve had with Strava. This is not the first time they’ve sponsored.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: I’m excited to introduce our first speaker, Tara. She’s the senior director of product management at Strava where she leads a team of product managers. As a product leader, she focuses on solving the right problems to build minimum lovable product. I love that. In her spare time, she mentors underrepresented groups and helps them build rewarding careers in product. So welcome, Tara.
Tara King-Hughes: Okay. Thanks. Well, I’m going to tell you a little bit about Strava.
Tara King-Hughes: Strava is a global community. We have over 85 million athletes with more than 80% residing outside the US, We have athletes in 195 countries. Strava members upload approximately 40 million activities a week. That’s more than 5.3 billion activities shared to date.
Tara King-Hughes: Our mission is to connect athletes to what motivates them and help them find their personal best. There are over 30 activity types on Strava, ranging from cycling to wind surfing, and we want to continue to expand this list and to support as many activities as our community needs. I’ll now hand it back to you, Angie.
Angie Chang: Our first lightning tech talk will be from Lucinda Zhao. She is the lead senior ML engineer at Strava and she enjoys developing algorithms and applications that bring better insights to millions of athletes on Strava. Before Strava, she worked at Uber on applied machine learning with location sensor data. She spends more and more time exercising ever since joining Strava in 2019. Welcome, Lucinda.
Lucinda Zhao: Hello, I’m Lucinda and I’m a senior machine learning engineer at Strava. Today I’m going to give a high level introduction on the problems, machine learning engineers. The machine learning team at Strava is relatively new and small, the team was built less than two years ago, yet we have good autonomy to discover and decide what to work on within Strava that could greatly benefit from machine learning.
Lucinda Zhao: With tens of millions of athletes on platform and billions of activity records, we have regionally unique data to leverage, to create values and to personalize athletes’ experiences. As we may be expecting a company of a relatively smaller size like Strava, our work scope is pretty end-to-end from data exploration to helps pipelines to model training and validation and a model serving and integration.
Lucinda Zhao: We leverage open source tools as much as possible. Since the team is new, almost all projects start from scratch. Here listed a few projects we have worked on. Some of them may sound familiar and some may be Strava specific. We work on PYMK which is short for people you may know. This is like social network, essential.
Lucinda Zhao: At Strava, we suggest fellow athletes for you to follow to help discover and connect in the community. The suggestions are based on athletes’ activities, interactions, etcetera. We also worked on dynamic notification scheduling. The goal is to intelligently send notifications of different content at different times and cadence to enhance user interactions and provide a good amount of information without too much interruption. We also worked on activity type classification. This is Strava specific.
Lucinda Zhao: Basically, when you upload an activity to Strava, you need to specify the sport type, whether it’s a run, ride, or swim, for example, and athletes could compete with each other by comparing the records of the same sport type and the same location. And that activity becomes the segment and each segment has its own leaderboard. Segments and leaderboard are one of the key features of Strava, incorrect types may lead to inaccurate leaderboards. Activity type detection aims to detect activities of wrong sport types automatically, and such as a correction to help improve data integrity and user experience.
Lucinda Zhao: The last one I like to talk about is segment effort estimation. Strava recently launched the new navigation and maps through which exploring segments and routes has never been easier. In the new map, Strava recommend segments based on intense, for example, as you can see on screenshots, whether it’s popular segments or discover new places or break your records. The names are quite self explanatory. In the break your record and climb leaderboard intense, we recommend segments that we think you have a good chance to score a better rank.
Lucinda Zhao: Let’s take a closer look at the segment effort estimation at this particular application. Under the hood we may have tens of thousands of segments for a given map region. We filter them down to a smaller pool, say, of a few thousand, run a model to get an estimated best effort for all the segments for the given athlete and compare the estimation with the leaderboard or personal records, rank and [inaudible] selected segments in the app. If I take a closer look at the data and model, your [inaudible] projects are composed of two: parts offline training and online scoring.
Lucinda Zhao: For offline training, we take the best effort from the past and records of the label for given athlete and segment here. The future and aggregate past segment efforts to characterize a given segment, which is a segment of features in the chart. Similarly, we filter and aggregate his or her activities on Strava to characterize a given athlete, which are the athlete feature in the chart was labeled and [inaudible] a model can be trained and evaluated.
Lucinda Zhao: The number of segments we have at Strava is at 10 million scale. The number of athletes at Strava is at 10 million scale and the segment efforts is at 10 billion scale. The final model is training model 100 million segment are athlete players. For the online estimation part, the features I mentioned previously are pre-calculated and stored in the productive database which can be batched in real-time based on ID with the train model and features we can provide pretty reliable personalized estimations for arbitrary athlete and segment players.
Lucinda Zhao: Finally, a little bit about the model serving integration. The most common ways to have a standalone surveys. You already in person where you registered [inaudible] model, expose it as an import and do the RPC call with provided features and get output in real-time. However, for this particular application since we may run predictions on some of our segments under the hood for each [inaudible], the size of the input features could be quite large. So it makes more sense to move the model to the data rather than to move the data to the model.
Lucinda Zhao: As a result, we have the models served within the scholar server, always [inaudible] settings. Besides to achieve desired latency would also routine the model complexity to improve the inference efficiency with a bit of sacrifice on accuracy. Details only [inaudible] but hopefully it provides a high-level picture of the workflow.
Lucinda Zhao: Of course, we’re planning a lot more in the future. For example, we may want to recommend challenges, competitions, or local events that athletes can participate in. Maybe it can recognize segment the athletes who are similar to you with a lot and so on and so forth. This technology is in detail, we strive to create unique values and experiences for our athletes. That’s all from me. Thanks for listening, I’m handing it over to…
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you. I’m going to do a quick intro for you, Sara. Welcome. I’m glad to see everybody dialing in from all around, like I said, all around the globe in various time zones. Welcome, Sara.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Sara is is an engineering lead and manager at Strava on the foundation team. She enjoys developing the systems and infrastructure that makes Strava reliable and performance for all the athletes that rely on Strava. That’s amazing. She’s passionate about helping individuals navigate their careers and building inclusive and sustainable teams and culture.
Sara Shi: Thank you for the intro. Hi all, thank you for having me here at this Girl Geek event. My name is Sara Shi and I’m here to talk to you about scaling on-call culture with a growing product or, how I learned to stop worrying and love ownership. I hope there’s some people out there that get the Dr. Strangelove reference, but if you don’t, it’s a good classic film that you should check out.
Sara Shi: A little bit about me. I’m based out of San Francisco as an engineering lead and manager on the foundation team. Our team is more traditionally known in industries as infrastructure or site reliability engineering team. I joined about three years ago in 2018 and before then, I’d never been on call in my life, but we’ll get into that a little bit more later.
Sara Shi: At Strava, we like to say that everyone should have time for the preferred activity type, and contrary to what you might believe, not all of us at Strava are crazy triathletes. In fact, I’m going to go as far as to say that my preferred activity type is eating so that isn’t quite something I can track on Strava. A little bit about Strava, as Tara mentioned in her introduction, we are a global community with over 85 million athletes, adding over 2 million athletes every month.
Sara Shi: We are a rapidly growing product. To give you a sense of the scale that we operate at, we have over 5 billion activities to date and every week we upload more than 40 million activities. And we’re a distributed company. We’re about 250 plus engineers or employees and about 85 people in the engineering org. So all of this might seem like it’s a sales pitch but I’m telling you this just to give you some background on what on-call is like at Strava and the scale at which we operate.
Sara Shi: Strava’s on-call journey, or at least as I’ve known it. As I mentioned before, I’d never been on call before my time at Strava but back at the beginning of 2018 or 2019, the time came for me to go on call and I asked for access to PagerDuty. The response that I got from my colleagues was, be careful what you wish for. That’s not quite what you want to hear when you’re just asking for access to on-call software but I soon came to understand why.
Sara Shi: Back in 2019, we had about 50 engineers. In terms of scale, we had crossed the two billionth activity mark sometime during that year. But when I went back to look at PagerDuty metrics, the top 10 most paged engineers at Strava handled 91% of all incidents. That’s not great. It’s not great for our engineers. It’s not great for the product and it’s not great for the athletes that depended on those. So we resolved to change this, but we knew it would be a long journey. So what did that long journey look like? Well, it’s easy for me to look at the metrics in retrospect.
Sara Shi: In 2020, Strava had grown to about 70 engineers. We crossed a 3 billionth activity mark that year but this time holding steady with my top 10 most paged engineers metric, the top 10 most page engineers handled 69% of all incidents. It’s still not great, but definitely improvement. That brings us to 2021 or this [inaudible] August. We are now at about 85 engineers, well past our 5 billionth activity, and this year, so far, the top 10 most paged engineers handled 60% of all incidents.
Sara Shi: You might imagine that you’d want something where every engineer was responsible for an equal proportion of incidents but that isn’t particularly realistic based on how different services run, how different teams operate, and what different teams consider high urgency. That being said, we’re still not where we want to be and there’s definitely room for improvement, but that’s not what I want to talk about. I’d like to walk you through where we started and what we changed to get the improvement that we did see with our growing scale. So I’m going to cover this in the context of three areas. Technology, people, and culture.
Sara Shi: So, technology, where do we start from? This may feel pretty self-explanatory but you can’t have a successful on-call culture without the right technology. The pillars of observability and metrics logging and tracing provide visibility into our systems and applications while alerting enables us to respond to the conditions that require attention. These two together allow us to investigate and diagnose issues that arise within the systems. Fortunately, in 2019, we had already configured or were in the process of configuring many of our tools. I want to note that it’s a seriously non-trivial effort to configure each one of these components on their own but thanks to the hard work of many engineers on my team, we had a solid foundation to work on.
Sara Shi: How did we improve from here? To shift the ownership of those 91% of incidents from one group of engineers who didn’t necessarily have all the tools they needed to succeed, we invested heavily in building tools and documentation to enable individual team ownership of their own observability and alerting. For example, we built tracing libraries and of course shared libraries into every one of our services so that any service owner can simply follow the library version and get tracing for free. Or for another example, we wrote a product called [inaudible] which enables people to write their own grip on a dashboard easily.
Sara Shi: We also wrote docs on how to use a variety of the tools available and gave the recorded tech talks to demonstrate how to use those tools. We simplified the friction of using these technologies so that our developers would be able and excited to own their services from end to end. So on to people, where did we start from? Back in 2019, we had about three main rotations, but the input rotation responded to nearly all incidents. In the process, we are exhausting a small group of individuals, siloing product knowledge, and struggling to maintain core triaging incident response skills across the rest of the engineering org.
Sara Shi: How did we get better? Beside just forget about it altogether, we started from scratch. We established rotations on the minimum of eight people and up to 10 people. These numbers might seem kind of arbitrary, but they allowed us to avoid exhausting any one individual. Engineers could expect to be on call for about one week, every two to three months, which is just enough for engineers to maintain their core triaging and incident response skills.
Sara Shi: We also established product rotations per product area and team rather than grouping engineers into the broad rotations that didn’t really make much sense. It seems like that’s intuitive, but it was quite a challenge to draw the product area lines, but I’ll get into that a little bit later. We also established primary and secondary rotations across the product areas and teams. If you’re not familiar with the concept of primary and secondary rotations, the idea is you have two rotations, ideally sibling teams on call at the same time to cover for one another in some capacity.
Sara Shi: Typically, the primary rotation for one product area or team is the secondary on another product area or team and vice versa. Our secondary rotations catch any alerts that might fall through from the primary rotations or provide coverage than someone on a primary rotation needs it. This means you always have someone to call in for backup or to cover for you while you go do your preferred activity type. I’m actually on call right now, but thanks to Jacob on the activities team, I’m getting coverage as I’m giving this talk.
Sara Shi: Additionally, we establish the role of incident managers. You may remember in my talk description that I said, even our CTO is on call. He’s on an incident managing rotation. Incident managers, helping [inaudible] incidents to delegate responsibilities, manage external communications and communicate overall business impact to stakeholders, giving us engineers the ability to focus on what’s going on in hand. Finally, culture. Where did we start from?
Sara Shi: Well, we had set product level objectives, latency, request ability, et cetera, across the company. We had relatively good playbooks or sets of instructions for responding to, diagnosing and resolving incidents, mapped to specific alerts and errors. We had effective long-term remediation and prevention. We do and still to this day, take advantage of a weekly meeting called incident review, in which we review all incidents that happened during the week, assign immediate action items and identify where we need to plan out longer term remediation strategies and we have a blameless culture.
Sara Shi: We focus on the contributing causes of incidents without focusing on any individual or change behavior or resolution time. We can always assume that everyone did the best that they could with the information available. Being on-call can be stressful and we want to provide a psychologically safe environment to work, learn, and grow in being on call. So how do we get better? Ownership. How do you know who owns what as your company grows? As teams change, as product focus areas shift? How do you prevent features from being neglected or lost? Maybe at a large tech company, you have the resources to hire a new team for every product area.
Sara Shi: For a company like ours, that’s just not possible when we’re trying to grow modestly in line with our scale. So how do we start this ownership journey? Well, it started with sitting down with a spreadsheet. We conducted a product survey and feature audit in that teams to product areas and features. This was quite a monumental task, especially over areas that have been neglected over the entire 11 year history of the company. This spreadsheet ended up being a whopping 336 line items and I’m sure we didn’t even hit everything with the survey and audit, but it gave us a good starting point to work from.
Sara Shi: From there, we were able to map product features to services and services to teams and with the join we’d already built, it was easy to ascribe ownership of observability and alerts to those teams. The things that I’ve just discussed are a sampling of where we’ve improved. We’re constantly learning, iterating on our processes and on call culture, and maybe in another year I’ll have another update, but in the meantime, what should you walk away with or what should your company strive for? A solid technological foundation, implement observability and alerting, build tools and write documentation that allow any individual to own their own alerts, logs, metrics, and traces with ease.
Sara Shi: Take care of your people. Start with a fixed core number of people per rotation and create rotations per product area. Set up the backup cavalry primary and secondary rotations with the right on-call training and preparation so that you can give your people psychological safety and work-life balance and designate incident managers to help with managing everything else flying around during an incident. Finally, build a sustainable culture. Set service level objectives so that your company level objectives don’t feel so impossible to tackle. Write playbooks that any engineer from any team can pick up.
Sara Shi: Make sure you have long-term remediation and prevention strategies, whether that’s a post-mortem culture or a weekly incident review meeting like ours. Promote a blameless culture where your engineers can work collaboratively and openly learn from their mistakes and own what you built. This is important. Don’t let us become an afterthought. Build this into every step of the process. I hope you’ve learned a thing or two that you can take back to your own companies. Thanks to Girl Geek for hosting and thanks for listening. I will pass it back.
Angie Chang: Thank you, Sara. Really liked that talk, especially about the culture aspect and creating that playbook. So thank you so much. Our next speaker is Michelle Dobbs. She is a senior server engineer at Strava on the competition and community team. She enjoys developing scalable systems to improve the athlete experience for all and is passionate about improving developer productivity and operations. In her free time, she enjoys cycling, basketball, and learning to play piano. Welcome, Michelle.
Michelle Dobbs: Excited to be here. Hey, everyone. My name is Michelle Dobbs, I’m a senior server engineer here at Strava and I joined the competition and community team back in March of this year. I’m based out of the Strava Denver office and I actually just returned back to Denver’s altitude yesterday, so if I’m a little out of breath, I’m just not acclimated to the lack of oxygen yet. Prior to Strava, I was working at Amazon Web Services on a space and satellite project called AWS Ground Station. One of the things I definitely learned from having your full production service require satellites orbiting the earth is how to get a little creative sometimes with your testing strategies.
Michelle Dobbs: Before I dive into how we load tested our new group challenges feature back in June, I want to give a brief background of Strava challenges and what it meant for us to launch group challenges. Global challenges have been around on Strava for several years. These are challenges that are surfaced to all Strava athletes and everyone has a chance to join and complete the challenges to earn digital badges or discounts or products from some of Strava’s partners. For most athletes, the leaderboards of these challenges can be a bit out of reach since it can include so many thousands of people. So, often these challenges can be more about pushing yourself individually to reach a goal that many others are also striving towards.
Michelle Dobbs: By launching group challenges, Strava made a challenge experience that’s more personal, customizable, and competitive. Athletes can challenge their friends to a specific goal of mileage to run or total time span active and they’re able to view leaderboards and send comments back and forth to this smaller group of athletes. This feature was developed reusing some of the same backend as global challenges, but there was also a sizeable amount of new code. When we launched this back in June, we wanted to do everything in our power to ensure both that the new feature was working correctly and that the existing global challenge features were not negatively impacted by the launch.
Michelle Dobbs: What can we do to increase the likelihood of a smooth launch day? Throughout the development of the feature, we ensured that we had third unit testing and code reviews for the new logic added to our challenges services. We also launched a beta testing round with athletes well ahead of launch so that we could gain insight into what pieces of the system might not be functioning as expected. And that’s both on the user experience side and also on the software performance side. But the missing piece that both these strategies have is the ability to gain insight into the performance at scale.
Michelle Dobbs: We need to be sure that when our millions of users have the opportunity to explore and play around with this new feature, they aren’t met with bad performance or high latency while our engineers have to scramble in the background to repair issues post-launch. With this load testing goal in mind, we developed a high-level testing plan that we believe would have the best chance of exposing any performance issues ahead of launch.
Michelle Dobbs: First, we’ll create hundreds of thousands of challenges and add athletes to them. Next, we’ll drive activity, upload traffic, so that the business logic of leaderboards and challenge updates is exercised. Lastly, we’ll leverage our metrics and dashboards so that we can identify where any bottlenecks might exist.
Michelle Dobbs: Once this plan was developed, our next task was understanding how we would run it logistically. Do we want to use Strava’s pre-prod staging environment to avoid unnecessary prod impacts or do we want our load test to be as realistic as possible, running in production with the competing traffic and capacity that it will have on launch day? Staging had the added challenge of lacking like a consistent activity upload pattern, whereas, our users in prod are constantly uploading new activities of all kinds that would exercise the code path that we’re interested in.
Michelle Dobbs: As you might expect, our solution here was to use a mix of both production and staging. We developed a four-phase approach that used Cron jobs to create challenges called the challenge-related endpoints for steady-state traffic and to delete all the test challenges. We planned to run these Cron jobs in four separate phases, a small-scale testing phase and staging to validate that the jobs code worked as expected, a larger scale test in staging using fake activity creation to stimulate prod uploads.
Michelle Dobbs: A small-scale testing in prod to ensure that load tests acts as we expect and, again, that athletes will not be impacted by the test. And then one last large-scale test in prod with hidden challenges that were created in the background for random athletes. We used existing traffic patterns on the global challenges side to estimate what we imagined was the ceiling for how many challenges might be created on launch day. And then for these larger-scale testing phases in staging and prod, we tried to hit those ceiling numbers that we’d estimated.
Michelle Dobbs: Once these phases were determined, our next question became, what exactly should we test? So the graph here is a pretty simplified version of the architecture for this feature. The athlete begins interacting with the group challenges feature through the high-level Strava APIs. Those APIs then call into the challenges service, which has several dependencies of its own. So we needed to understand what we would gain and lose by having our testing enter the system in different places.
Michelle Dobbs: The first decision we made was to have the testing entry point be in the challenges service rather than in the Strava API. The Cron jobs code became much simpler by moving it to develop against the challenges service, just due to the authentication methods required for each of the systems. We also did some due diligence there to investigate the Strava API code that called into the challenge of service, just to ensure that there were no risky areas that we needed to include in the test.
Michelle Dobbs: Next, we wanted to consider communication safety, so when users join or are invited to group challenges in production, there are several different notifications they may receive over the life of the challenge, like push notifications or emails. And we needed to ensure that when athletes were added to hidden challenges in production, they would never receive notifications. The negative side of this decision is that it eliminates a dependency from our load test. But we determined that our load to the notification service would not actually be significantly different from its existing steady-state load from other Strava features.
Michelle Dobbs: Having the confidence that we wouldn’t send unnecessary notifications was worth removing this piece from the load test. Before we ran the test, there were a couple of other safety precautions we wanted to take. We needed to be able to quickly stop all the load test traffic if there was a negative athlete impact in the production phase of testing. So we created a feature toggle for this purpose and ensure that all the on-call engineers understood when testing was happening and how exactly to stop it if it was suspected to be causing issues.
Michelle Dobbs: We also made sure that in staging, the feature toggle actually worked, which is key. When generating challenges, we also use the same random string names so that it was very easy to identify exactly which challenges are related to the load test. Lastly, to validate that no notifications are being sent, we added logging and feature checks that we could verify in staging and prod that no notifications were ever going to be sent for the test challenges. Once we ran this, what did we find? In staging, we discovered a missing index on a table that was causing queries to become extremely slow once the table had a large number of rows. This could have caused a complete service outage due to how slow those queries became like both on launch day and if we had chosen to run the load test in production.
Michelle Dobbs: We also found a small race condition in some of the notification generation logic. After correcting these issues and staging, we continued with the production test phase and found a couple more issues. There was a periodic challenge job that caused contention in the database with athlete traffic and increased the latency of non-group challenge-related calls. We were able to fix this by more evenly distributing that jobs load over time and over different service components. We also found an edge case bug that was affecting two to 3% of all create challenge requests in prod, which we didn’t catch in the beta test phase due to the low volume of that test.
Michelle Dobbs: All of the issues we discovered we were able to fix before we launched the feature in early June and we didn’t have to push back any deadlines. That was great. So after finishing the load test, we took a step to analyze how we could’ve made our testing better. The biggest pain point for the load test was the ability to upload quality activities in staging. Because we had no way to do this programmatically, we had to do generation of manual activities, which are completely separate from the Cron jobs that ran the rest of the load test logic.
Michelle Dobbs: Manual activities are also less useful than the activity uploads that you might see in prod, just because they’re less diverse activity types and they never contained GPS data. So what do we do in response to this finding? We didn’t have time to implement any of these changes during the development of this load test without pushing back our deadline. But thankfully Strava has this awesome concept called Guild week where engineers across teams can work together to develop solutions to problems that span across all of Strava. After identifying these pain points during load testing, I was able to propose a Guild week project, get buy-in from other engineers and then spend a week with them making the staging activity process better.
Michelle Dobbs: We built a new service that only runs in staging and allows programmatic generation of full GPS activity uploads in staging. Along with being able to use this programmatically, like in the Cron jobs for this load test or another testing code, we also created a UI where Strava employees can go and clone their own product with these, into their staging accounts with just one click. Not only did our load test secure a smooth launch for group challenges but also led to work that helps improve the development and testing experience for devs across all of Strava engineering.
Michelle Dobbs: What are key takeaways from this load testing process? First is staging first. We caught multiple issues in staging that would have really impacted production if we had started testing there, one of which could have taken the entire challenges service down. It was super important to start testing in staging and find the big bugs first. Next is isolate systems when needed. Isolating certain parts of our load test made the load test safer and simpler to write. As long as you’re aware of what you’re cutting out and the trade-offs that are involved, it can be really beneficial to make the tests run more smoothly.
Michelle Dobbs: Next, we have timing awareness. We caught multiple bugs through the testing process and because we started load testing sufficiently early, prior to launch, we didn’t have to push back launch at all to fix them. If you’re load testing without expecting to have to fix anything, you’re probably confident enough in your architecture to just not load test in the first place. Lastly, pay attention to pain points. Even if you don’t have time to fix issues with your testing environments or set-ups during the load test development, take note of the issues and then advocate for working on them later.
Michelle Dobbs: You have the potential to not only benefit future load tests for your team but also potentially multiple aspects of testing across your entire company. Hope you all found some of this info helpful or interesting. I’d really like to thank Girl Geek for hosting this event and I’m really looking forward to the amazing panel we have coming up. Thank you.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you. That was just super insightful and things for us to pay attention to when we’re rolling out whatever our big launch might be at our respective companies. Next up is Camille.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Camille is the head of talent at Strava where she leads an amazing group of talented professionals in building diverse teams. 16 plus years recruiting veteran, she enjoys the day-to-day foundational building of talent acquisition, establishing a path for teams to attract and retain exceptional talent. She is a sought-after speaker, panelist, and contributor to the human resources and talent acquisition community. Welcome, Camille.
Camille Tate: Thank you so much for having us. I truly thank you, Girl Geek, for this partnership and setting this event up. I also am so excited and glad to have the opportunity to have listened to those amazing lightning talks. I learned so many things, even though I work at Strava. Thank you for that.
Camille Tate: I want to spotlight our amazing panel, throughout this panel discussion, you might hear me say amazing and awesome over and over again, just because this panel is truly a team of A-players and all-stars. I would like to introduce them and let them introduce themselves in a way I know that they can. We’ll start with Shailvi first, if you want to come on Shailvi and introduce yourself.
Shailvi Wakhlu: Hello. Hi everyone. Thank you so much, Camille, and thank you so much Girl Geek for hosting us. My name is Shailvi Wakhlu, I go by the pronouns, she/her. I am based out of San Francisco and I’m the Senior Director of Data at Strava. I lead the analytics and the machine learning teams. You heard from our wonderful teammate Lucinda who’s on my team earlier today. My one fun fact, similar to Sara, I also like activities that are food-related. So my favorite activity is looking for new things that I can fry in my air fryer.
Camille Tate: Love it, me too, Shailvi. Next, we have Elyse.
Elyse Kolker Gordon: Hi, I’m Elyse Kolker Gordon, my pronouns are she/her and I’m a Senior Director of Engineering at Strava and I am based out of San Francisco. My fun fact to share with you is that I have technically been a professional musician. I have been paid to play the drums in a concert. So yeah, and excited to be here tonight.
Camille Tate: Wow. Elise, I learned something new, that’s good to hear. Now I’ll pass it on to Tara.
Tara King-Hughes: Hello everyone. My name is Tara King-Hughes, I’m the Senior Director of Product Management, calling in from Atlanta on the east coast. I’ve been with Strava since February and it’s just been a wonderful time partnering with so many to build products and features that our athletes love. One fun fact about me, I’m a Marvel junkie, love all things action movies. So that is my thing. If I can just chill and not be focusing on fitness, it’s binge-watching a good action flick.
Camille Tate: We have that in common, Tara. Awesome. I’ll pass it to Danielle.
Danielle Guy: Hi everyone, I’m Danielle Guy, my pronouns are she/her. I am a Principal Technical Program Manager at Strava, and I joined right along with Tara in February. I am based out of Las Vegas, Nevada, the lone wolf, holding it down. A fun fact about me is that I am actually afraid of chickens. We go way back with an unhealthy relationship, but an additional fun fact is I’ve been trapped two times by chickens in a bathroom, both of them in Hawaii.
Camille Tate: Such a cool fact, Danielle. We pass it along to MacBeth.
MacBeth Watson: Okay. My name is MacBeth Watson. My pronouns are she and her and I’m based out of San Francisco. Right now my title is VP of Design. I’m a member of our senior leadership team and all that involves but I’m deeply involved in both marketing and product. And then I lead the design teams, which includes, at Strava, brand design, product design, copywriting, user research, as well as creative ops. It’s a pretty broad team that supports across the company. And then before Strava, I was at places like Pinterest, X-Box, and Starbucks. And then my fun fact or random fact is I think sprinkles are really good luck and so I pretty much put them on everything and I have an entire shelf in my kitchen for sprinkles.
Camille Tate: That’s awesome, MacBeth, thank you. I was being truthful, we do have a team of all-stars and we’re going to talk about a variety of topics that you all may have an interest in. First, we’re going to talk about working in consumer tech. So we might have a lot of people attending this event tonight that would benefit from how you all got into consumer tech. So give us a quick elevator story on getting into the industry. So, we’ll start with Shailvi and how you got into consumer tech.
Shailvi Wakhlu: Yeah. I started my career as a software engineer in Monster.com, which was a job search engine back in the day. It was one of those original dotcoms that had a Super Bowl commercial. So, really it was one of those moments. But yeah, I loved working in a place where I had impact directly on people and really enjoyed that space.
Elyse Kolker Gordon: I accidentally wound up in consumer tech. In college, I thought that I wanted to be a video editor, was lucky enough to have taken a few coding classes and found my way eventually to be an engineer. Worked in a consultancy at first and got to work on some really cool projects, including the first online live streaming Olympic player. Then went from there to do more video at Vevo, which does music video online, and now at Strava.
Camille Tate: Thank you. Tara.
Tara King-Hughes: Okay. For me, it started off with, I really wanted to just focus in undergrad and really focused on helping children and I got this amazing, amazing internship. I realized the system to help protect children was broken and I said, okay, maybe I can be more effective outside of the system within it. Just like with any internship, you get busy work and the busy work was working on the company’s website. Lucky for me, my mother had put me in over seven computer camps and I was like, “This is not what I want to do.”
Tara King-Hughes: But the computer camp skills actually was brought to life and then it connected me with technology and I said, okay, I’ve got to do something with this. That led me to a career in development and in development, I always wanted to connect the dots and X, Y and my boss was like, “Well, maybe you should be our dot connector.” And then that landed me in product, where I can take my love of the human mind and tech, and build consumer products.
Camille Tate: Awesome. Thank you. Danielle?
Danielle Guy: Yeah. I started my career in consumer tech also unintentionally. I was in graduating college right after the economic recession in 2010 era and it was very difficult to find an entry-level civil engineering job, which is what my degree was in. So I took an internship at a local company in Las Vegas named zappos.com. I hope some of you have heard of them, and I worked in the project management department and fell in love with the company, the culture, the role, and just continued learning on the job, went through lots of trainings, and here I am 12 years later.
Camille Tate: All right. MacBeth, how did you get into consumer tech?
MacBeth Watson: Yeah. When I graduated college from — I have a degree in visual communication and design, and so the spectrum is pretty wide. So I wasn’t sure. So what I did was I took a bunch of short-term contracts and tested the waters and figured out what was right for me, what I really enjoyed solving, what problems I enjoyed solving, and wound up at a number of different places, but the major one was Starbucks corporate working on their website and they had a label back in the day, like music label. So I got to design that website and some of those kinds of things, which was really fun. And ever since then, I’ve been in tech.
Camille Tate: Awesome. I love that because talking and hearing from all of you ladies, it just proves there’s not just one way to get into the industry, there’s multiple different paths and experiences you can have to get into our industry. So thank you. I actually want to direct a question to Shailvi and MacBeth about pointers or advice you would give on achieving a sustainable career in consumer tech. So, Shailvi?
Shailvi Wakhlu: Yeah. I feel very strongly that in consumer tech, there is a natural affinity heading towards just looking at things from a consumer’s perspective, which is great, but I always really encourage people to focus on growing their own functional expertise that extends beyond that specific use case for that specific consumer and think towards other use cases and what would be your skillset that would continue to apply in those different situations. I think that is what takes someone up and further in their career because they’re able to adapt to new psychology of the users that they’re trying to support and build out those unique use cases more effectively.
Camille Tate: Thank you. MacBeth?
MacBeth Watson: Yeah. Completely plus one to what Shailvi just said. Adaptability is really huge. I would also say that a lot of it also is that passion and drive to push yourself into places that may not be a one-to-one match. For example, for me, I went from designing webpages to that kind of like, okay, this is what I know. And then I switched to Xbox where I was designing operating systems for Xbox. And it’s like, yes, it’s similar, but it’s different enough to kind of push those other skills. I worked with a very different team. You learn your way through it, but I think it’s also being aware of when you’ve reached that point of what are the challenges that you’re facing? Are you still challenged and then pushing yourself further so, and exploring other options.
Camille Tate: Yeah. Great. Thanks for that. Next, I want to jump into the topic of how do you become great at your job. Obviously, you all are on an executive panel discussing Strava and the work that you do, you’ve been successful in your roles. I have a question for Elyse, Tara, and Danielle, in terms of, from your experience, how do you excel and become great at what you do in your respective roles? We’ll start with Elyse.
Elyse Kolker Gordon: I think from my perspective, starting as an engineer and then in leadership also, it’s being willing to seek out and say yes to opportunities that seem outside of your comfort zone and seem like maybe it’s you’re not ready, but to do it anyway. I think you’ll often surprise yourself and now working with people from a management perspective, I get to see people do that, which is really cool to see. So you can do it. You just got to put yourself out there to be able to do it.
Camille Tate: Thank you. Yeah, Tara?
Tara King-Hughes: I think always be a student because you always want to continue to learn. You don’t necessarily know at all and the great thing about technology, it always evolves, so you want to always stay ahead. Being an active listener, really sitting in and listening to the people around you because you can learn so much. I think you can gain so many insights when you just pause and open your ears. I would also say that sharpening your negotiating skills, especially if you’re in products because everybody wants everything to be number one priority and there have to be trade-offs and so you have to really learn how to negotiate that.
Tara King-Hughes: Then also sharpen your decision-making skills under fire. I would plus one what Elyse said by watching other leaders on how to best handle that with an even temperament will help you go far.
Camille Tate: Yeah. That even temperament will help you to go far. Danielle.
Danielle Guy: Yeah. Definitely remaining calm. Part of a TPM’s responsibility is to be that first line of defense with escalation for teams. When they come to you with a problem, it is best to present calmness back to them so that they can impact, have that temperament when they’re moving into their conversations to find the proper solution to whatever they have going on. Also, developing a growth mindset. Looking at challenges or failures as opportunities to grow and expand on your abilities so that it enables you to be a better partner with your colleagues so you can solve problems more effectively.
Camille Tate: Thank you, Danielle. We’re going to talk about building products. I know that’s what some people came here to talk about how we build inclusive products, but I want to interject a fun question to the panel. I did tell the ladies before we started that I probably am going to catch them off guard with the fun questions. Here it is, if you had to describe your work, what you do every day with a song, what would that song be? Elyse, I know you have one because you’re the musician on the panel.
Elyse Kolker Gordon: I mean, I like this question but I don’t know if I can come up with a song this fast.
Camille Tate: Or even the song that you listened to that gets you motivated. If you’re on a project and you crank it out and you get stuff done.
Elyse Kolker Gordon: I am totally blanking on the name but the first song on the Baby Driver movie soundtrack is very good pump up, need to get in the zone, get excited song. So that’s been my go-to for a while.
Camille Tate: Okay. Shailvi, do you have a song that you listen to or describes your work?
Shailvi Wakhlu: As soon as you said that question, the first two songs that popped into my head, I think they apply, it was, “Under Pressure” by Queen and “Delicate” by Taylor Swift. I think my work is somewhere between those two.
Camille Tate: I love that because I love Queen. Tara, quick song?
Tara King-Hughes: Like Shailvi, I do have one song by Taylor Swift but my first one is “Work That” by Mary J Blige because you always have to work it in product. And the second one is “Shake It Off” because there’s so much stuff that comes your way you just have to “Shake It Off” by Taylor Swift.
Camille Tate: Okay. Lastly, Danielle and Macbeth.
Danielle Guy: Yeah. “Under Pressure” was the first one that came to my mind, but I’d also say “Eye of the Tiger”. Coming in and seeing my list of to-do’s that I have to do and just gearing up and getting into it.
Camille Tate: Thank you. Macbeth?
MacBeth Watson: I would say there’s a song called “Confident” by Demi Lovato and you have to find it some way or another to show up every day.
Camille Tate: Yeah. Thank you for indulging me, ladies. So let’s talk about building inclusive products. What do you all think are the best strategies and pathways to building inclusive products? We can start with Tara.
Tara King-Hughes: Well, first of all, you have to take a very deep breath because it is not easy to build a framework for inclusive product and in fact, just take several deep breaths, but you have to do it because it is absolutely the right thing to do. It’s imperative to include in an inclusive lens throughout the product development life cycle. And if you don’t necessarily have all of the lenses covered, put together an advisory board to help broaden the lens. I think also too, making sure hiring diverse staff, making that a priority, will also help tremendously.
Camille Tate: Danielle?
Danielle Guy: I’d say to come up with a plan, surprising coming from the TPM, but you can’t boil the ocean and there’s a lot of dimensions with inclusivity, so we need to focus in order to make progress. So come up with all the dimensions that you want to target and then lay them out in the phase plan and then get started on the first phase.
Camille Tate: Okay, awesome. Thank you. I’m going to use that, you can’t boil the ocean. In the interest of time, I do want to ask you all some questions about change management and leaning, we’re obviously still in a global pandemic and you all are leaders at Strava. So I want to talk about how ways of work and what change management tools or techniques have you all embraced during this time. So Shailvi, do you have any tips?
Shailvi Wakhlu: Yeah. Absolutely. I think one thing that has become very, very apparent during the pandemic is that everybody’s in a different location. Everybody’s trying to collaborate across a lot of different things and documentation is something that has almost become an absolute requirement in this thing. It’s to not just make sure that you have a plan that is securely communicated, but also make sure that everybody in the team feels included in that plan. They have that transparency on what those pieces are. I think at Strava, we’ve definitely invested a lot of effort into doing that. I’d love to hand over to Danielle to maybe refer to our V2MOM progress, which was such as a fun thing that we rolled out.
Camille Tate: Yeah, Danielle.
Danielle Guy: Yes. Shailvi’s definitely singing my song on documentation and communication. We implemented a V2MOM this most recent cycle for planning and it stands for vision, values, methods, obstacles, and measures, and it actually comes from Salesforce and so we implemented it. It’s similar to OKRs, for anyone not familiar with V2MOM. With this, it allowed us to align what each team was working on across the organization. Everyone was aware, we could highlight dependencies and prerequisites early. It also allowed leadership and cross-functional partners to understand what each of the product teams were working on.
Danielle Guy: With that, we also implemented a more consistent way of documenting our work with backlogs, roadmaps, and we have a status that goes out every Monday so that everyone’s aware of what we’re working on. And I’d like to add to documentation, is to maintain focus. It’s very easy right now with most of us working from home to extend our hours and to have a difficult time in disconnecting. With our most recent cycle, the leadership team all has the same alignment on maintaining balance. We set some guard rails in place to ensure that that teams didn’t overplan them with the amount of time that they had available and that they could still balance the work and their life, along with not being burnt out.
Camille Tate: That’s awesome. That’s great. MacBeth you have anything to add?
MacBeth Watson: Yeah. Actually on a much more something that anyone can take on through is this is one of the things I found is making sure that it’s safe for people to try different approaches. We do not know how to handle this. We are still learning and so how to create an environment where people can try what works for them as well as what works for their teams and by knowing what the goals are and things like that, it really helps. But to be able to check in on that and be intentional, like going back to the office, does that work for this of meeting? Maybe not, maybe it does, things like that and trying different tools.
MacBeth Watson: You may try them for a week and walk away from them but it’s worth the effort and know that no one’s got it right. So you can definitely do it.
Camille Tate: Thanks. Macbeth. There’s a comment in the chat, psychological safety is crucial for innovation within teams. Thanks, Eilene. Yeah. So I want to talk about pivotal career moments and ask you all, this will be our last question in the interest of time, but I want to, there might be a lot of people from various backgrounds here with us tonight.
Camille Tate: I wanted to ask all of you, what are some tips you would give someone who’s at a crossroads in their career, or who wants to transition into the consumer tech industry, whether it be design or product or engineering or data. Can you talk a little bit about that? We start with Elyse.
Elyse Kolker Gordon: Yeah. I mean, I think this goes back to my how do you learn and grow answer. It is like you really leaning into the opportunities. When I was thinking about this topic in advance, I actually was thinking about — I wrote a technical book, which sounds glamorous, but I can assure you that is not a glamorous endeavor and thinking about that I did that with this vague feeling that it would open doors for me and that part was true.
Elyse Kolker Gordon: It definitely helped me move forward in my career, established me as a subject matter expert, got me more opportunities to speak. Probably has helped me with finding jobs. I think that was a very scary thing to do. I had no idea what I was doing. I’d never done it before, being an engineer doesn’t prepare you to be a book author, really. Those are not really adjacent skillsets. I think that’s a good thing to think about is like lean into that fear and being willing to try.
Camille Tate: Yeah. That’s awesome. Leaning into fear. I like that. Thanks, Elyse. Tara, you have any pointers or advice on people that may be at a crossroads or want to get into consumer tech or product engineering, design, program management?
Tara King-Hughes: The only thing that I’d add to what Elyse just said, is just network. So if you see someone out, maybe on LinkedIn, who is in an area that you’re interested in, reach out to them and see if they would mentor you or just have one or two Q and A sessions. There are so many resources out there, free resources that can help you learn and hone in on your craft, and don’t be so hard on yourself, it’s consumer tech, it’s not rocket science, you will definitely get where you want to go.
Camille Tate: Thank you. Danielle?
Danielle Guy: Yeah. Plus one to all of that, for sure, and in addition, I’d like to add, look inside, find what makes you happy, what brings you joy. And don’t be afraid to prioritize yourself. When you look into your next adventure, your next company and role, make sure that your values and beliefs align with whatever company that you’re looking at or whatever role you’re looking at. I think that’ll take everyone very far if they do that.
Camille Tate: Yeah. That’s great advice, Macbeth and then Shailvi.
MacBeth Watson: I think one of the things I have used between each of my big things is recognizing that the skills I have connect to the skills I want to learn and really focusing on what are those things that I want to learn and how do they connect. If it’s a different industry, if it’s a different space. Even if you’re a coach, you could be an amazing manager in a tech company. There’s so many ways to transverse across skills and how they apply into a tech industry that it’s actually just thinking through some of those kinds of things or having the conversations with some the other women have mentioned.
Camille Tate: Okay. Shailvi.
Shailvi Wakhlu: Yeah. Plus one to all of those wonderful thoughts. I think for me, when I think about it, I think of getting comfortable advocating for yourself is so important. I think it’s the best skill that you can learn. I think it’s the best investment that you can make in your career. If you prioritize looking for places that treat you with respect, that provide you a good learning environment and that really have respect for what you bring to the table. So I’d say, go out there and look for those opportunities. As Tara also mentioned, get the help that you need, find those mentors and move forward.
Camille Tate: Thank you so much. Thank you to the panel and I wouldn’t be head of talent at Strava if I didn’t mention that we are hiring, you can go to our website www.strava.com/careers and take a look at what we have to offer. Thank you to Girl Geek for this partnership again, and I’ll transition it back to Angie.
Angie Chang: Thank you. That was awesome. Thank you all so much for speaking on this panel, to all the Girl Geeks who gave lightning talks, those were all really great. These will all be hosted on YouTube later, so you can check them out if you missed them they’ll be emailed to everyone who signed up. So keep an eye out for that.
Angie Chang: The jobs that Camille mentioned, they’re all in the emails from Zoom. We’ll send out another email with the survey and thank you all again for joining for the Strava Girl Geek Dinner in the middle of a pandemic, it is still ongoing, and hopefully one day we’ll see you again soon in person!
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Angie Chang: I want to say hi to everyone. My name is Angie Chang, the founder of Girl Geek X…
Morgan Cole: And welcome to Girl Geek X Opendoor Dinner! I’d like to spend just a few minutes chatting with you all about how you can start or continue cultivating a successful career by prioritizing your own self-awareness…
Heather Natour: One of the things I love about Opendoor is seeing that demonstration of leadership every day with every single person I work with. And I’ve personally seen that leadership demonstrated by these particular panelists…
Annie Tang: …Really keeping in mind that execution matters. It’s not all about like coming up with cool ideas. We need to keep a high bar for what we do.
Maggie Moreno: There’s no shortage of good ideas, only people to make those ideas a reality…
Amy Yang: I’m going to give you a flavor of the type of problem and a project data scientists are working with at Opendoor. Specifically, this is a multiple hypothesis testing problem…
Sumedha Pramod: I’m going to start with an opener. We actually filled out a variety of customer experiences and dashboards, which spanned from educating the customer on buying and/or selling their home, all the way through to actually digitally closing on their home…
Angie Chang: Thank you all for sharing your insights and your journeys with us! Really enjoyed all the talks and the conversation about this is what leadership looks like. Cool. We are going live with our Opendoor Girl Geek Dinner. I want to say hi to everyone. I see people are joining us. Can you chat to us where you’re coming in from. I’m coming in from Berkeley, California. How about you, Sukrutha?
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hi everyone. I’m Sukrutha. I’m dialed in from Yosemite this weekend.
Angie Chang: Cool. Awesome. Quick intros. My name is Angie Chang, the founder of Girl Geek X. When we started Girl Geek Dinners over a decade ago, I was the only female engineer at a startup, and I really just wanted to meet other women in tech.
Angie Chang: I started asking companies to host Girl Geek Dinners, so that we could go to different companies and hear from the women on stage about what they’re working on. And then also be able to meet other amazing people like yourselves, which we’ll be doing after the talks. I was able to meet people like Sukrutha. So Sukrutha, why don’t you just tell us a bit about you and what you’re up to?
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yeah. I met Angie because I was looking for things to do outside of work and that’s how I ended up finding out about Girl Geek Dinners and Angie. Honestly, I think everybody is craving a network now more than ever, and this is part of why us doing it virtual makes it possible. We encourage you to have your respective company that you work at to sponsor a Girl Geek Dinner. We hope that at some point in the near future, we’ll be able to see you all in real life.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: By day, I also work at a large company, namely Salesforce, and we’re also transitioning back into the office. The way people are working right now is so different. We can work from anywhere, so we should also be able to network from anywhere. So yeah, I look forward to tonight’s content and the speakers are all amazing. Over to you, Angie.
Angie Chang: While we wait, we have a few minutes to say some things. I wanted to quickly say some things that we’ve done since we started. We have a virtual conference every International Women’s Day called Elevate and it’s March 8th. And it will be again, March 8th, in 2022. And all the talks are recorded and hosted at youtube.com/girlgeekx – you can actually find all those conference talks, all the Girl Geek Dinner events, and tonight’s talks. If you have to drop off, go make dinner, we totally understand that. Everything’s available on YouTube later in case you can’t stay for the entire hour or two.
Angie Chang: And pro tip, look at the playlists, because they’re actually categorized into different things like career journeys, management, engineering, machine learning, and you can dig into what you’re interested in and see what other girl geeks have spoken about over the years on those topics.
Angie Chang: We also have a podcast. So if you like to listen, like I do, we have two seasons, I believe, of podcast and we have another season coming out this summer, so stay tuned for that. We’ll have some new content coming out.
Angie Chang: And then we also are going to be contributing to our local community here in the San Francisco Bay Area and adopting a middle school/high school and really contributing to enriching and helping support the students there who are interested in STEM. So stay in the lookout for news on that.
Angie Chang: That’s another opportunity where we can see you and hopefully engage you with some students and get them inspired to stay in STEM. So a quick note, I want to kind of say, who is here tonight. I looked at our attendee list about half an hour ago, and I saw that we have about 45% of you, have over a decade of work experience.
Angie Chang: Often when I go to networking events, people always say everyone’s junior or they just got out of college or they’re looking for their first job out of a bootcamp. That might be true, that might not be true, but also at the same time, there’s a lot of really, I would call mid-career people, who are out there, and continue to come back to these events, so I really say thank you for coming back! And continuing to dig in and learn more about companies and the people that work at them.
Angie Chang: And I’m really excited that tonight we are going to be listening to the women at Opendoor. If you haven’t heard of Opendoor, it is a real estate startup company and I’m sure the women will be talking more about what they’ve been working on at Opendoor, so I’m going to turn it over to them, the experts.
Angie Chang: Our first speaker, the keynote speaker, is Morgan Cole. And Morgan Cole joined Opendoor in 2017, where she’s helped many, many customers transition to their dream homes and served as a people leader for sales and support. And she’s currently supporting learning development team as a senior trainer and curriculum specialist with an emphasis on instructional design, internal partner relations, and creative problem solving across multiple organizations. So when she isn’t navigating the world of L and D, you can find her spending time with her sour patch, pup, Arthur. So welcome Morgan.
Morgan Cole: Hello. Thank you so much for the warm welcome, Angie. I really appreciate that. I am going to go ahead and share my screen and then we’ll go ahead and get rolling. All right. Can you see that okay?
Angie Chang: Yes.
Morgan Cole: Very good. All right. Hello everyone. And welcome to Girl Geek X Opendoor Dinner! My name is Morgan Cole, and I’d like to spend just a few minutes chatting with you all about how you can start or continue cultivating a successful career by prioritizing your own self-awareness.
Morgan Cole: Now, before we dive in, I should share just one quick tidbit about myself. I am a words of affirmation girl. It is the love language that rivals all others, in my book. So that said, I am going to need your help just to make sure we’re all on the same page this evening. So if you all are ready to kick off this conversation, just take two seconds for me and go ahead and type the word yes, Y-E-S in the chat box at the bottom of your screen, just let me know you’re ready to rock and roll. Go ahead and type Y-E-S. Oh, they are trickling in. I like it. Very good. Very good. That was a test, and you all pass with flying colors. So let’s do it.
Morgan Cole: So a few years ago, Dr. Tasha Eurich, who is a best-selling author, she’s a psychologist and founder of the Eurich Group, her and her team, they conducted a study with nearly about 5,000 participants. And the purpose of this study was to better understand the meaning of self-awareness. Here we are. The research team’s findings, they were actually pretty astounding, they learned that there are actually two types of self-awareness. The first one is internal self-awareness and the second is external self-awareness. Now, the thing to note here is that these are not mutually exclusive, meaning it is possible to possess one or both types.
Morgan Cole: Now, before I dive into each type of awareness and the role that it plays in our professional and in our personal lives, I am curious to know your thoughts on this next question. So if you look on your screen here, you’ll see the question reads, how many people do you believe are actually self-aware to some degree? Do you think it’s A, 10 to 15% of people, B, 15 to 20%, C, 20 to 30%, or D, 30 to 40%? If you had to guess, how many people do you think are actually self-aware? Go ahead and type in A, B, C, or D in the chat box for me and let me know your thoughts.
Morgan Cole: Oh, a handful trickling. It’s a mixed bag. Very good. Thank you all so much for the responses. I appreciate that. So while you all are still continuing to put in your choices, I’ll tell you the not so fantastic news is that the average human believes they’re self-aware, but only 10 to 15% of those people actually fit the criteria.
Morgan Cole: The good news is that self-awareness is a learned behavior. What that means is that we can strive to inch just a little bit closer to fully understanding how we tick and what truly motivates us and how to dissect the depth of our perceptions of the world around us. And it also aids in stronger leadership competencies too.
Morgan Cole: Going back to the two types of self-awareness I spoke about a few seconds ago, let’s explore internal self-awareness first. Now internal self-awareness, it represents how clearly we see our own values and passions and aspirations, your thoughts, your feelings, your impact on others.
Morgan Cole: Studies have shown that this type of awareness correlates with higher job and relationship satisfaction, as well as just general happiness. Meanwhile, external self-awareness, it represents understanding other people’s perceptions of our value systems and our thoughts or our feelings, right?
Morgan Cole: Essentiall,y folks that drift toward external self-awareness, they typically understand how others view them and they’re more skilled at showing empathy and taking in other people’s perspectives as a result.
Morgan Cole: The takeaway here is that it’s most impactful to try to strike a balance between both subtypes of awareness, rather than over-indexing on one or the other, because here’s the truth, being crystal clear about who you innately are, your own behavior patterns, and what you need and want is form of leadership.
Morgan Cole: Self-awareness – it catapults your ability to clearly articulate your desires and ask for help in forging the appropriate path to get you there. This next slide, it’s a quick map that actually breaks down four self-awareness archetypes, which is basically how we present to the world based on the depth of internal or external self-awareness that we possess. I’m going to save you a bit of time, and I’m just going to give you a quick overview of these four categories. No need to read through each line.
Morgan Cole: The top left quadrant, it shows how high internal self-awareness and low external self-awareness is typically referred to as introspective. It depicts people who clearly understand themselves, but they rarely challenge their own views. And in some cases, this particular quadrant can limit their interpersonal relationships.
Morgan Cole: Now, the bottom left quadrant symbolizes seekers. These are folks with low internal and external awareness. And people that are currently navigating this quadrant, they might be in a state of self-discovery and may perhaps be a bit unsettled or in a state of flux in their personal or professional lives. Now going over to the bottom right quadrant, low internal and high external awareness, those are telltale signs of a people pleaser. This means that someone may be hyper-focused on how other people view them, sometimes to the detriment of their own personal or professional contentment.
Morgan Cole: And in many instances, folks that work through this category, they’re known to make decisions that are not always in service of their own success. And in some respects, it can be considered a self-saboteur. And last, but certainly not least, at the top, right quadrant, that depicts high internal and external awareness, which insinuates that a person is keenly aware about themselves or the external environment and they value candid feedback from other people. There was a study specifically from Gallup that show people in this particular category are generally proven to be good leaders in a plethora of environments because they intentionally seek out balance and inter and intra personal skills. So those are the four archetypes.
Morgan Cole: Now with those four archetypes in mind and in the spirit of bravery and transparency and leadership, I would love for you all to just take a few seconds, just to think about which one of those four categories you believe you are currently in, in your career. Go ahead and just write it down on a sticky note, or perhaps the note section on your phone or a piece of scratch paper, whatever you have nearby in your home. And this is only for your personal use. But take a look at those four categories and jot down which category you believe you’re currently in. Now, I wouldn’t ask you all to do anything that I wasn’t willing to do. So in my case, I’m actually going to share my self-awareness experience aloud. So full transparency, I toggle between being aware and the people pleaser. I do.
Morgan Cole: And I’ll share an example that clearly depicts this. Two of my former leaders at Opendoor, they taught me very early on in my career that in order to gain sustainable success, it was going to be my responsibility to always ask questions, to always raise my hand for help and to speak up and finish what I started. But here’s the only problem with that, I interpreted most of those tasks as signs of weakness, almost like a bird’s eye view of my professional inadequacies or inefficiencies.
Morgan Cole: And let me just tell you this, thank goodness for patient and nurturing leaders, because it took about two years for me to really get over this hump. And while it sounds a little half witted for me to say now, I truly believed asking questions or raising my hand for help would inadvertently highlight the things that I had not yet mastered. And my aha moment was, “That’s the point, Morgan. That’s the point.” I needed to acknowledge the things that I had not mastered because you can’t fix what’s hidden and you can’t practice what you refuse to acknowledge.
Morgan Cole: So when I finally came to terms with what was holding me back, myself, I held onto this quote from Thomas Edison that I love, and it reads, “Having a vision for what you want in life is not enough. Vision without execution is hallucination.” So while I could go on and on about this topic for days, I do know that time is of the essence, but I want to leave you all with a parting gift. So I challenge each of you to take about 30 seconds, and I want you to recall a book or an author or a podcast or perhaps maybe even an article that has been especially helpful in building your leadership skills or self-awareness or interpersonal skills, anything that has helped you in your career.
Morgan Cole: Go ahead and take a few seconds to just think of that one resource, or maybe there’s a few of them that you always go to when somebody asks you for a recommendation. And once you have that resource in mind, I would love it if all of you can go ahead and type it in the chat box below for me. And while you all are typing and putting in your resources, I’m going to share three books that have been especially impactful for me.
Morgan Cole: Now, the first one is called The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. It’s really a good book about getting out of your own way. And it was really helpful for me about a year and a half ago. The second one is a person that we all know and love, Brene Brown’s Dare to Lead. It’s a classic. I would venture to say reading it once a year is always a good idea. I always get gems from Dare to Lead. And the last book that I loved is actually called Get Over It! by Iyanla Vanzant. It’s a really great self-help book that talks from a professional and a personal standpoint about removing yourself from yourself, so that you can present your best self when you are in a professional setting. So just to recap, my top three books, The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks, Dare to Lead by Brene Brown, and then Get Over It! by Iyanla Vanzant.
Morgan Cole: Now, let me see what you all have in the chat box here. I’ve got a couple coming in, The Power of Gentleness. Ooh, very good. Thinking Fast and Slow. Thank you all. Continue to go ahead and put them in as you see fit. And as books and articles come to mind, please continue to trickle them in for me. This is actually my first time reading about some of these titles. So thank you. Thank you to everybody who’s sharing so openly. This chat is chock-full of resources, and it’s an endless gift to each of us. There’s an African proverb that says, if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together. And tonight’s conversation and your willingness to offer resources to cultivate your peers will continue to build an equitable bridge between different ethnicities, self identified genders, and neurological differences in this ever evolving world of business.
Morgan Cole: So take that sticky note or that note on your phone with your self-awareness type on it that I mentioned earlier, and the plethora of resources that you now have in this chat box, and I would love for all of you to use it as a first step to discovering how you can continue to evolve into the best version of yourself in business and in life. So thank you all so much for your open hearts and your listening ears and collaboration and huge thanks to Girl Geek team for cultivating a platform that acknowledges and celebrates women in tech. I am so, so appreciative.
Morgan Cole: For our next speaker, I would love to introduce the one and only Annie Tang. Annie is a Senior Design Manager for Seller at Opendoor where she works on drastically simplifying the home selling experience. And in her time at Opendoor, Annie has worked on designing various aspects of the Opendoor consumer experience like trade-ins, buying and mortgages, but outside of that, she loves to hang out with her sweet pup. So without further ado, Annie, I’m going to pass it off to you.
Annie Tang: All right, here we go. Sorry. I don’t use Zoom every day. Oh my gosh, Morgan. That was such an amazing and inspiring talk. This is actually not my first time hearing it from Morgan, but actually I always feel inspired the second time around too and it really got me thinking about the internal self-awareness piece, especially because I think as we think about self-awareness, it’s easy to think about the external piece, at least for me. And so this really got me thinking about the internal piece. With that, I’ll transition over to my talk for the day and that is about design and strategy at Opendoor. So like Morgan said, I’m the senior design manager for Seller. Seller is one of our teams here at Opendoor and I manage the team of designers that work on that experience for our customers.
Annie Tang: A little bit about me. I started out at architecture, so did not study UX design at all. And worked at a couple of various larger scale companies before I found my way to Opendoor. And the reason why I joined Opendoor about four and a half years ago was really I wanted to work on a very complex real-world problem. And at the time, it was a pretty small startup and I was really excited by the opportunities that it gave.
Annie Tang: But most importantly, I was really excited to design for online and offline experiences where I wasn’t really selling an app or an interface, but I was actually thinking through selling a service that included both the digital experience and a real world component to it, and that felt really exciting to me.
Annie Tang: And so today, I’m going to talk to you a little bit about design and before I get into it, I wanted to get a signal maybe in the chat, you can put it in the chat if any of you guys have been watching Mythic Quest, it’s been a favorite around our house lately. Angie definitely has. There’s a couple other people. I personally am loving it. My husband and I really love to watch this show. But one gripe, I will say, that I do have about this is that it really centers around this myth of the creative genius where you’ve got this creative director who over the course of the night comes up with these amazing visions for the new game and the art director and team just creates it and there’s no research or anything and makes for great TV!
Annie Tang: But unfortunately that is not really how design actually works in real life. And so over the course of designing and my design career, what I’ve realized is core for design and for product design actually, and creating products is that the genius-ness, the coming up with the ideas isn’t actually the hard part.
Annie Tang: And it’s a good thing and a bad thing. It means that even if you feel like you’re not an ideas person and you don’t have that, it’s not the end-all be-all to being a designer and also at the same time, being a designer doesn’t mean that you’re just the one coming up with ideas and other people execute.
Annie Tang: A lot of being a designer is validating the idea, effectively communicating across the company and figuring out how to build it out. And so I’m going to go over that little bit with a two-part agenda.
Annie Tang: I’ll talk through some of the principles that we have within design team at Opendoor that help guide us to make sure that we’re really being diligent about how we design for our customers. And then I’ll also walk through a case study for what we did for our Seller experience last year where we designed the experience end to end when COVID hit and really helped our customers figure out a way to sell their home faster and on their own time.
Annie Tang: Principle number one that I have with our team is we always start with research, we never forget the data. Every idea should be backed by reasons why people’s lives will be better with it. What we do is we spend a lot of time talking to our customers, our users, to discover problems and validate possible solutions before we even get into any ideating phase. It’s really important for us to really empathize with our customers and really understand what those needs are.
Annie Tang: A couple of ways that we do this, at a high level is qualitative research and quantitative research. On the qualitative level, that’s really talking to our customers, doing user interviews. An insight that we might get out of qualitative research could be something like I have here, which is, meet Linda. Linda’s looking to sell her home and buy a new one. She is completely overwhelmed with the process of coordinating two transactions to line up her move, and that’s the buy and sell transactions.
Annie Tang: We’re talking to customers and really getting at what is really difficult for them in their process. Quantitative research is really about sizing this opportunity. So it could amount in something like this, like Linda, 70% of home sellers in the United States are simultaneously buying and selling a home at the same time. This basically tells us this is a real need. And actually, a ton of people are experiencing this need. And so that really centers around a problem that we can obsess over then that we can ideate upon. So the second principle that we really adhere to is first visualize the experience, not just the UI.
Annie Tang: I’ve worked with tons of designers over my career, designers junior and senior. I’ve seen so many folks, when we get a new prompt, or we get a new idea, we immediately hit the pixels and we design out a shiny experience, and it’s really, really amazing.
Annie Tang: We forget that actually the customer needs to be the star of the story. It’s not about the UI. And so what we really emphasize is when we start thinking about new ideas or solving problems, we think about the story, we think about the customer and how they experience the flow from end to end. And sometimes when we do storyboards like this, sometimes we do flow charts, but it’s really about putting the customer at the forefront of the story first and then the UI and the pixels fall to support that.
Annie Tang: Here’s an example of some work that we do when we put together flows and comps. You’ll see that we have the digital experience, but also first, we have images that support kind of telling a story of what happens in real life. We’ve got text updates and someone on the couch receiving them, we’ve got a walkthrough prep and imagining that a customer is cleaning their home and getting ready for a walkthrough before they log onto their mobile app to do that walk through. Really putting it situational with the designs is really core to how we try to think about designing new products.
Annie Tang: And then the last principle that we have is really that execution matters and we sweat the details. Again, design isn’t just about the idea and the strategy, equally important is the craft and the execution. Actually, a lot of times what I’ve seen is the final idea that gets executed might not be the most novel thing, but if we execute it really well and really diligent about it, and we track it, and we learn from it, that’s really what makes a product successful. What we really enforce is every detail, every pixel of experience matters, not just the strategy, also exactly how we execute it so that we’re delivering a high quality experience to our end customers.
Annie Tang: With those principles, I’m going to walk you guys through a tactical case study to kind of bring this to life and show you guys at a high level how we go about big design projects at Opendoor. What this case study is at a high level, I’m going to walk you through how we ended up designing a centralized dashboard for our Opendoor experience, where the design team created a vision to unify several parts of our experience, which guided a lot of the product roadmap throughout 2020.
Annie Tang: Starting with the problems and the research. What did we find? In 2019, throughout the course of the year, what we found is that our experience that Opendoor was just really disjointed. Customers were telling us that they were getting dead ends, that there was a lot of long wait times in between parts of the experience, and one thing that we give to our customers is they come to us and we give them an offer on their home.
Annie Tang: Starting with the problems and the research. So what did we find? So in 2019, throughout the course of the year, what we found is that our experience that Opendoor was just really disjointed. Customers were telling us that they were getting dead ends, that there was a lot of long wait times in between parts of the experience, and one thing that we give to our customers is they come to us and we give them an offer on their home. There was a really long wait time and they didn’t know what was coming up next. There was a lot of scheduling coordination going on. There’s a lot of things happening and a lot of dead ends and people didn’t really know what the next step was, and that was really impacting our customer experience.
Annie Tang: At the end of the 2019, what we did is we got together a group of cross-functional leaders, PMs, designers, engineers, and operators and we did a sprint over the course of a week. What we really wanted to do was figure out a strategy to solve those problems that we have identified from our research team and try to help to come up with a visualization of an end state, a future state that we want to aim towards by the end of the year that would solve all the identified problems that we had, and that would hopefully guide our work. And that way we can break it out into chunks that we can kind of slowly build towards over the course of the year.
Annie Tang: And the output of that sprint, what we created was a single narrative for that in-state. So we actually did, was we created a deck that included pieces like the images that we see on the right where we actually just laid out a story for our customer, Jill, who was looking to buy and sell, and we put together a couple screens, but really focusing on the story and how she feels and what she’s interacting with. We created this vision deck, and we actually tested a couple of these high-level concepts with potential customers.
Annie Tang: What we aimed to do is we really want to show strong concepts that were new to the experience that we could refine at a later time, but it was really about thinking about this new experience for our customer (Jill) that would solve all of her needs by the end of the year.
Annie Tang: A couple of the big ideas that came out of this was the idea for the Opendoor dashboard where we would centralize all of these disjointed experiences into one place where our customers can come back to see what’s next.
Annie Tang: But a couple of different ideas too, was like this idea of an instant offer. Previously we were having customers wait 24, 48 hours. What if we can give them an instant offer? As they were telling us information about their home, we can update their offer live.
Annie Tang: What if we could give them clear milestones? We always internally call it pizza tracker kind of like the Domino’s pizza tracker, but what if we could make it super clear like that for every stage of this buying and selling process on their dashboard?
Annie Tang: Another big pain point was that customers were having to schedule these inspections and figure out how to line up having people come to their homes. What if we leverage technology and help customers do self guided inspections where they could just upload a couple of photos of their home and we could do the inspection without having to actually go into their home?
Annie Tang: All of these ideas culminated into this vision deck and what was really cool that came out of it, is once we had an aligned vision where we were wanting to go towards for the end of the year, we could then formulate a roadmap and piece off different projects that each team would then take to work towards that vision. And we could get really tactical and figure out what the right way to execute towards it would be.
Annie Tang: And the great thing about this is that the sub teams then had a more or less unified idea of where we wanted to head towards and build towards for the year. So these are just some screens about how we sweated the details. We started from each project then, went through various rounds of research and low fidelity mocks on the left side to high fidelity mocks in the right side. Ultimately, whittling down to one experience that we ultimately shipped. I have Q and A on here, but we’re actually going to save Q and A until the very end, but that’s it on an example of how we design at Opendoor, both on a principle level and also in terms of case study.
Annie Tang: And with that, I’m going to introduce Amy. Amy is a Senior Data Scientist on the advanced analytics team at Opendoor. Her responsibilities include defining and leading pragmatic, casual learning practice at a company level using advanced experimentation and decision science techniques. So welcome Amy.
Amy Yang: Hi everybody. First, thank you, Annie, for the great showcase of all the cool design work your team have been working on. I’m a senior data scientist at Opendoor. I’m going to give you a flavor of the type of problem and project data scientists are working with at Opendoor. Specifically, this is a multiple-hypothesis testing problem. As you all know, this multiple-hypothesis testing problem means when we do more statistical tests, we’re more likely to make a type one error, which is a false positive discovery.
Amy Yang: Here is an illustration where we test 20 kinds of colors of different colors of jellybeans and how they show a correlation with acne. One out of the 20 tests will show a significant correlation, even though it’s purely out of random noise. That’s telling us whenever we do statistical tests, we want to control the overall type one error rate in case there is cumulative inflation by… The more tests we do, the more likely we are going to see a significant result.
Amy Yang: At Opendoor, the problem came up frequently specifically for product improvement, sometimes we want to track multiple outcomes of interest, not just one. When we want to evaluate the effect of certain product change, long-term or short-term outcomes, we are encountering this problem. Or if we want to dissect the data set into multiple subgroups and then do a statistical test within each subgroup, we are encountering the same problem.
Amy Yang: Sometimes we want to run an experiment with multiple treatment groups, not just one case which is one control group., where we have multiple treatments, we want to test each one compared to the other one, which one give us a [inaudible]. So other scenario we’ll generate this multiple hypothesis testing problem. If you look at the literature, you will find out statistically, there are ways to control this type of type one error rate inflation by adjusting your p-value.
Amy Yang: For example, some common measure you will see are Bonferroni corrections or a Holm’s method, false discovery rate control. Those are all thoroughly researched statistical methodology to control this problem. However, practically we have some objections when using this type of statistical method.
Amy Yang: People will say p-value adjustments are actually pretty arbitrary by the number of tests we are going to consider. How do you decide what’s the correct number of tests we are doing to adjust? Should we adjust tests we have done in the past? Should we adjust tests have been done in other teams but not specifically our teams.
Amy Yang: This number becomes very arbitrary and sometimes people will use this arbitrary concept to falsely adjust the total number of tests. The other objection is when we reduce the type one error, we are inherently increasing our type two error rate, which means we don’t have enough power to detect a significant true result which also means we are going to increase our total sample set.
Amy Yang: To solve this controversial problem as a data scientist, we come up with a very practical recommendation and strategies not only for researcher and the data scientists, but also for leaders and stakeholders who are going to review and read those report.
Amy Yang: For example, we would recommend not just focus on interpreting the p-value part, but also focus on the true magnitude or the effect size of the finding from the data. Also, we want to pay attention to the quality of the study and the data set.
Amy Yang: Focus on more from the design and the data quality side of the report and the study, not just purely based on the p-value from the study. For researcher and the data scientist, we come up with a set of statistical methodology recommendation, for example, when handling correlated outcome or metrics.
Amy Yang: We have this index method that can utilize the correlated information from multiple outcomes. Try to aggregate the common information and reduce the type one error rate, or we have this Bayesian multilevel modeling method. Completely move away from the frequent test p-value based decision making process and move to a more Bayesian probabilistic recommendation system.
Amy Yang: Practically, we also give recommendations. One of my favorite recommendation is rewrite the error rate into family-wise error rate control system based on theoretical related test groups. Let’s say you have two set of tests. Three tests, all measuring user satisfaction. You may have different metrics, but you are going to run three tests, they are all follow the user satisfaction category. You have another set of tests which are testing the total error rate or page load speed, which can fall into the safety metrics category. In this case, instead of submitting the total error rate across all the tests equally, you can divide them by the two family. So each family can share their own overall error rate.
Amy Yang: Now that’s just one project data scientists are working on at Opendoor. I also want to use this opportunity to introduce some of the other projects data scientists work with at Opendoor. Why is Opendoor investing so much on data quality and data rigorous and that data science role? It’s because Opendoor business is really unique and it’s very complex.
Amy Yang: If you think about housing transaction, it’s very important, and maybe you only do one or two housing transactions in your whole life. It’s very complex, the transaction process. Second challenge is our data is super sparse. Due to it’s a rare event, we don’t have repetitive interaction with a customer. Sometimes we only serve the customer once or twice in their whole lifetime. It brings a lot of analytical and statistical challenge. We don’t have the luxury of the e-commerce or internet type of traffic.
Amy Yang: A lot of the decision we are making need to depend on statistical influence and statistical expertise at Opendoor. The last point is optimization. We want to produce the best user customer experience with constrained amount of time and constrained cost. We want to work within limited costs and trying to optimize within the constraint and the produce the best customer experience.
Amy Yang: I’m going to share with you some other typical projects our data scientist team work with, for example, in the buyer team, we study the local housing demand and the price elasticity, and we feed that information to our resale pricing team in order to better or more accurately price the resell price for the home we acquired.
Amy Yang: In the seller team, we try to target specific seller group and provide more customized seller experience by serving based on seller input. Their characteristic provide a different type of unique service. So that’s our optimization model our data scientist team work on. From pricing side, we want to understand how to combat risk, adverse selection, and the competition and build other factor and the macro information into our pricing model. So that’s an overall introduction for the data science team and some of the cool project we’re working on.
Amy Yang: I’m going to introduce our next speaker, which is Maggie. Maggie is a Senior Software Engineer on the sales and the support team at Opendoor. Maggie has been a part of a wide range of projects at Opendoor, and recently she co-designed and is currently implementing a new role-based access control system for the company internal tooling. Outside of work, Maggie is a competitive swing dancer. Welcome Maggie.
Maggie Moreno: Thank you, Amy. Hi. I’m Maggie. And I’m going to talk about role-based access control at Opendoor. In this talk I’ll go over what role-based access control is generally, what the design goals were for Opendoor’s RBAC system, technical design of our RBAC system, and some challenges and recommendations from our experience. If you aren’t familiar with the term role-based access control, I can almost guarantee you are familiar with the concept. At a high level, in an RBAC system what a user can and cannot access is based on their assigned role. There are three main data entities, users, roles, and permissions. Let’s take GitHub as an example.
Angie Chang: Hey, Maggie. Real quick. Can you share your slides? I don’t think we see them.
Maggie Moreno: Oh, yeah. You know, it goes to show all the preparation in the world…
Angie Chang: Perfect.
Maggie Moreno: Let’s take GitHub as an example. Can you guys see my slides now?
Angie Chang: Yes.
Maggie Moreno: Excellent. Thank you. GitHub. I am part of the backend infra team, which means that my role is an administrator on the web Repo, which means that I can access admin features like merging pull requests without all the checks passing.
Maggie Moreno: For Opendoor’s role-based access control system, we have some very specific design goals. As a result of going public in 2020, we needed to comply with the Financial Operations Act, widely known as SOX. SOX compliance can mean different things for different companies, but the most pertinent part of SOX compliance for Opendoor was showing that only authorized employees were allowed to perform financially sensitive actions.
Maggie Moreno: Other goals for the system included easy use of maintenance for engineers, straightforward management for IT, and peace of mind for security. Security was a bigger concern than usual for our new RBAC system because we would be trusting the system with protecting financially sensitive actions from both internal and external users. We wanted employees to follow a clear process to change role and permission assignments.
Maggie Moreno: In our design, we assigned roles to users in Okta, an industry standard authentication and authorization tool, bringing a lot of advantages for security and IT. We already have moved towards using Okta for authentication for our internal tooling and this change felt like a natural extension of prior work.
Maggie Moreno: We store our permission to role mapping in a separate service config, which means that changes were handled through GitHub. It also means that for every API we call a role to permission service Gatekeeper to check the users roles. API end points are tied with permissions directly in the code, which is easy for engineers to implement and maintain. And once we get the users roles from Gatekeeper, we check whether they match the permissions for that API end point.
Maggie Moreno: Our biggest challenge for this project we encountered in the design phase. We had a big challenge understanding what SOX compliance would mean for Opendoor and what actions we should take to limit access first. Like many companies, Opendoor has a few different deployment environments for our internal tooling, and one of our biggest questions was whether we could limit our RBAC gating to one of these deployment environments. After further exploration, we discovered that that was not the case and this significantly changed our design requirements.
Maggie Moreno: Additionally, this project stress tested how major engineering design decisions are made at Opendoor. Getting alignment on the critical design decisions was especially difficult given the lack of clarity on the scope of the project. If you happen to find yourself in a similar situation in the future, we recommend that you clarify and align on your RBAC project goals before you start the design process. We also recommend involving cross-team stakeholders early in the project and communicate to engineering management early and often if the project needs more resources. Thanks.
Maggie Moreno: The next speaker is Sumedha. Sumedha is a Senior Software Engineer at Opendoor on the seller core experience team. She builds out various tools and interfaces to help customers find a home selling experience which best suits their needs, whether that is listing or selling their home using Opendoor services. These range from dashboards to see their home value to a digital closing experience.
Maggie Moreno: She also manages and maintains Opendoor’s design systems and React UI component libraries, which power the Opendoor site and admin tools. Outside of work, Sumedha is an avid baker and always trying to find ways to fit more plants into her environment. Welcome Sumedha.
Sumedha Pramod: Hi. Thanks Maggie. Sorry for taking over a little bit early. Role-based access control and SOX compliance are so important now that we’re a public company. It’s really great to see what went on behind the scenes to make that all happen. Hi. I’m Sumedha.
Sumedha Pramod: On the Seller team at Opendoor, we actually filled out a variety of customer experiences and dashboards, which spanned from educating the customer on buying and/or selling their home all the way through actually digitally closing on their home.
Sumedha Pramod: As you can imagine, the UI gets increasingly more complex as the functionality gets more and more important. This means that customers need to be 100% sure that they’re trusting their home and their money with Opendoor and that the site that they’re on, and that they’re signing contracts on is legit. Delivering on these expectations while continuing to add new features requires pretty thorough testing and it also helps us as a company build trust, brand, and consistency across all of our customer experiences.
Sumedha Pramod: With different UIs, it’s not as straightforward to catch a lot of UI changes and things like colors, font sizes, mobile responsiveness, and all those little nitty gritty things aren’t as easy to catch. Especially when there’s a ton of engineers working on the same UI, it’s pretty easy to miss if one person’s change unintentionally impacts everyone’s experience. I spend a lot of time personally staring at my team’s customer experiences, so I tend to notice some pretty nitpicky changes, but that doesn’t mean that an engineer from another team has the UI memorized the same way. This is amplified even more with design systems and shared component libraries, because a lot of these components that are changing are used across tons of different experiences.
Sumedha Pramod: At Opendoor, we have a bunch of micro front ends and a single change to a shared component like the button here on the left-hand side can have an unintended side effect on pretty much every experience at Opendoor without people really realizing it. UI regression tests are one of the ways that we found to actually help mitigate a lot of these unintentional UI side effects.
Sumedha Pramod: It allows us to compare screenshots of the UI or visual snapshots against a predefined baseline. It really helps us catch a lot of these really nit picky things. And it also helps us QA the user experience in a way a lot easier. And it helps us QA against design expectations. Additionally, we can also develop a lot of these components in a completely isolated environment without any kind of network calls. We don’t have to worry about data loading or any of that, we can really focus just on the UI and the pixel perfect stuff.
Sumedha Pramod: At Opendoor, we use a combination of two frameworks called Percy and Storybook, which are two different open source tools that enable the development and documentation of UI components and also automating a lot of that UI screenshot testing. In this example, you can see that we have a dashboard being rendered, but what we can actually turn this pretty simple unit test into something that renders a component.
Sumedha Pramod: If you want, you can have it mock out some data calls, do all that stuff, and you can actually render that and test it against a specific baseline. UI regression testing or UI visual screenshots don’t actually replace your standard unit tests or smoke tests or integration tests. Since those actually validate the expected behavior and experiences, this is really just to focus on the nitpicky UI things, so things like the CSS changes that I mentioned earlier.
Sumedha Pramod: Also you have all those other tests to validate behaviors such as whether or not a [inaudible] pops up when a user clicks a button or typing something in an input field will enable a button somewhere else. And this isn’t just useful for engineering, it’s been extremely helpful when QAing new features and designs. It’s also greatly reduced the amount of back and forth as we’re launching new features with design where we’re like, “This is a little bit off, this pixel is a little bit off.” As we’re developing, we can send these over and we can make sure that any future changes isn’t actually breaking that experience.
Sumedha Pramod: All of these things combined allow us to develop really beautiful and seamless experiences for customers and really make one of the most expensive and biggest transactions in people’s lives a little less scary.
Sumedha Pramod: Now, I’ll turn it over to Heather for our next segment. Heather brings 22 years of engineering experience to Opendoor, having led teams at Lyft, Capital One and Blackboard. At Opendoor, she leads the engineering organization focused on the core product experience for home sellers along with growth initiatives and retail partnerships. Heather lives in Berkeley, California with her husband and two boys. Welcome Heather.
Heather Natour: Thank you, Sumedha. And thank you so much for presenting on the Storybook and Percy testing. I’ve personally seen the impact of that on our quality and productivity. And I’m really excited to host this next session which will be a Q & A with our panelists.
Heather Natour: I’d like to invite everyone back to come back on the screen. And while they’re doing that, I wanted to talk about leadership in this Q & A, and as an engineering leader, I believe we should be creating opportunities for leadership at all levels, whether you’re an intern or a staff engineer.
Heather Natour: And one of the things I love about Opendoor is seeing that demonstration of leadership every day with every single person I work with. And I’ve personally seen that leadership demonstrated by these particular panelists.
Heather Natour: I’d love to ask each of you first, what do each of you believe has contributed to your ability to demonstrate leadership at Opendoor? I think we have everybody on now. So Morgan, maybe we’ll start with you.
Morgan Cole: Sure. Thank you, Heather. I appreciate the question. There’s two things that come to mind for me. The first piece I would say is, it sounds pretty simple, but I have practiced the art of assuming good intent at all costs in every scenario. Because I think sometimes in leadership, it can be quite easy to become a little bit defensive because you want to do well and you want to show up correctly, and so I think if you operate from a perspective of no matter what’s thrown at me, I’m going to assume that this was thrown at me with good intention, it will help calm that defensiveness so that you can respond in an appropriate manner. So that’s the first piece.
Morgan Cole: The second piece I would say is the team that I’m on specifically has done a really good job of teaching me how to lead collaboratively. I think it’s super important that whenever you are leading, whether it’s a new project, whether it’s a team, whether you’re just building new relationships with other partners throughout your business, it’s vital, it’s paramount that you don’t look at yourself as the single source of truth, but rather you work in conjunction with the parties that are involved to make sure that you all are leading in the same direction. So the two that I would say is assuming good intent and leading collaboratively.
Heather Natour: Yeah. That’s so true and really insightful, Morgan. I really appreciate your thoughts. How about you, Annie?
Annie Tang: Hey guys. I am unable to start my video, but I’m here. If whoever’s hosting could start my video for me, that’d be great. If not, no worries. Oh, here we go. All right. I’m back. This is such a great question. I think that my ability to demonstrate leadership at Opendoor has really been stemmed from as a designer and as a design leader related to what I was talking about in my talk, really helping everyone at the organization really obsess over problems, over ideas, and really… One of the key values that we have at Opendoor now is to start and end with the customer, and I think a lot of being about a designer is building that empathy and really obsessing over our customers. And that ultimately gets you to obsess over problems rather than solutions, so I’d say that’s one aspect.
Annie Tang: And the other aspect is really keeping in mind that execution matters. It’s not all about coming up with cool ideas and cool visions and stuff. That at the end of the day, we need to keep a high bar for what we do. And so execution really amounts to making sure that teams are working really collaboratively, that designers and PMs and engineers are working collaboratively and are in sync, can we do these workshops to make sure that people are in sync? So I think the dual sense of just making sure that we’re obsessing over customers and problems, and also making sure that we’re really executing to high level is kind of my leadership style.
Heather Natour: Yeah. That’s really great. And I agree, I’ve seen so much of that at Opendoor, the collaboration, especially collaboration that you facilitated. And it’s certainly a differentiator, I think, how much Opendoor obsesses over their customers. So that’s great. Maggie, what are your thoughts on the topic?
Maggie Moreno: Yeah, I feel like one of the best things about working at Opendoor is that there’s no shortage of good ideas, only people to make those ideas a reality. Opendoor’s business has a lot of different facets and there are opportunities everywhere for taking on more responsibility. So for me personally at Opendoor, I just feel like getting more leadership opportunities and developing myself as a leader has mostly just been a matter of raising my hand.
Heather Natour: Yeah, that’s very true. And I think the business complexity at Opendoor is really interesting and absolutely creates those opportunities. I love that. Amy, how have you experienced leadership at Opendoor?
Amy Yang: Hi. Not only the complexity of the type of problem Opendoor trying to solve, but also I would say, I admire this whole industry is still very new and young, like a startup feel when you join Opendoor compared to… I used to work at a more mature, larger technical company. I can definitely feel the culture difference here. Not everything is perfect is set up already. You don’t see maybe a perfect data engineering team prepare a perfect data that can be consumed by data science team. A lot of times you need to do the heavy lifting and see where the gap is, where the problem is, not just complaining for the missing pieces, but actually propose a solution and just do it. So that naturally you creates a gap create an opportunity for emerging new leader, especially for me coming from an IC now transition into a leadership role.
Amy Yang: The other thing I want to mention is this one team, one dream culture that is core value for Opendoor. So when you see area for improvement, even not within your immediate team, maybe it’s a cross-functional team, but you can contribute. There is nobody will stop you and say, “No, just do your own team’s work.” There’s always collaboration opportunity and you can just extend your influence outside of your immediate team and service area.
Heather Natour: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s spot on and the sense of ownership that everyone has and doing that as a team, it’s so much more powerful, it becomes real multiplier. How about you, Sumedha, how do you feel the Opendoor experience has allowed you to demonstrate your leadership?
Sumedha Pramod: Okay, sorry about that. Honestly, one of the best ways I’ve been able to actually demonstrate leadership and grow is every week, every other week we have these kind of architectural meetings, and it’s really allowed me to not just have ownership of the code and the surface areas that my team operates in, but really expand that beyond that. And gives us a lot of opportunities to propose and facilitate a lot of discussions that have impact beyond just your specific team. And so really getting to establish that level of ownership at a much, much, much broader level and really expand your impact across the company. Yeah, that’s been really one of the most unique and interesting ways that I’ve been able to really develop leadership here.
Heather Natour: Yeah. I’ve seen that there’s a lot of people and we really want to include everybody in that process, and I think it’s really elevated a lot of amazing ideas, much more long-term thinking and has really pushed the organization to the next level. That’s a great example. Clearly each of you have developed deep domain expertise, and so on top of that, each of you have considered the direction in which you grow and whether it’s moving to people management or focusing on deepening your multiplying impact.
Heather Natour: Were there specific things you considered in order to decide which direction to take your career? And maybe we’ll start with Maggie.
Maggie Moreno: Thanks, Heather. I have been thinking a lot about going into people management. So I’m working on that transition right now. About a year ago, I got the opportunity to be a tech lead for a team, and I found that performing the leadership role was a lot more rewarding than being an IC. So I’ve really been taking on pursuing that and getting involved with the crafting of our transition role and starting to craft those documents.
Heather Natour: That’s great. And I think your selflessness that you demonstrate every day is really a huge impact to the rest of the team. And so it’s really great to see you moving into people management. Amy, how about you, you mentioned you were recently transitioning more from IC to leadership, what were some specific things you considered?
Amy Yang: Yeah, I think I’ve summarized the decision making process. I consider two factors. One is what my strength is, two, what my passion is about, three, is what’s the company goal is. I think the perfect position is how the three factors can align the best. Sometimes what you want to do doesn’t really align with the bigger picture of what the company want to go. Either the long-term goal, I haven’t seen sometimes, especially technical, a very deep technical person, they just want to utilize specific technology or tooling but that doesn’t necessarily solve the immediate business problem. That is a misalignment. I think the perfect position are when everybody would try to evaluate what’s the best role is. Do you see opportunity or can the next position that help you align the three factor better?
Amy Yang: For me, I joined Opendoor relatively recent, end of last year. I joined as a senior IC. Now I’m in the tech lead position. I enjoy my current position. It gives me both the freedom to do some project roadmap planning management, and also stay close to the technology while I’m still learning about the business, but eventually, based how I feel, how I evaluate the three factor alignment, I will make my decision for the next step.
Heather Natour: Yeah, that’s great. It’s so great that you’ve gotten these opportunities so quickly and yet, you can always change your mind and feel supported in how you grow here, I think that’s great. Sumedha, how have you thought about your career direction?
Sumedha Pramod: For me, it came down to as simple as I really just like writing code, as nerdy as that sounds. Writing code and really spending a lot of time diving into our customer experiences, whether that’s from a product design or even engineering standpoint. Obviously, as I grow more as a senior IC, it’s definitely less about doing a lot of the nitty gritty code myself, but really figuring out how I can better enable those around me to accomplish whether it’s technical goals or OKRs or things like that. And then also, how can I set some technical standards around best practices while really starting to think a lot more big picture about our systems and those are the challenges that really excite me and made me really want to go down the route of becoming a more senior IC for sure.
Heather Natour: That’s great. It’s hard to debate not liking to code. Annie, you’ve provided leadership at Opendoor for quite a while, how have you thought about your career direction?
Annie Tang: Yeah, so I started off at Opendoor long time ago as a senior designer as a senior IC, and I worked on much of the end to end experience and various part of the experience. And then, about two and a half years ago, I moved to management. And I think one guiding principle that I really had about my career has always just been to optimize for growth because I am happiest when I am learning and challenged. And so I was honestly really happy being an IC. I loved designing, I learned a lot, especially going from designing, just digital experiences at previous gigs to Opendoor, where I was really challenged and designing these online and offline experiences. And as Opendoor grew, I got the opportunity to manage.
Annie Tang: And when there was the opportunity, I was actually really excited and I actually told my manager that I wanted this opportunity. And I think that’s one thing that I would advise everyone too, is I actually don’t believe there is a certain stereotype for ICs, like if you are this way, you’re a great IC or if this way, you’re a great manager. If you’re curious and you want to grow into one or the other, make it known to your manager. It might not be that immediately you can do it, but that’s one thing I always tell, especially females. If there isn’t a right or wrong answer, if you’re curious about something, just to say that, because that’s ultimately how I ended up in management. I was really curious about it. I saw an opportunity, I told my manager and he helped me work my way through it.
Annie Tang: And as our company grew, I got to scale our team and I have really found a lot of enjoyment in supporting my team and not being the hands-on IC. I also haven’t ruled out though that maybe in the future or next gig, I want to be an IC again. And so I believe that there’s a lot of fluidity to this.
Heather Natour: Yeah. That’s excellent advice. I wholeheartedly agree. I have similar experiences. Morgan, you inspired us with just your self-awareness talk. How do you think personally about your own career direction?
Morgan Cole: Sure. Well, let me just tell you Heather, my career has been nothing short of a jungle gym. I have been a senior manager, an entry-level IC, a senior IC, a lead, back to management, back to IC. All of that’s happened in the span of about six years, and in different sectors too, whether it’s sales, whether it’s marketing and advertising, leadership and development, or learning and development, rather.
Morgan Cole: My decision-making process generally speaking, is with regard to the skills that I like to nurture. That’s basically how I base my decisions. So the trajectory of my career, it’s based on the skillsets and the acumen that I hope to cultivate at a specific time. And whatever those skillsets are, I am going to look for a position or role in which it will specifically help me get to that next step, and I’m less concerned about what the title is and more concerned about what the end result could potentially be.
Heather Natour: Yeah, that’s great advice. It’s sometimes hard to take the time to even think about that, but I think it’s really important. I appreciate all of the panelists’ thoughtful answers and that’s a wrap for the presentation portion. I also wanted to thank the Girl Geek team for all you do for the community.
Heather Natour:Here’s my LinkedIn – feel free to connect with me and reference this event if you want to hear more about Opendoor. I’ll invite Angie back on the screen to share the next portion of the breakout sessions.
Angie Chang: Awesome. Thank you all for sharing your insights and your journeys with us. Really enjoyed all the talks and the conversation about this is what leadership looks like. We will be sharing some Opendoor jobs via email. Keep an eye out for that.. that’s actually an event survey, and also links to the Opendoor jobs!
Here is a list of recommended resources – crowdsourced by attendees to help each other evolve into the best versions of ourselves in work and life!
Short on cash? Here’s a helpful hint: It’s easy to find sites with used copies if you Google the book title. In the results, there’s even a section to see the library closest to you that has the book!
Sukrutha Bhadouria: We will move on to our next talk. Our next talk is going to be given by Ashley. Ashley leads OpenAI’s developer ecosystem and creative application strategy, where she helps accelerate developers and startups build new applications with positive impact. She has also helped lead the launches of OpenAI’s research and commercial products, including Usenet, Jukebox, Rubik’s Cube, Multi-Agent, Image GBT, GPTC API, CLIP and so, oh my goodness. That was a lot. Welcome, Ashley.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: Excellent. Thank you so much for having me. Let me go ahead and share my screen. All right. Excellent. Let me bump this over here.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: Okay, great. Well, thank you everybody for joining this session. I am very excited to walk you through prompt design and engineering with GPT-3. As mentioned, my name’s Ashley and I’m the technical director at OpenAI. So, just a quick introduction here. If you haven’t heard of OpenAI before. So, we are an AI research and deployment company with the mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: And what’s unique about us, is we’re actually made up of three distinct pillars focused on engineering startup, research lab, and safety and policy group. And so, a little bit of background here in the lead up to GPT-3. So, nine months ago, we launched our very first commercial product, which was the OpenAI API.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: And this has really become our core platform for accessing our latest AI models. And unlike most AI systems that maybe you’ve interacted with before that are typically designed for one use case, our API actually provides a general purpose text in, text out interface, which I’ll walk you through in a live demo in just a bit.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: And so, this enables our users to try it on virtually any English language task. Since launching, we’ve already seen 200 production-ready applications built using the variety of capabilities that GPT-3 offers. And so, what we’ve seen is actually this incredibly new ecosystem of applications. Spanning things from legal to HR, game development, customer support, productivity, science and education, and both new companies being developed and startups as well as other companies integrating the API. So, a little bit about GPT-3. So, this model doesn’t have a goal or objective other than predicting the next word.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: And so, the key thing to take away here, and this is going to be key as we begin to dive into this prompt design, is it is not programmed to do any specific task. So, this single API can perform as a chat bot. It can perform as a classifier. It could do summarization because at its root level, it’s able to understand what those tasks look like purely from a text perspective. So, really the best way to really… If there’s one thing to take away about GPT-3, it is really just trying to predict the very next word based on all of the previous text it’s seen beforehand.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: So, prompt design and engineering. What do you need to take away here? So, if you have ever played the game charades, this is actually a really great exercise for figuring out how to program with GPT-3. Because what essentially you’re trying to do, again, if it’s just trying to predict the kind of task that you’d like it to perform, you basically want to provide enough context, but not have to give all the information at once. And so, you want to be able to just provide some guidelines about what you’d like GPT-3 to do.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: So, for example, if you want to do classification, want to be able to provide some information about what you’d like done and then maybe a couple of examples. And then try to even provide some counterexamples as well. And so, I’ll show that in just a second. Before we dive in, I just want to highlight some of the settings that are going to come up. There are things called Temperature and Top P. These again, back to thinking about prediction. So, these are not necessarily creativity dials, but they’ll control randomness.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: Another thing we offer is “Best of.” And so, again, GPT-3 in the API is trying to think, “Okay, what is the best response here?” And so, what is the highest average value of the tokens being generated. Frequency, we also… Basically it’s saying, “Okay, we don’t want to repeat what’s already being generated.” And then the Presence setting is also trying to figure out, “Okay, do we want to change topics here and being able to move forward from that?”
Ashley Pilipiszyn: So, we can come back to that, but I’m going to go ahead and move over into… This is the OpenAI beta site. And so, let’s just move this down here. So, this is the Playground setting. So, here on the right hand side, you’re going to see all of these settings that I was just talking about. So, for example, you can determine what the response links will be and to generate with. As I mentioned, this is the Temperature setting. So, we have it currently set to 0.7. So, that’s a pretty standard setting. We also have the Frequency Penalty, the Presence Penalty, and Best of, which I had mentioned. We won’t dive into these just quite yet.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: So, what we have here is what’s known as a prompt library. And what we’ve done is, actually with our developer community, figured out what are some of the best prompts that people are able to get really good results on and what are those settings?
Ashley Pilipiszyn: So, for example, let’s say we want to summarize for a second grader. If you’ve ever received an NDA or any type of legal documents. Actually I, myself, am not a lawyer. And so, many times if I’m reading a legal document, I really don’t know what the essence of that document is really saying. So, actually this prompt, Summarize for a 2nd grader, is really helpful because essentially it is transforming more dense text and simplifying that into maybe how you would explain that to a second grader.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: So, the prompt here. This is actually talking about Jupiter. So, it’s saying that it’s the fifth planet from the sun, the Roman God it’s named after, et cetera. So, again, as I was talking about before, you’re providing the example, so you’re already telling GPT-3 here, “My second grader asked me what this passage means.” You’re already putting that context of putting it into something that a second grader understand, then you’re separating it here. And then you’re actually putting a content that you would like summarized. And then you’re telling GPT-3, okay, you’d like it to be rephrased in plain language a second grader can understand. Here, it will also tell you, “What are some of the ideal settings for a prompt like this.” So, let’s go to Playground.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: And just a second, there we go. So, then all the settings, everything pops up in my Playground setting. And so, here the prompt is, and let me bump this up and let me hit submit. So, “Jupiter is a big ball of gas. It’s the fifth planet from the sun. It’s bright. You can see it in the sky at night. It’s named after the Roman God, Jupiter.” That’s pretty good. It pulled out kind of all the main pieces that we’d want from the prompt and the original text.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: Now, the cool thing here is, too, let’s say you don’t want to use Jupiter… Or figure out more about the solar system, but let’s say you did want a section of a legal document. What you could do is you can just edit these prompts right in your Playground. So, you could delete this and go ahead and delete this as well. And then you could go ahead and copy and paste your own text in there as well, because you’re still retaining those key guidelines. Again, imagine if this is a game of charades or even if you’re working with a coworker and you’re trying to give a set of instructions. So, the key instructions here are asking the second grader–saying, “My second grader asked me what the passage means,” and you want it rephrased. But you can always insert different types of content here.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: So, let’s do another example. So let’s go back to the prompt library. So, a very cool thing we also understand. Remember how I said GPT-3 is focused on text. However, it is able to transform text into emojis. Which actually, thanks to one of our developers who discovered this, we were actually not aware of this capability beforehand. So, if you want to convert a movie title into emoji, you could give some examples. So, Back to the Future might be, you know, boy, man, a car, and a clock. Batman might be a man and a bat. Game of Thrones will be some arrows and some swords. And again, you’ll have the settings on here to get you started.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: So, we can open this up again in Playground. And so, let’s see what we’ll come back for Spider-Man. So, it’s got some spiders, some webs, and that’s pretty good. Let’s see if… What it might come back with if we try it again. All right. So, it looks like it’ll repeat itself on that one. But also, you can begin to combine some of these as well.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: So, you can imagine using chat. So, obviously chat bots are a really popular application. And as I mentioned before, you can think about in customer support scenarios, you can think of in all different types of applications.
Ashley Pilipiszyn:Many of us have already interacted with chat bots before. So, let’s say you want to customize your chat bot. So, the base prompt here is, “This is a following conversation with an AI assistant. The assistant is very helpful, creative, clever, and very friendly.” And so, we’ll begin this dialogue. So saying, “Hello, who are you? I’m an AI created by OpenAI. How can I help you today?” Let’s say, “What movie do you recommend I watch this week?” And we’ll set AI. And submit, oops. My apologies.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: Looking at works of Christopher Nolan. Interstellar, Inception, The Prestige. That is actually a little bit freaky. Christopher Nolan is one of my favorite directors and I love, actually, all three of those movies. So, very spot on actually. But you can begin to actually customize these even more. So for example, let’s say, “The assistant is very creative, clever, very friendly, and an expert on sci-fi.” So, let’s say, “Which books should I add to my reading list?” The Left Hand of Darkness. The Gate to Women’s Country, The Ship Who Sang. Interesting.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: So anyways, you can begin to play around and begin to add that additional context. So, for example, we’ve seen people say, “Okay, this AI chat bot is a science teacher or a bookstore clerk,” and you can begin to actually create these various personas to kind of probe GPT-3, or nudge GPT-3 into the direction, or have that context that you would like it to have. So, let’s do one more.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: So, I mentioned earlier before, Classification. So, you can imagine this being a really useful example. Whether you think of product classification, here is an example of a list of companies and the various categories that they’ll fall into. So, if we open this up in Playground.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: So, again, we’re telling GPT-3, “Okay, Facebook. You want the tags, social media, technology.” LinkedIn will also have that, but maybe enterprise and careers. McDonald’s, you’ve got food, fast food, logistics. And so, this is an opportunity also to create different types of tags. So, let’s see. Logistics transportation. Let’s add… What’s another one. See what comes back for TikTok, social media entertainment. So, that’s pretty good.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: But you can imagine again, applying this to a variety of different products. So, let’s say you’re building a different kind of app for different types of clothing or different types of foods. These kinds of things. And so, you can begin to actually add all of these different capabilities together. So, let’s say for example, the chat bot from the previous example also was able to then help you classify the different products you had in your application.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: And so, as I had shown before for the different startups we’ve seen, et cetera, all the different applications you’re seeing with GPT-3, all boil down to these prompts. And so, your ability to actually help GPT-3 understand, “Okay, what is the end result that you’re trying to get GPT-3 to do,” is really where a lot of interesting things can happen. And so, some of the best applications we’ve seen have been ones where you actually combine these capabilities. So, not just doing a single classification or a single chat bot, but actually being able to integrate those because that’s where GPT strengths lie. As I said before, GPT-3 can do a lot of different things. It’s not programmed to do one or the other, but it actually is very good at, essentially, multitasking.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: So, with that, I wanted to… I’m not sure if any questions have come through, but I wanted to leave a time for just a few questions. But I know this was a very, very rapid fire, deep dive into prompt design and engineering. If A), you have any questions, please feel free to email me. If you are interested in getting access to GPT-3 or building an app or product with GPT-3, again, please email me. I’d be delighted to discuss and very excited to have more people join our developer ecosystem and build with GPT-3. So, thank you so much. And I’d be happy to take any questions with the remaining time.
Angie Chang: There’s some questions in the chat. Most of them were like, “How do we get access to GPT-3?”
Ashley Pilipiszyn: Okay.
Angie Chang: You just answered that question, but if you would like to look in the chat, there’s a question about how OpenAI overcame bias about, for example, food suggestions, American versus Western food, or summarizing New York Times, Wall Street Journal, short article or headline. Let’s see if you can answer in three minutes.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: Okay, awesome. So, and I can not see the exact question, but I think… So, on the question of bias. So, excellent question. It is a, first of all, a very big industry-wide issue at OpenAI, especially we’re really focused on addressing this. Especially with our safety and policy work.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: Actually, I highly recommend checking out if you haven’t last week, we released a new research release about multimodal neurons in our latest clip model, which is our most powerful vision model.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: And the reason I bring this up is because, this is kind of demystifying what’s happening underneath the hood with these AI models. Because obviously, these models are trained on all of the internet. And so, they’re basically integrating what they’re learning from us on the internet. And so, what this multimodal analysis allows us to do, is actually peek under the hood and understand, “Okay, so how are these associations being made?”
Ashley Pilipiszyn: And this allows us to figure out, “Okay, then how can we begin to address these,” by identifying where these associations are happening. And so, this is really borrowing a lot from neuroscience. So, but to address bias in the case of prompt design and engineering.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: There is an opportunity actually to address some of this in text form as well. And so, whether it’s modifying your prompts. So, I think the example was for like foods or recipes, being able to provide a little bit more context to be able to help nudge where you’d like GPT-3 to go. And this actually will help with giving examples as well.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: So, actually one quick example that might help address this is… Question/answer. So quickly, what you can do in a situation like this is you also can provide, for example, a question that’s rooted in truth. I would get the answer. If you ask me a question that’s nonsense, or it doesn’t have a clear answer, I’ll respond with unknown. And so, you can also provide facts or essentially give those examples of how you’d like GPT-3 to respond. So, that’s another way again, is through that prompt as well.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: And then the second question… Angie, I forget what was the second question on?
Angie Chang: It was on headlines, for summarizing media company headlines.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: Oh yes, yes. So, summarization, I guess more broadly. So, GPT-3 is excellent at summarizing. Actually, it can do data parsing and summarization. And so, if I’m understanding the question correctly, could you take a variety of headlines and then summarize a bunch of different headlines and what’s the TLDR main takeaway from that? GPT-3 would be very good at that. Pretty much summarizing, again any text, it will be quite strong at.
Angie Chang: Great. Thank you so much, Ashley. That’s all the time we have today. I know people will be definitely signing up to join the GPT-3 beta and trying it out. And thank you for leaving your contact information on the slide..
Ashley Pilipiszyn: Yes.
Angie Chang: Where you can get in touch with Ashley directly.
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Sukrutha Bhadouria: And we will move on to our afternoon keynote, which I’m super excited about.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Our afternoon keynote is with none other than Ashley Dudgeon. Ashley Dudgeon is VP of Software Engineering at Salesforce, where she has worked for over a decade. She began her career as a software developer after graduating from UC Berkeley with a degree in computer science. She believes cultivating engaged, innovative, and transparent organizations is a prerequisite to building amazing software, and I have had a courtside view of that. Welcome, Ashley.
Ashley Dudgeon: Thank you, Sukrutha. Thanks so much for having me.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: So we’re going to get it right in! As they say, every good story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, not necessarily in that specific order, with so much of what defines a person is really based on how their story actually began. So I’d like to rewind a little bit, if you don’t mind, and I’d like to hear about your early years.
Ashley Dudgeon: Sure. So since we’re talking about resilience today, I’m glad that we are starting from the beginning. So while I certainly didn’t know it then, it was during my childhood and upbringing that taught me that resilience is not only critical to surviving, but it is the key ingredient to thriving. So my family and I immigrated to the United States as refugees. We had escaped Vietnam after the war, when I was only an infant. We’re now what history calls the boat people, fleeing to the wide open seas, packed in small ill-equipped fishing boats, willing to risk death for a better chance at life.
Ashley Dudgeon: I have no memories of this, of course, but it was the most influential event that has shaped who I am today. And while I never knew it or felt it, growing up, we were quite poor. My parents would move from orchard to orchard, harvesting tomatoes, cucumbers, or whatever was in season, from sunrise to sunset, to provide for their six children. When my father saved enough to start his own business, my mom would mow lawns and rake leaves beside him in these pristine neighborhoods that felt so foreign to our own. And despite our hardships, my parents provided a privileged and happy upbringing for my siblings and me. We had everything we needed. We had food, shelter, safety, and a loving environment.
Ashley Dudgeon: We played like normal children and focused on school and not because we were forced to, but because we figured early on that access to education would be the greatest gift that my parents could ever give us. So for us children to excel academically would mean that all of their sacrifices would have been worth it, and would also mean that we contribute back to a country that had given so much to us. And I’d say my high school years were also pretty transformative. I went to school in East San Jose. The student body was made of the surrounding lower and middle-class families. There were gangs and teenage pregnancies and drugs, but I also found myself amongst some of the smartest and brightest peers, many of whom I still have contact with today and have built their own successful careers.
Ashley Dudgeon: And I think we were really fortunate to have a set of AP teachers that believed in us and successfully prepared us to get into top universities. They had the audacity to coach East Side kids mock trial and send us in to compete against schools whose teams were coached by their attorney parents. We actually ended up making it to the semi-finals, which I thought was pretty remarkable. And I was also on the tennis team, with a coach that insisted that we compete in the top league, even though we were consistently coming out near the bottom. We would drive to these richer districts and get clobbered by girls who belonged to private tennis clubs and have their own private coaches.
Ashley Dudgeon: It was brutal, but sometimes we would come out on top. I didn’t see the brilliance then, but our teachers and coaches were preparing us to show up, to compete, and pushed us to succeed in a world that was beyond the East Side. They gave us confidence to believe in our abilities so much that we began to believe in them as well. One teacher, in particular, so inspired us that we gathered annually for the past two decades, hoping that he continued to see the impact that he made in our lives.
Ashley Dudgeon: And when he passed away a few years ago, we got the opportunity to reunite with all of our high school teachers, and that was just such an amazing and touching event. And so, as an adult, I realize now that much of my determination and unwillingness to accept defeat was seeded very early on by simply observing my parents throughout my life, and then it was also reinforced by the most dedicated and amazing teachers. So those are my early years, and they definitely had an impact and who I am today.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: That’s just amazing to learn more about how it all started and how it has played a part in where you are today. But along the way, you’ve obviously made some bets and you made some decisions, and we all have to continue to make decisions where we continue to question which direction to go in, whether that’s the right one for us and for everyone around us. And I, myself, have struggled with making the right decision, and it’s really hard to say, but hindsight is 20/20. So what’s the bet that you think you took that had a substantial impact on where you are today?
Ashley Dudgeon: Yeah. Oh boy. So I’ve certainly made my fair share of bets. And I have to say a few turned out pretty awful, but in hindsight, I can’t say they were truly losses, because collectively, they’ve led me to where I am today. But there is one big bet that stands out. Because I can still remember how it feels, or how it felt, to carry that immense weight of the decision around for two years to see how it would play out. And I’m referring to my years at UC Berkeley and the huge bet I made when I decided to pursue computer science. I’m totally dating myself here, but let me take you back to 1997. Google didn’t exist yet. About a third of US households owned a computer, and accessing the internet sounded like you were trying to make contact with ET through your telephone.
Ashley Dudgeon: That’s something our children will never know. I was a freshman and I thought I wanted to pursue a degree in business after ruling out medicine. And as one of the pre-reqs, I happened to take a course, Intro to Programming, which I believe was taught in Lisp. And from the start I was hooked. My mind was blown by the fact that you can use the keys on your keyboard to make your computer do things. It felt like magic, but the only problem was the only way to get admitted into the computer science major was to take two years of the curriculum, apply, and then pray that your technical GPA was in the top 50 of all applicants.
Ashley Dudgeon: It was the simplest acceptance algorithm, but it was also pretty cutthroat. I mean, I couldn’t even use the English or Asian-American studies to prop up my GPA. Those didn’t even count. So all I could do was think about what kind of degree I’d end up with if I didn’t get in and what would happen to my life as a consequence. It sounds a bit dramatic now, but remember, I was 18 and I felt like I might’ve already ruined my future by not choosing medicine. Anyhow, it felt like a pretty big gamble. I remember sitting in lecture halls of two to 300 computer science students, and all I could see was this auditorium full of males. I swore that many of them knew how to program before they probably learned how to talk, and come to think of it, I don’t think I had a single female computer science professor my entire time there.
Ashley Dudgeon: So it was no wonder I was constantly fighting this inner voice that told me that I was out of my league, but fortunately, there were also louder counter voices that gave me the confidence and determination to succeed. When things feel impossible, I find courage in all the stories my parents would share with us growing up. I remember the war stories of my mom running, heavily pregnant, from the bombings with three kids in tow, while the fate of my soldier father was unknown. Or, how we shared a two-bedroom apartment with two other families when we first arrived in the United States.
Ashley Dudgeon: And while they were mostly met with kindness, there was also the occasional encounters that reminded them that to some, they were just cheap laborers in someone else’s land, but yet they persevered. So did I believe that I was capable of studying hard and earning a place in computer science? You bet. It seemed like the easiest thing I could possibly do when I compare it to the challenges that my parents faced. And I vividly remember the morning that I made the long trek up to Soda Hall, praying that I would see my name above the dreaded cutline of those who got into the major.
Ashley Dudgeon: It all seems really cruel now how they would so publicly post the names and GPAs of the victorious and the defeated. I remember seeing my name above the line and finally releasing the weight that I had been carrying around for two years. At graduation, as one of the few females in the program, I was asked and accepted the honor of speaking at the commencement ceremony. So in that moment, with my parents in the crowd, I felt invincible. The bet that I had made on myself had paid off. So I guess, in summary, those years in college laid a solid foundation on which I would build my career in technology.
Ashley Dudgeon: And it has nothing to do with the data structures we learned or the compiler we had to build, or the many mathematical theorems I had to apply. In all honesty, I don’t think I retained much of it at all. I hope I never have to ever take a test on that again. But what I did gain was a sense of resilience, defiance, and confidence that has helped me get to where I am today. And while I still find myself amongst the sea of males in this field, though, it is getting better, I actually don’t really see or feel it. So I come to every meeting, and I lead every project without a consciousness of gender. And I find that really empowering. So how’s that for a bet?
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Oh, I mean, the comments that we’ve been getting in, everybody is getting very emotional, listening to you talk through your journey. But you’ve given me great advice, because I had the honor of working with you while we spun up this amazing big project of Work.com. So what advice do you have on negotiating for impactful projects that one can do in order to secure career growth? Because people often feel like opportunities aren’t presented to them, and most people, opportunities aren’t presented to them. And if they feel like there isn’t interesting work, then they need to make it for themselves. So what’s your advice?
Ashley Dudgeon: Yeah. I think the best advice that one can give comes from your own personal experience. So when I think about a time when I had to negotiate for a path to promotion, my mind goes immediately to how I earned my current role as Vice President of Engineering. If you guys don’t mind another story, I’ve got one for you. And I think this story is particularly relevant to tell today on International Women’s Day, because it’s centered around the unique challenges that women face when they choose to have children in the corporate world. I think it also emphasizes the importance of negotiation, which I believe many people, especially women, don’t do often enough when they hit roadblocks in their careers.
Ashley Dudgeon: So to tell this story, I have to take you back about four years. Thanks to the amazing parental benefits that I got from Salesforce, I was about to go on maternity leave with my second child for a long seven months. And I had never stepped away from my career for that long, but I felt completely confident in doing so. At that point, I had had multiple career conversations, with my then boss, about what it would take for me to grow into a VP role. And while I was not quite there yet, I did feel that I was at the pinnacle of my career. I had just successfully led the delivery of a multi-release project, solving a complex search problem that had been left unsolved for the past 17 years.
Ashley Dudgeon: And on my last day of work, heavily, heavily pregnant, I remember I was handing off a high-priority project plan that was solving a critical and deal-blocking gap for a premier customer. So in short, I felt confident in my place in the organization and the value that I brought to the company. I was leaving, or at least I felt like I was leaving on a high note. So when I returned seven months later, I went from feeling confident and secure to being lost and searching for a purpose to anchor me. The team that I had led directly was no longer intact because victory had been declared. My other teams were executing well under their manager. Of course, business had continued while I was out.
Ashley Dudgeon: My responsibilities had been delegated across multiple leaders and there really wasn’t that much to return to. And in some regards, I succeeded in what I was supposed to do, right? I put in place a transition plan that worked, and I built a team that could operate without me. My boss, who had always been a straight talker, told me that funding for our group didn’t quite play out the way that he had hoped, and he no longer saw a path for me to grow in his organization. He had suggested that perhaps the timing was perfect to switch groups and try something new.
Ashley Dudgeon: And if I hadn’t just spent the last six months nurturing a newborn around the clock, I was an emotional wreck because my nanny had unexpectedly quit two weeks after I came back to work. And my infant son was now living with my mom an hour away, Monday through Friday, until we figured out childcare. And if I wasn’t pumping every three to four hours to try to keep up my milk supply through all of this, I might’ve been in a better position to rationalize my work situation. Instead, I felt utterly crushed and defeated. I was struggling to find stable ground at home and at work. I wondered if it was time for me to step back from my career and just bring my son home. It just all felt too hard.
Ashley Dudgeon: And what was punching me straight in the gut was the reality that so many women go through when they choose to have children. It’s an impossible choice between bonding with your child and being present in your career to hold onto your relevance. It’s a part of the maternal experience that I think even the most supportive and progressive companies have yet to fully solve for. Having had two children, I believe the transition back from maternity leave is one of the most vulnerable times in a female’s personal and professional life. And it typically occurs during mid-career. So if we really want more females in senior leadership roles, reentry into the workplace has to be formally addressed.
Ashley Dudgeon: And I’m not saying that every woman encounters this challenge, and I hope that I’m not discouraging anyone from taking maternity leave, because you absolutely should, and you absolutely deserve to. But if you do find yourself in a similar situation, hopefully sharing my personal story can help you be better prepared. So what did I do? Well, I was far too stubborn, or dare I say resilient, to put my ambitions on the back burner. I sought support and encouragement from my most trusted circle, but for the most part, I was unflinching at work, because I believe that’s what strong leaders were supposed to do. I started tapping into my network and reached out to every technical executive that I knew, simply stating that I was seeking new opportunities.
Ashley Dudgeon: And they were actually all really helpful, and it led to a few interviews, but I really didn’t find anything that excited me. And I felt like I had worked far too hard in my career to compromise now. So about after two months, my boss then told me that a new project was on the horizon, and he asked if I would stay to lead it since he knew that I was already talking to other groups. And I won’t lie, it felt really validating when he said that he believed that I was the only one that could deliver it. And that was when I knew I had to negotiate. I was no longer willing to put in the work and hope that it would be good enough to get me promoted.
Ashley Dudgeon: I clearly told him if I committed to the project and help make it a success, he would commit to putting me up for promotion in exchange. The project actually turned out to be one of the most exhilarating projects in my career. It took about a year and a half to build and release, and the reception from our customers was phenomenal. And to my boss’s credit, he followed through with his end of the deal, and I was promoted to vice president in 2019. And in fact, he would later play a pivotal role in pitching me for my current position, which has been the biggest stage and opportunity of my career thus far.
Ashley Dudgeon: So if faced with a similar situation, only you can really make the decision on what path to take and what’s right for you. But I think that the advice that I can give that can be universally applied, is to be resilient. Be clear with yourself about what you want, be committed to putting in the work, and don’t let setbacks discourage you from obtaining your goals. And if you’re passionate about what you do, you’re far more likely to succeed. And in terms of negotiating career growth, I honestly hope that you don’t need to. If you don’t already have one, co-create a plan, a career plan, with your manager. You should be clear about what you want to achieve, work with your manager to align expectations for reaching those milestones, as well as identify the current gaps in skills and impact.
Ashley Dudgeon: And if you find yourself struggling to make progress, be honest in assessing whether or not you have the right skills, the right goals, or the right boss. And if required, don’t be afraid to negotiate. It may be obvious, but negotiations only work if the other party needs what you have to give. Thus knowing when to negotiate is also key to being effective. And if you’re not entirely sure, I say go for it. The worst that can happen is you lose one of the many bets you’re going to make throughout your career. And if you’re resilient and if you’re courageous, then you’ll end up finding a path that’s right for you. So that was a really long story, but I guess that’s my response.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Well, it didn’t feel long. I was hooked, and I was also monitoring the questions and the comments and people are just really resonating, saying that they’re so thankful that you’re sharing your stories. And when you spoke about how you were put up for promotion at that moment, there were a lot of people cheering you on, because it was like almost like they were watching a movie where it has a happy ending. But this is just the middle, I’m sure. The biggest takeaway is to be absolutely intentional in your career growth and focused on what you think you can do and keep at it, don’t give up. So Ashley, on that note, do you have any final thoughts or advice for our amazing listeners who are just hooked and totally queued into your story?
Ashley Dudgeon: Yeah. Well, first I want to thank you, before my time is up, for having me here today, and for you and Angie’s inspirational work in elevating females in tech and for creating a forum to encourage women to learn from each other’s experiences and to uplift one another. And I do hope that I’ve been able to make a small contribution to that today by sharing my story. And while I’ve taken everyone through a really personal journey, behind my narrative is a basic framework that can be helpful to anyone setting out to achieve a goal.
Ashley Dudgeon: First, you should understand what drives you, because that will be your motivation when things get difficult. Next, define what success means to you and be honest about how much work you’re willing to put into it, to achieve your goals. Don’t forget or neglect to revisit and refine your goals as needed. Don’t be afraid to change them, up the ante, or dial them down, because just like in poker, how you choose to play your hand changes with each card that’s dealt on the table.
Ashley Dudgeon: And I encourage you to not be afraid in making the big bets, because those are the ones that will most likely change the course of your life. And finally, be resilient and be courageous. The path to reaching your goal will rarely ever be a straight line. When the road takes an unexpected turn, remember that it is within your power to forge a new one. And finally, it occurs to me that, as I give this advice to all the attendees today, it’s really not my advice to give at all. I’m merely giving voice to the framework that my parents taught me, starting from that fateful night when they set out to sea. So that’s what I have to share today.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you, Ashley. That was just phenomenal. If you do get the chance to check out the chats and all the cheers that you got in the comments. We’re so honored to have you as our afternoon keynote Thank you so much.
Ashley Dudgeon: Thank you for having me.
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Sukrutha Bhadouria: We’re going to move on to our next segment which is our amazing USDS panel. USDS is United States Digital Service. It is a tech startup at the White House with a diverse group working across the federal government to build better tools and services for the American people. Julie will be moderating the panel with Amy, Elizabeth, and Gina. We’re so excited to hear from them. Welcome, ladies.
Julie Meloni: Hello, this is awesome. I haven’t seen you all for a couple years but it’s good to be back in my favorite, most favorite, conference ever. So we’ll just gonna jump right on in so we can get to the good stuff. I’m Julie, I’m an engineer with US Digital Service. I was with USDS from 2016 to 2018, took a little [inaudible], came back in October, it’s pretty awesome. And I’ve got some of my most awesome compatriots here who are much more interesting than I am and I will allow them, and by allow, I mean beg them nicely, to introduce themselves. So we’ll do that in just a second. I should probably tell you what USDS is. I am really out of practice, something about a pandemic.
Julie Meloni: All right, USDS. US Digital Service is a tiny little startup, we say, except that we’ve been around for seven years now so I think that the startup shine is off. We’re just small so, we’re just small. But we’re scrappy and we sit inside the Executive Office of the President in the Office of Management and Budget in the US Federal Government. None of that is important. All you need to know is that we’re a bunch of folks who go out and try to make shit better for everybody. We say citizen-facing services but it’s citizens and people who want to become citizens, because this government owes lots of people lots of things and the technology is really bad. So we try to fix it with a small group of UX researchers, designers, product managers, and engineers of all flavors. We are the flavors. And each of these folks will tell you about that and what they do and some of the gnarly problems that we disentangle. President Obama created our group in 2014, we lasted through the rest of his administration into the next one and we are still here because the work is hard and whoever’s in charge in the White House just makes it hard or harder. Right now, it’s just hard so we’re all glad to be here and we hope that lots of you will come and join us. All right. Amy, we’re gonna go alphabetically. Tell us about yourself.
Amy Quispe: What’s up, everyone. My name is Amy Quispe. I’m an engineer like everyone else here at the US Digital Service. I started last May, so we were already in the thick of it. I’ve been working from home this whole time. And prior to USDS, I worked in a pretty typical tech career I think. So we’ll be hearing more but I’ll hand it off to the next person.
Julie Meloni: E. Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Schweinsberg: Excellent. Hi, I’m Elizabeth Schweinsberg and I am an engineer here at USDS also. My particular specialty is security engineering so I’ve spent most of my career doing threat detection, incident response, and digital forensics. But I’m actually kind of a generalist, it turns out, so I’ve worked at a couple of brand name companies before this, but have been enjoying my time at USDS since August. And to Gina.
Julie Meloni: G for Gina.
Gina Maini: Hey, I’m Gina, I’m an engineer as well and I’ve been at USDS for two and a half years, maybe more than that now. And in the beginning, in my USDS tenure, I worked on asylum adjudication at DHS for a brief bit, and then I worked on Medicare for a few years and then moved off of Medicare modernization to now working on organ transplant, so I’ve done a lot of different stuff at USDS, a lot of fun times, a lot of hackathons, civic hackathons, which I really enjoy. And yeah, that’s me in my USDS tenure. Before USDS, I have no idea why I got this job, I often say that to myself because I’m technically a functional programmer by trade so I had really focused highly on really niche stuff that most people in government don’t even care about. They’re still on COBOL mainframes. And then I got here and had to work with what I had, so I guess more on that later but yeah I’m a SRE library engineer and I guess all around back end developer.
Julie Meloni: I need to learn how to use the chat because I’ve just been chatting away with my panelists and not all of you. So my job in here is to learn to switch that to everyone and try to answer questions as they roll along. But we’re going to hear some really gnarly stories, gnarly for those who don’t know the word, think of the most gross to sing intertwined, intertwingled pieces of crap and that’s the technology that runs the US government and from a state and local and federal position, probably also all governments, let’s just be honest.
Julie Meloni: And our job is to go in and disentangle that and try to make it work. And making it work can be things like taking paper forms and putting them on the internet. I know it’s crazy. It could also mean taking 45-year-old or sometimes 50-year-old mainframes, things that are actually older than me, and making them not mainframes.
Julie Meloni: Or make them some sort of nice hybrid model because there’s not actually anything really wrong with mainframes except that they might fall over and that’s bad, but that’s why we have Gina and Amy and Elizabeth, we have all the… Oh my God, it’s a good thing we’re not on a plane together because if the plane went down all mainframe folks in the government wouldn’t… Yeah, it’d be terrible.
Julie Meloni: All right, so we’re going to talk about gnarly problems and I’ll just give you guys a little heads up, not all of the gnarly problems in the government or in your jobs, really, are technical problems, they’re people problems. So we’re going to talk a little bit about people but also a lot about technology, but also a little bit about people, and how people skills, not just tech skills are what we need. Also, big plug, USDS.gov/apply, come join us.
Julie Meloni: All right. Gnarly problems. Who wants to go first? We can do the star technique situation: task, action, and result or you can just talk.
Amy Quispe: I’m happy to go first. So like I said, I started last May and if you remember anything about last March, April, May, lots of people were unemployed, a lot of people were filing for unemployment, a lot of people it was for the first time. State systems, which have been built to serve unemployment were overwhelmed. I remember just trying to help my family and friends follow yet they [inaudible] the sites back up in various states.
Amy Quispe: So when I joined USDS, my first project was actually something a little unusual, we were working with states. Because unemployment is kind of a weird hybrid of federal and state work and so these state systems were falling over, had to go and fix them make, sure people could get their money, make sure people could live right now, and I think that I saw some really crusty old systems. I gotta say, before USDS, the companies I’d worked for, the oldest was maybe like 15 years, 17 years old. And then I’m working on these systems that are way older than that.
Amy Quispe: I remember my first time running into like seeing a Y2K fix and just kind of being floored because I was like, “Oh, 20 years ago, someone wrote this kind of hacky fix, 20 years into the lifetime of the system thinking that, oh someone’s gonna fix this and make this good down the line.” I’m telling all you right now, never underestimate the longevity of your worst code. Never underestimate the longevity of your to-do’s. And so we started investigating one state system trying to figure out where the core of the problem was. Eventually, we figured out there was one point of the system that was like the point of failure. Everything needed to be written to this one place and one at a time. There was no parallelization, that was the bottleneck.
Amy Quispe: And when we discovered this bottleneck, we realized that we wanted to make different fixes. The people that were in charge of that part of the system did not want us to touch their shit, which was… And so here we’re in the middle of a few different things, we’re in the middle of a technical problem. We’re in the middle of a people problem, we’re also in the middle of a bureaucratic problem, systems that are in place already that have been built over time, both at a process level. And so what we ended up doing was we actually ended up building another system on top of that to do some queuing to slow that down to make sure that things didn’t fall over before hitting the mainframe.
Amy Quispe: And so a lot of times I kind of wish we’d fix things the right way but sometimes you have to figure out how to work around that and I think that that was that project has really informed a lot of how I think about what’s going on and fixing these systems, and also I think it’s gonna make me write better code in the future and be a little less precious about what’s mine.
Julie Meloni: That is a really good point and I’m trying really hard not to ask all of the questions I have on my little list because I want to get through like, the what are you going to take away from USDS when you eventually go back into the private sector or do you stay in the public sector, I don’t know, I don’t know your plans. That’s going to be a super interesting question.
Julie Meloni: I should probably say, US on a tour of duty of model which means we’re not here forever. And one of the reasons that we do that, come in for three or six months stay up to two years, renew again for up to two more years, it’s so that we don’t become entrenched in the technology that we are fundamentally trying to fix or make slightly better. The fresh perspective is incredibly important. It’s really easy to slide into complacency in a large complex organization, be it the government or anywhere, and taking a step back, refreshing and doing something new is super duper important.
Julie Meloni: Also, shit changes really fast. When I was in USDS the first time, Kubernetes wasn’t a thing, really, and now it’s everyone wants to keep kuberentify everything like, “Whoa, where’d that all come from?” And I remember that Gina’s has been here the whole time and now it made a lot more sense. Sorry, Gina, you can tell me that you don’t actually like Kubernetes later, but I needed a prop. So hey, tour of duty, what are you gonna do afterwards? We’ll get to that next, but, Elizabeth, I want to hear about your gnarly stuff and I hope that you guys have different gnarly things because I didn’t pregame that.
Elizabeth Schweinsberg: Yeah, good thing I got to go before Gina because my gnarly thing is a project that I picked up from her and have taken off with. So I also work at Center for Medicare and Medicaid Systems. I turns out because this program is very old, they still use mainframes to, say, pay doctors money. And one of the main projects I’ve worked on is building in security monitoring for it, which has several challenges. The first being, getting the logs off the mainframes into a system that is modern for log processing. Fortunately, that had already been done when I got there. And then it’s making sense of it, mainframes are a different paradigm from the server model that we use today. In a server application, you have the users who run the servers and those are separate from the users who use the application, and there are two different types of accounts.
Elizabeth Schweinsberg: Mainframes, that’s not true. Everybody who can use an application is just a user on the mainframe. So understanding that took a little bit. My most favorite part is mainframes were invented before TCP/IP. TCP/IP was bolted on afterwards. So the thing you do in threat detection is you want to know what IP address people are attempting to log in from. That has been my most gnarly problem because in this instance, people are typically on a internal network so everything’s a 10 dot something IP address to start. But then they don’t write it, they don’t really record it because that was not a main concern. So yeah, learning about the security of mainframes and figuring out what the actual threat models are going to be and how to really fix them while trying to deal with little things like, I don’t know what IP address people are coming from, so it’s been super fun. And there was question in the chat, CMS uses IBM Z/OS as their mainframe. So how about you, Gina? What gnarly stuff have you seen?
Gina Maini: I’m just laughing because don’t you love when the person before you starts a crazy project and then you just completely leave the new person to rock it out? But no, I’m so glad that you took over that project because it’s so important, it’s so, so important. And yeah, you were one of the few people who saw through my insanity and wanted to support me because we’re really… I mean, it’s really radical stuff in the government to teach people that security and compliance are separate topics. In the government, it’s very easy…
Julie Meloni: Wait, wait, wait, Gina, let’s be honest, it’s not just the government.
Gina Maini: Yeah, that’s true. I mean you see it in healthcare, you see it in finance, you see a general laziness in STEM, in certain areas in STEM too, there’s a general laziness about it. But in the government, especially with systems that deal with such sensitive data, teaching our stakeholders the differences between security and compliance have been challenging. So even just getting a security review at Medicare to get the appropriate stakeholders in a room looking at the same view of data and being able to talk about the same semantics was such a huge leap, that was like a light year’s leap. Because now the agency is prepared at least in some positioning to address serious security issues in production, which really before USDS, before our poking and prodding and trying to get data in the cloud, no one had really… There had been attempts but they were not successful so the agency had gone through a few different phases of modernization but it really took a huge amount of people to succeed. And so anyway, that’s that’s a shared victory and you are making the magic continue so thank you.
Gina Maini: But yeah the gnarly problems, I feel like I’ve just had gnarly problems after gnarly… I feel like I don’t have any problems that are not gnarly at USDS. I’ve never seen it, I mean I’ve never seen a government system that was better than I expected it to be. It’s never happened to me yet in the two and a half something years. And I actually forgot I even worked on unemployment, I had forgotten that in my intro, but that’s how I would work.
Julie Meloni: Oh, we’ll get there, We’ll get there.
Gina Maini: Yeah [inaudible]. But there’s so many gnarly problems. The thing that that sticks out in mind is the time that, during an onboarding process at Medicare, I had discovered a massive production vulnerability and it was really just a vulnerability because no one had thought through the process from an end to end life cycle of managing accounts. And so just because I’d had experience thinking about enterprise security, just kind of naturally followed some conclusions and then had to basically vary immediately to my engagement with Medicare, make a decision, do I take a massive bug disclosure to the CIO who doesn’t know me yet and has never worked with me. It’s like, “Hi, you don’t know me, here’s a massive issue that you need to address immediately.” And it was really gnarly too because I was meeting a lot of the security people for the first time so that was their first way of getting to know me and that was really challenging, I think, from a stakeholder management perspective.
Gina Maini: But I think the way that I disclosed it, I ended up building relationships with those people that lasted throughout my engagement with Medicare. So we ended up getting it fixed and it was kind of because I had gone to them as more of an ally than kind of come in from more of a hammer perspective. But anyway, that was one glimmer of the many bizarre situations.
Julie Meloni: I wrote down like five things that popped up in the chat so I’m going to try to like right through them real fast and then we’ll and then I’ll tee up the question for you all so you can be thinking about it. Resiliency. That’s all I’m going to tell you. All right, so a couple things that came up in the chat. Is the current administration throwing large sums of money at us to fix this? Fun fact. The last three administrations have thrown amounts of money to us to fix it. Fixing technology problems, believe it or not, is a bipartisan problem and Congress likes to throw money at bipartisan problems when there is continued success and we have been able to spend money successfully over the last seven years. But we are about 200 or so people, there’s hundreds and hundreds of thousands of federal employees and 400 agencies and a metric shit ton of technology problems that us 200 people can’t solve.
Julie Meloni: We are intentionally small so as a forcing function to spend the government’s money wisely. We get appropriated funds which means we do not have to pay them back. We get a certain amount of money each year, 99% of that money is spent on the salaries for the people that work at USDS. And so as many people as can literally be hired within that budget we will hire them and we are the empowered and entrusted, like Gina said, to go out to the highest levels of government and tell them that their shit’s broken.
Julie Meloni: USDSers have stood in front of Secretaries of Defense and said, “You have a security problem right here.” And that’s fine, that’s who we need to be yelling at so that we continue to have the risk ability and the ability to get in there and fix it, like Gina said. Hello, I got a big vulnerability I’d like to disclose right now, CIO I don’t know, don’t even really know what a CIO does because what the hell does a CIO do. But I’m gonna tell you your shit’s broken and you need to fix it now or it’s gonna be really, really bad. So that is the sort of empowerment and emboldenment, enbiggenment, if you will, that we all get when we join USDS. It’s why there’s a relatively rigorous application or interview process. We really only hire people who’ve got some really gnarly experience and that get any type of organization.
Julie Meloni: Generally we don’t care what school you went to, where you worked, where you’ve done your work, or what you’ve worked in. If you have consistently solved gnarly problems in and around technology as an engineer or product manager or UX researcher and designer, you’re someone that we want to talk to because something is going to need that type of help. But we can’t fix everything. We are also not responsible for anything and we do not have the power to purchase anything. So you know those interview questions where you learn a lot about how does your candidate manage without authority? We ask a lot of these questions because we have absolutely no authority but all the responsibility to make sure shit doesn’t fall over. It’s super fun.
Julie Meloni: And so our budget is not being cut, our budget is attempting to be expanded but each of the last three administrations, Obama, Trump, and Biden, we have been here, we have worked hard for the American people and people who want to become the American people and there’s no sign of slowing down, so we are grateful for that. Applications. Yes, we do have a lot of people applying. Inauguration week was a big week for us, we had about 5,000 applications that week. And we’ve gotten through all of them, we’ve adjudicated them, we are a band of people who want nothing more than more colleagues. So please, yes we do have a lot but like if any of the things that we talked about describes you, apply. If you apply and do not make it through the process, that’s fine. There’s about eleventy billion other places for you to help.
Julie Meloni: Go to codeforamerica.org. Look at 18f.gsa.gov. USDS. Code for America will hook you up with local and state civic tech groups, volunteers. Civic tech is a growing area of interest and there are always ways to help wherever you are, be it your local state or federal area. And talked about empowerment blah blah blah blah, I think I got all my things. All right, how do you build resiliency into systems when people are the problem, Elizabeth?
Elizabeth Schweinsberg: So my traditional approach does not currently work. Normally I start with cookies or some other baked good but I actually haven’t met any of my co-workers in real life and the contractors that I’m working with are also all over the country so the the typical endearing yourself to them through baked goods isn’t working. So I have been trying to build my social capital by answering the problems that they have. So the people who actually run the mainframes are contractors. And these people know mainframes, they’ve spent their entire three, four decade long careers in mainframes with a few exceptions and that is what they know. And having some other person come in and be like I’m going to tell you how your mainframe should function differently, well not function, but how you need to look at your mainframes differently.
Elizabeth Schweinsberg: It can be a little unsettling so in addition to having them give me what I want, I have also been trying to make sure that they get what they want. And in specific, we are doing a hybrid cloud mainframe so some of the things that the mainframe vendors have been in charge of the data is moving to the cloud and that makes them a little concerned because the data that they were responsible for is going to be outside their control. So I’m helping them get more of that information starting with very basic things like we have APIs. The APIs come through a gateway in our cloud. Why don’t we check and let the mainframe managers know if somebody’s trying to use the APIs from an unusual IP address. And they seem really receptive to that sort of thing so there’s a bit of a give and a take and making sure that they get some of what they want has made them more willing to give me what I want.
Julie Meloni: Amy, go. Resiliency. People.
Amy Quispe:Resiliency. People. I think that one way to build resiliency is actually to build process. And another way to build resiliency is to remove process. I think that thinking very intentionally about how you work is really important and how you work with the other people that you’re working with is going to be really important to figuring out what your cadence is, what people can take on, not making assumptions or writing down your assumptions especially since we’re all working remotely. I think that this is also part of building a resilient software system so not just building a resilient team and a resilient way to work but actually thinking about how to intentionally build something. If you can define well what everyone is doing, if you can define how you’re working, then if someone has to leave the team, if someone has to join the team, you have a way to make that work smoothly. And that’s going to make your systems continue to work smoothly no matter what the team is, if you’re building actual teamwork.
Julie Meloni: Awesome. Gina, bring it home.
Gina Maini: Yeah, I echo what Amy just said. I think that’s how you get resiliency, for sure, is some level of process. And the old engineering teams I worked on, right, we called it lore or the playbooks or some document that would be wisened and if you get blamed it it’d be like a tragedy the commons and everybody had contributed. That was kind of what I was used to working like. But then you arrive in government, there are no engineers. You’re it. There’s nobody else coming. That’s kind of what it felt like for us to get started, especially at a new engagement, in the case of Medicare and unemployment with the Department of Labor, you’re kind of coming in and there’s nobody there doing your job which is why it’s so exciting to be there and why we’re so valuable in these spaces. But when you’re thinking about building a product, you’re not actually building a product, you might be working with the policy arm of the agency to craft some kind of pilot, right? And that pilot may be procured by someone who isn’t you. You might be setting up a contract play for the agency to hire the right thing which isn’t very exciting and I think if someone had told me that years ago I would have been like that doesn’t sound like anything I would ever want to do or be a part of.
Gina Maini: But it is the most value add I think any of us really give at USDS is the dollar value that we save American people by pointing out, you don’t need to buy Ferraris if you just want cup holders. Because these systems evolved to buy battleships, these systems did not come about to buy software, so they’re going to look for different signals that are just noise and so we kind of come in there and we tell them what to focus on in the procurement and actually that sets them up and a good procurement and a good contract, these contracts last for 10 to 12 years, maybe more. And so setting up a contract to be really flexible to have the right kind of outcomes is actually, that’s kind of resiliency across decades in government. Because a lot of these systems they span many administrations, many decades of policy and that’s why there’s such amalgamations. There is no such thing as product, there is just policy and then a bunch of contractors scrambling to implement it, right? That’s the reality of the United States Tech.
Julie Meloni: Awesome, we have eight minutes left and I want to address just a few questions real quick but also plug everything that Amy and Elizabeth and Gina have said today. Yeah, we’re talking about working in the government, in the federal government in this case, but everything… Please listen to everything that they said and take those… Elizabeth would you just like to read your mug that would be…
Elizabeth Schweinsberg: No.
Julie Meloni: Okay. Yeah, go for it, read it.
Elizabeth Schweinsberg: Okay. I picked a special mug for today. “Women belong in all the places where decisions are being made.” [inaudible] illustrious RGB.
Julie Meloni: RBG. Yes, that’s much more interesting than what I was going to say, which was all of these lessons you can apply in your gnarly complex hierarchical organizations as well. However, being at the table where the decisions are made, being in the room where it happens, if you wish, that is one of the reasons that USDS was created: just to get technologists at the table. They didn’t tell us that when we applied and we’re going to be an engineer, we’re going to fix it shit. I’m like, why am I reading this bill before it becomes a law? School House Rock did not prepare me for this, hence the title of this little chat.
Julie Meloni: We all know about how bill becomes law, but we don’t know that sometimes bills get sent around in Google docs and your friendly neighborhood USDSers and a whole bunch of other people just randomly comment on them about that’s dumb, that’s dumb, please don’t write API specs into law, just stop at, you should have an API. That’s great, big fan, don’t write specs into law.
Julie Meloni: And so we’re all in the rooms where it happens now and we keep things from that happening but we keep things like, you should share data at the forefront. Don’t make dumb decisions, don’t enable 53 distinct territories and states from creating their own unemployment systems, maybe just have one, maybe share. [inaudible 00:33:54]. And that is a really, really, really important part of what we do. And probably if that had been part of the pitch, none of us would have joined because policy is really boring. Except it’s not really boring when you get to write a law in a bar that enables technology to be put in place and you can see my 2018 Girl Geek talk. But anyway, last question for everybody, most important question. What do you want the takeaway for all of these fine folks who have listened to us, what do you want the takeaway to be and what are you taking away from USDS when you eventually leave us and go somewhere else? You can all fight over who goes first. We don’t fight at USDS, Gina, you can go first. Or Amy.
Gina Maini: Yeah, can Amy go first?
Julie Meloni: No one’s ready to think it through.
Gina Maini: Sorry, Amy.
Amy Quispe: No, I’m fine to go first, I’m was just trying to get the vibe here, vibing over Zoom is so hard and so important. I want to say that one thing that comes up when you’re in the room where it happens is that as technologists, we all have kind of a fresh perspective on what’s going on. But also, we all have just our own personal perspective on what’s going on. One of the values of USDS is find the truth, tell truth. And I think that’s one place where I’ve been really able to be valuable in USDS. I was in the meeting earlier today where I had to just stop and say, “So we’re talking about a technical solution to a non-technical problem and there are also non-technical solutions, non-technical problems, but ultimately we’re talking about non-technical problem.” And just sitting down and laying that out in plain language changed the conversation and I think that that’s one thing that I see USDSers do all the time is bring clarity to the conversation and change the conversation, whether it’s about technology or not.
Amy Quispe: And I don’t know what I’m going to be doing in the future but I hope that you all realize that you can also bring the truth to these conversations. If you are in a place that does not allow you to speak the truth or does not hear the truth, please find a way to get your voice heard and understand how powerful you are, understand that this power is so important in the US Government but in all sorts of systems, including the technology that all of you are creating everywhere, because technology is something that is scalable, it is something that is big, it is something that is powerful and it’s something we are building right now and you have the ability to change the way that the future works.
Julie Meloni: Man, that was such a good quote, we’re putting that on a sticker. We do stickers a lot. Amy: you have the way you change… Okay, change the way the future works, please change the way the future works. I’m old, I need a better future in my retirement years. Elizabeth, you know that means we’re going to wind up with you again at the end, just be prepared. Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Schweinsberg: Okay, so I know we said that we got 5,000 applications the week of inauguration, mostly due to news organizations picking up some comments in the html. Now this is not official. I helped review a lot of those resumes and looked at pretty much all the names that came into the engineering. Just based on names, it was not the most diverse set of applicants. There were a lot of traditionally white male names in there. So apply. Because we really value diversity because everybody has something different and interesting to bring to the table.
Elizabeth Schweinsberg: And yeah, I mean it sounds like a really, a whole lot of people and we’re going to hire some. We have to replace probably a few dozen people this year. And maybe it’s not right now but it will be in the future and there’s also a slew of technology-oriented non-profits that are coming up. We’ve had a couple talks through USDS with them on building tools to help people file for bankruptcy more easily, improve access to voting machines, so there’s some really great stuff out there if you keep your eyes open. The gnarly problems aren’t just in the government or at your large tech firms. 100% the thing I’m going to take away that I was actually hoping to get out of this is all of my jobs have been very operations focused and I am terrible at getting my project work done.
Elizabeth Schweinsberg: But here, I’m working with product managers and designers who really think through how we are designing the programs, talking about how we’re going to build them, and seeing that cross-disciplinary work towards project management, hopefully absorbing some of it, I think will be really useful whatever I do next.
Julie Meloni: Awesome. Gina, you get the last word before Angie kicks us out like she did to me in 2018, because I just can’t shut up about gnarly problems and how everybody can fix them because you have the power. Go.
Gina Maini: So last word. What I’m going to be taking away from this job? Definitely not one thing. This job is really… I don’t think I really understood how government worked before I got this job. So I think I know how the sausage is made now and it frightens me deeply. So I think that’s half of what I will take away from this job. The other thing though is I think I never really understood myself very well in my career in the sense that I worked for a bunch of e-commerce companies and the biggest moral dilemma was if I was gonna disappoint somebody buying a TV on Black Friday. And the thing is getting a TV on Black Friday is a really important problem and I don’t mean to diminish any value that e-commerce has. E-commerce has amazing value it’s so important to our everyday lives.
Gina Maini: But I didn’t feel super satisfied, it didn’t drive me, personally. I didn’t come into work wanting to optimize a pricing algorithm or optimize… It didn’t make my heart sing. Every day on this job I feel that. I feel that spark that I never had and it’s interesting how I used to think I was the slowest engineer or the worst engineer on the team. I think I just was unhappy in a lot of my work and now that I’m here and working on stuff that really motivates me, producing is weirdly not an issue anymore, it’s more about… Oh, I see, a wild cat has appeared. It’s more about actually managing my time well here because there’s so many fires and so many great people to work with. So it’s been more of a time management issue these days anyway.
Julie Meloni: Awesome. All right. Thank you all for hanging in. LinkedIn, it’s a thing that works. I actually use it. I will answer all your questions. I just said that out loud in front of everyone. Okay, don’t forget to love each other, wear a mask, be safe, wash your hands, do a good job. Bye, everyone.
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Angie Chang: We are going to turn it over to Anu. She is the VP of Product at Atlassian. She leads the enterprise business at Atlassian across product lines and also runs a cloud platform team and she’s an accomplished executive with a track record of growing $500 million businesses, building great teams, and shipping blockbuster products. Anu joined Atlassian as a Head of Product for Jira and held a variety of roles at Atlassian and currently serves as the Director of Atlassian Foundation. Welcome, Anu.
Anu Bharadwaj: Thank you so much, Angie. Can everyone hear me?
Angie Chang: Yes.
Anu Bharadwaj: Awesome. Hi, everybody. My name is Anu. Like Angie said, I’m VP of Product at Atlassian. Atlassian is an Australian company. We make collaboration software for teams. I have been at Atlassian for the past seven years and before that I was at Microsoft for 10 years, building developer tools for software teams and Visual Studio for all of your document plans out there.
Anu Bharadwaj: In addition to my day job, I also serve as the Chairperson for Atlassian Foundation, a nonprofit that funds education projects for underprivileged kids worldwide. Today I’m super glad to kick off a Girl Geek X annual event, Elevate, with all of you, wonderful people. I’ve been seeing the chat window. It’s incredible to see what you all done to survive the last year and many of you thrive through it. We’ve had over 3000 registrations for this event today. That’s pretty massive. It’s exciting to be in your company. Our theme at Elevate this year is resilience. And what better theme to choose since the whopper of the year that we’ve had in 2020.
Anu Bharadwaj: Women have always had to be resilient to stay the course in their careers. Resilient to overcome challenges that are unique to us and threaten the thwarters as we rise up. Resulting in far fewer women executives compared to the number of women that start out in entry level roles. Over the last year, that resilience has been further tested as we’ve dealt with the crisis of the pandemic battling to keep work and home running. Today, we come together to celebrate our resilience and hopefully come away inspired to build more reserves of it. So, buckle in as we kick off the day with a big warm welcome to all of you, strong amazing women from all over the world.
Anu Bharadwaj: Let’s start with paying a little bit of attention to the word resilience. Take a moment to reflect on what resilience means to you. People and systems both need a strong dose of resilience to stay healthy. A few months ago, someone came to me and said they were shooting a movie about Silicon Valley technology leaders and how they work and collaborate and build software and teams. They did an interview with me about my work, which was great, and said they’d also like to film what tech leaders do in their spare time to relax and unwind.
Anu Bharadwaj: Angie talked about how she likes to meditate. They asked me, “Do you like to do yoga or play music or meditate just to calm your mind? What do you like to do? And we would like to film you doing that.” And I said, “I kickbox.” It wasn’t quite what the movie director expected, but the camera crew did come to my gym to shoot a video of me while I was fighting.
Anu Bharadwaj: I’ve learned martial arts for many years since I was a kid. And to me, this is indeed a way that I relax and unwind. I’m bringing this up though, because as a kid, when I started learning martial arts, I wasn’t very good at it. When I wanted to give up, my mom said, “Anu, when someone tells you that you’re beautiful or smart, how do you feel?”
Anu Bharadwaj: Beauty and intelligence are lucky qualities that you inherited, but they aren’t anything to be proud of. But when someone says you’re kind or resilient, how do you feel? When you’re kind, you made a choice to care for another person, a choice to be proud of and when you’re resilient, you accomplish something in the face of difficulties. You won your kickboxing match despite losing before. That is something to be proud of.” Now more than ever I appreciate the wisdom of her words.
Anu Bharadwaj: Resilience is the capacity to deal with setbacks yet continue to grow. It is also the cornerstone of mental health. Good mental health does not mean never being sad. It means having the ability to cope with the vagaries of life without being paralyzed by them. But why do we have to talk about resilience as a group of women? As a young woman, starting out in technology, I saw women’s groups around me and I didn’t understand it. I didn’t get it. I thought, why do they need a group? I was raised with the idealistic and naive notion that men and women are born equal and are treated as such.
Anu Bharadwaj: Now 17 years later, I acknowledge the privilege of the sheltered childhood and I’m grateful for it. I graduated with a computer science degree, like Sukrutha talked about. When Microsoft hired me from school for my first job, I was an engineer. I was ready for it and they said, my first job was to write code for video games [inaudible]. When I heard the job description, I was like, you pay me for this shit? I’ll do this job for free.
Anu Bharadwaj: When I started out, it felt strange to see fewer women engineers at work than men, but the thrill of checking in core to a system that millions of people use day in and day out, felt incredible enough to forget any discomfort. People asked me about my job and what I do at work. I get the occasional remark that I learned to ignore. Like, “Oh, a girl developer, or you might want to comb your hair so your office workers take you seriously.” Or speaker feedback like, “The talk was very technical, but having an attractive speaker deliver it was a good idea.”
Anu Bharadwaj: I cried at that speaker feedback. I’ve worked so hard on creating the content for my talk, but the feedback had reduced me to a mouthpiece. I wish I could say these were exceptions, but unfortunately, as I’m sure you’ve all experienced, they’re not. Through seventeen years of my career, I’ve faced a slew of them. “You’re a woman yet you’re good at Math.” “But you’re a female manager, I expect you to be more caring and warm.” “Can you smile more in meetings? You need to be better light.”
Anu Bharadwaj: Like any average person, I have strengths and weaknesses that I try to improve on. As I diligently worked on the feedback I received, I grew increasingly frustrated with how unfair it was. I was intimidating, but a man exhibiting the same behavior was an assertive leader. Turns out I was not alone. Nearly all my women coworkers were going through a similar obstacle race of double standards.
Anu Bharadwaj: What’s worse, unconscious bias did not spare women either. There were many instances of women judging other women unfairly. That’s when inspiration struck. One of my favorite childhood PC games is Wolfenstien 3D. I’m not sure if any of you played this before, but I loved playing this on my PC Pentium 486. It had four interestingly named difficulty levels, the image at the bottom. So the gamer in me decided that being a woman is like playing a video game at the highest level of difficulty. AKA Beast Mode. Sure. Others may have it easier, but I’m going to blaze a trail of glory, defeating 3X the monsters that mere mortals do. Yeah! Bring them on.
Anu Bharadwaj: I confess that this kind of thinking also helped with my guilt. Having worked with nonprofits for over a decade. I understand how severe gender inequity is. Women lose wealth, health, and even in their lives due to this. It gets worse for women of color.
Anu Bharadwaj: Compared to that, surely the inconvenience I faced in my cushy little tech job as an engineer was too insignificant to matter. But there is no hierarchy of suffering. Injustice, no matter big or small, should not be normalized. So while playing in Beast Mode can be gratifying for all of you gamers out there, I’m sure you will agree. It should be a choice, not a default expectation.
Anu Bharadwaj: To win in Beast Mode, we need allies. In the recent hackathon, we rounded up as many allies at Atlassian as we could. We called it our Atlassian allies Trello board. This is a virtual gathering of men and women that are willing to help sponsor, mentor, and champion women. As we power through various levels of career, no matter which function we are, allies also help identify and reinforce sources of resilience while sharing their own sources. Like I spoke before, I will share three of my sources of resilience today and hope that this sparks some inspiration for you to think about how to fortify your own sources of resilience.
Anu Bharadwaj: Starting with lead with your strengths. In 2016, when travel was still a thing…Wow, do you actually remember those times, when we could get on a plane and fly? I took one year off. I took all of 2016 off as a sabbatical to go work on wildlife conservation projects around the world. I’m a bit of an animal nerd. I love working with animals. I worked with penguins in Antarctica, rehabilitated lions in Africa, set up traps to capture cheetahs in Namibia so we could put GPS collars on them and protect them from poaching.
Anu Bharadwaj: And through this time I was introduced to an organization called IAPF, Africa’s first all women, anti-poaching unit. When the founder of IAPF, an army veteran started setting up anti-poaching units, he noticed that the units with women performed way better protecting wildlife than men. Despite the job traditionally being held only by men. He noticed that the women were better at convincing the community to protect wildlife for their own economy. They were more creative in coming up with solutions that didn’t need force and more courageous in ferociously protecting the animals entrusted to their care.
Anu Bharadwaj: He turned around and created an all women anti-poaching unit. They’re called Akashinga, which means Brave Ones. These are women who have had to be deeply resilient in overcoming abuse, poverty, and trauma. When you notice how they build this resilience, the first thing they do is lead with their strengths, courage, creativity, and collaboration. Often on the quest for growth, we focus on our weaknesses and work hard to round them off. While this is important, it is also important to remember that your strengths are your greatest asset.
Anu Bharadwaj: The reason they’re your strengths is because you are happiest, most productive and engaged while using them. Focusing on using your strengths, allows you to operate from a place where you have the resilience to successfully overcome your weaknesses and further build out your skills. Over the past few years, I’ve been leading a big change at Atlassian. We shifted our company from an entirely on-premise product line to cloud native SaaS offerings.
Anu Bharadwaj: This might be not just a technical rewrite of our cloud platform, but a fundamental shift in the DNA of our company. How we build our products, run our products, sell our product, support our products. What we measure in financial and operational metrics. For a company at nearly $2 billion run rate, 7,500 employees, and millions of active users. This meant an all encompassing change. As I pondered the responsibility for leading this technological and business shift, it was scary to think about the enormity of this change.
Anu Bharadwaj: When you think of crucial issues, there is often a range called the Overton window. Typically, the view held by the public tends to be on some range of either left or right of current status score. This is where normalcy is. Take, for example, climate change, racial inequality. Most people acknowledge it’s a problem. Some believe we should take strong measures, some advocate leniency. But overall, there are reasonable policies in a spectrum that most people subscribe to.
Anu Bharadwaj: When you start a movement like civil rights or anti-racism, you have a chance to pull that window in one direction or another. As a leader, you have to shift the frame of reference that the general public starts to realize that the radical option, the unthinkable option is not really as unthinkable as we imagined, shifting the frame of reference of an entire population. That is the stuff that social movements are made of. For a smaller moment like a cloud shift at Atlassian, the same principle applies where you shift thinking from let’s hedge our bets across server on-premise and cloud to let’s go all in on cloud.
Anu Bharadwaj: As a leader, my personal style is to be the activist. The person that shifts the Overton window. Doing that energizes me and drives me to work even harder at making ambitious results possible. A few years ago, it was unthinkable to have majority of customers on cloud.
Anu Bharadwaj: Today over 95% of our customers choose our cloud products. Dozens of our largest enterprise customers start on cloud right away instead of waiting to migrate. Leading the cloud shift at Atlassian has allowed me to exercise my skills. Where I didn’t just lead with courage, but also lead with love as entire teams inside and outside Atlassian had to fundamentally change their business model and way of working. Such change can be scary, but when met with empathy and integrity, people realize that this change is possible.
Anu Bharadwaj: Change can be messy and chaotic, but it can also be real there towards progress. Ultimately, when you start a movement as a leader, people follow you when you deploy your strengths to help others. I have found that choosing work that will challenge you by letting you lead with your strengths is a good way of maintaining energy and growth. It keeps you resilient enough to learn from setbacks and to remain pressing on progress. Even when you find the work to be difficult. If you consistently find yourself spending most of your time doing work that you hate at work, that doesn’t utilize any of your net strengths, that is a red flag for burnout.
Anu Bharadwaj: The second source of resilience I fall back on is self-care. Self-care is never selfish. It is merely good stewardship of the sole resource that you have to serve others and do good in the world. Paying attention to how you feel helps notice sparks of burnout before it turns into a raging fire.
Anu Bharadwaj: Women are typically very good at caring for others, but often ignore themselves. In the name of multitasking, we find it hard to make time for ourselves, but productivity is about managing our energy more than our time. Find the simple acts that restore your energy and replenish you. For me, that is going on a daily run, Telegram chats with my best friend in Sydney, even just my morning coffee and croissant.
Anu Bharadwaj: Making time for yourself among the demands of work and home can especially be hard now in these pandemic-ravaged times, but goes along when building your energy stores, like we talked about at the beginning of a kickoff. The physical isolation of COVID exacerbates feelings of loneliness in all of us. Restoring energy is one thing, but in a world where we cannot be with people we love and feel connected to, paying attention to connectedness is helpful.
Anu Bharadwaj: Personally, I longed for a feeling of connectedness with the universe. For me, it is nature and science that quench the thirst, the mere act of hugging a tree or looking up at the stars, suits me. I marvel at how small we are, yet tightly connected to the fabric of the cosmos. Whether nature, science, religion, or spirituality, find whatever nourishes your inner life and makes you feel connected to a larger whole.
Anu Bharadwaj: My silver lining of working from home, or like Sukrutha said, living at work during the pandemic has been the ability to do silly and fun home projects like this 3D printed picnic bench for squirrels to have a rooftop party. I could literally see them just beyond my monitor, enjoying the sun and seeds outside my window. Made time for your silly source of joy and connectedness.
Anu Bharadwaj: And last but not the least, one big source of resilience for me has been the ability to pay it forward. This is one of my favorite photos with my mother. I lost her to cancer when I was a teenager. When my mother died, she made me promise I wouldn’t quit school, that I would finish my education, get a job and be financially independent. As a teenager, I didn’t understand why she was saying that. I thought, what’s the big deal with education. My dad was the sole breadwinner for a large family, three kids to raise, but thanks to his perseverance I did finish school and landed at a tech job, which ensure and remain financially independent for the rest of my life.
Anu Bharadwaj: What I did not realize as a teenager, I understood fully well as an adult. Education is a slow multi-generational change, but the most sustainable one that we have found yet. Educating girls, in particular, leads to fewer children, healthier families, and overall rising prosperity.
Anu Bharadwaj: The best way we have of making the world a better place is through funding education for girls. Over the past few years, I’ve been doing my small part in that through the Atlassian Foundation. Atlassian Foundation is a nonprofit that funds education projects for underprivileged kids around the world. I started out on the Board of Directors of the foundation five years ago, and now serve as the Chairperson for the board.
Anu Bharadwaj: The work that I do in this role is deeply meaningful to me with the impact on kids’ lives through the grants we fund being immediately obvious. In the past year with COVID, this work has become more important than ever. As girls and women in low income countries have been disproportionately devastated by the pandemic. Giving back and paying it forward helps me retain perspective in distressing times and building resilience to keep going and help others as much as I can.
Anu Bharadwaj: Those were my three sources of resilience: leading with strengths, self-care, and paying it forward. I hope this sparks some inspiration for you to think about your own sources of resilience. I would love to hear what those are. Drop me a line. As we all gather here virtually, here’s an interesting study related to resilience. Typically, we believe that when people experience stress, our instinct is to either stand and fight or flee as fast as possible.
Anu Bharadwaj: Researchers now suspect that women have a larger behavioral repertoire than just fight or flight. It seems that the female stress response has a buffer instead that encourages us to tend and befriend instead. When women become stressed, the response can be to nurture those around them and reach out to others, to build community. How do we go from fight or flight to tend and befriend? That is an interesting question to consider, as we think about how to combat stress and increase resilience.
Anu Bharadwaj: Wrapping up, if there was one thought that I could leave all of you with, here it is. All through the last year we’ve all had difficulties, personal loss and deprivation. When we encounter people day-to-day we have no idea what they have had to deal with. When someone appears distracted, tired, or even angry, respond with love and forgiveness. Remember you got here because someone did this for you and tomorrow someone else will get to where they want to be because of you.
Anu Bharadwaj: With your resilience, help others build resilience around you. I wanted to close this talk with one of my favorite poems that I think about often when I look up at the sky, please pardon my amateur drawing skills. I took out my iPad and pencil and drew this up the woman with a crazy head on the bench is me and the cat beside me is my companion Timtam who’s sleeping there in that little cathouse. We like watching stars with me. The poem goes like this.
Anu Bharadwaj: How should we like it were stars to burn, with a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me!
Anu Bharadwaj: With that, thank you so much. Love you all. Stay resilient, healthy, and happy, and enjoy the rest of your day at Elevate.
Angie Chang: Thank you so much Anu, that was amazing.
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